Jamaican Students of Color in the American Classroom: Problems and possibilities in education

With the influx of almost 400,000 Jamaicans of color to the US, American educators are increasingly concerned about whether learning communities are preparing teachers and students for the increasing diversity of the American classroom. Problems arise when Jamaican students of color with excellent English skills are placed in special reading classes or in classes of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). Additional problems occur with teachers perceiving Jamaican students of color as simply a black child among other black children in America, regardless of their English language skills, nationality or immigrant status. To compound these problems, Jamaican students of color also lack knowledge about their own heritage, resulting in loss of self-esteem and national identity. To assist their adaptation to a new society, teachers must possess the attitudes and skills necessary to be able to differentiate between the various nationalities of children of color and possess knowledge about the rich historical and cultural contributions of Jamaica.     

The residual effect of a growth-decay mechanism and the distributions of covariance structures

The product of two independent or dependent scalar normal variables, sums of products, sample covariances, and general bilinear forms are considered. Their distributions are shown to belong to a class called generalized Laplacian. A growth-decay mechanism is also shown to produce such a generalized Laplacian. Sets of necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for bilinear forms to belong to this class. As a generalization, the distributions of rectangular matrices associated with multivariate normal random vectors are also discussed.     

The Relationship Between Sense of Coherence and Career Thoughts

The authors examined the impact of sense of coherence on the career thought processes of a sample of college students. A. Antonovsky (1987) defined sense of coherence as the global orientation that the world is comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. Study participants completed the Sense of Coherence Scale (A. Antonovsky, 1987) and the Career Thoughts Inventory (CTI; J. P. Sampson, G. W. Peterson, J. G. Lenz, R. C. Reardon, & D. E. Saunders, 1996). Multivariate tests indicated a medium relationship between sense of coherence and CTI Total and subscale scores; sense of coherence accounted for 14% of the variance. Univariate tests also indicated a medium relationship between sense of coherence and each subscale.     

Book Review: Civil Society: Old Images,New Visions,by John Keane. Stanford University Press,Stanford, 1998

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