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Trigonometry: A Brief Conversation
No full textThese five units are specifically tailored to foster the mastery of a few selected trigonometry topics that comprise the one credit MA-121 Elementary Trigonometry course. Each unit introduces the topic, provides space for practice, but more importantly, provides opportunities for students to reflect on the work in order to deepen their conceptual understanding.
These units have also been assigned to students of other courses such as pre-calculus and calculus as a review of trigonometric basics essential to those courses. This is the third edition of the materials. Based on suggestions from instructors Units 2 and 3 have been edited to align with new questions on the final assessment for this course. More specifically, Section 2.3 Inverse Trigonometric Functions was added, but limited to right triangles. Section 3.5 The Unit Circle was added but limited to finding the coordinates of a point on the unit circle. Additional practice problems and solutions have also been added for Units 2 and 3.
We are grateful for the support we received from the Open Educational Research (OER) initiative of the City University of New York (CUNY). This 2025 edition is the third edition and was part of the OER Workshop-Cohort VIII.
We thank ALL of the MA-121 instructors for their invaluable input
Connections and Contrasts between “Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space” by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 Superbowl performance, and Sunni Patterson’s “We Made It.”
No full textThis assignment by Dr. Crystal Endsley Taylor uses all Open, low-tech solutions to create an active learning module that prompts students to pause, retrieve, re-state and reconsider several texts, including The Politics of Performance Space” by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 Superbowl performance, and Sunni Patterson’s “We Made It.” It was made as part of a workshop on OER-based Active Learning at John Jay College in 2025
Destabilizing the Nuyorican: \u3ci\u3eRivera’s Women\u3c/i\u3e and Nuyorican Cinema
Full text linkRivera’s Women, the Capstone, is a TV segment I produced for the CUNY-TV show Latinas that first aired June 27, 2023 (Pride). It grew out of an hour-long interview I conducted with playwright and screenwriter José Rivera as part of my research on Nuyorican Cinema, the films of the Puerto Rican Diaspora.
An unknown part of U.S. independent cinema, these diasporic films destabilize the way independent films continue to be categorized through gender, race, ethnicity, and language. Using the Capstone as a guide, I examine two of Rivera’s recent screen works that situate him within Nuyorican Cinema because of his practice of centering women interacting with diverse characters.
Regional, collegiate, and community theaters afford Rivera the artistic freedom he thrives on, making his practice of writing leading roles for women possible, unlike the commercial film and television productions that have been primarily work-for-hire, limiting his creative control. Nonetheless, Rivera’s focus on women is finding its way into his film and television work. As stated in the Capstone, he recently adapted One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez into a television series for Netflix and found it necessary to “give the women some agency” (Rivera’s Women). In Takeover, his latest screenplay based on the documentary of the same title by Emma Francis-Snyder, he invents a young female character and her family that frame a 1970 historical event, the Young Lords’ occupation of Lincoln Hospital.
This accompanying white paper is divided into four sections: Information about Nuyorican Cinema, including a definition of the term “Nuyorican,” followed by a summary of Rivera’s major theater, film, and television work in which elements of Nuyorican Cinema can be traced. A comparison between the Takeover screenplay and documentary explores how they blur distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. Lastly, I examine the process of adapting One Hundred Years of Solitude into a television series by contrasting the first episode of the series with the opening chapters of the novel. Season One of the Netflix series is scheduled for release at the end of this year. Takeover is scheduled to go into production next year
Building a Professional Learning Community to Improve Technical Services Librarians\u27 Teaching Preparedness
Full text linkThe Applied Improvement Project (AIP) was conducted to address the inconsistency of academic librarians’ teaching engagement on the AIP site. The problem of practice was framed as the gap between having all librarians prepared to teach and technical services librarians’ unpreparedness to teach. The implemented intervention was developing a professional learning community among technical services librarians of different generations with a variety of teaching experiences to increase teaching preparedness by sharing, discussing, and reflecting. The learning topics covered library teaching basics, motivating students, self-assessment, planning to teach, using Wikipedia, embedded librarianship and credit-bearing courses, teaching and research, and building a teaching portfolio. Data collection included an AIP implementation journal, reflective writing, and interviews to assess the learning process and outcomes. Answers to the guiding process questions were obtained by addressing what happened during the PLC implementation in terms of attendance, activities, and reaction. Answers to the guiding outcome question were obtained by examining the impact of PLC on participants’ teaching preparedness. Process results showed good attendance, a challenge in scheduling due to time conflicts, and tacit knowledge transfer. Outcome results showed that the PLC had a positive impact on participants’ teaching attitudes, motivation, and self-efficacy. In terms of attitudes, participants believed their knowledge of bibliographic organization and library operation would help them to teach, and the PLC activities broadened their definition of library-based teaching. Participants’ self-motivation was associated with the need to build a positive relationship with faculty and students, and new motivation was linked to the value of self-reflection to improve library-based teaching. Participants’ low self-efficacy was caused by negative experience or linked to familiarities and patterns built by experience. Participants’ self-efficacy was improved by open, sharing, and transferrable PLC activities. PLC’s successful implementation resulted in three implications for professional practice, including valuing gap analysis to identify organizational problems, valuing internal librarians’ talents to promote organizational learning, and valuing action research in community-based adult learning practice. Recommendations included repeating the PLC with adjustments to benefit more technical services librarians. The existing literature about technical services librarians’ teaching relies on sporadic personal accounts and mentoring relationships. This action research added to the literature on the effectiveness of community learning practice as a collaborative professional development approach to enhance technical services librarians’ perceptions about improving teaching preparedness
When College is Not Working Out: Obstacles to Community College Completion
Full text linkMy dissertation investigates what contributes to low community college completion rates, what college interventions may be working to support students, what are the experiences of the students, and how did the COVID-19 pandemic impact these dynamics. I am guided by the assumption that multi-dimensional inequalities including low level of social capital constitute a cumulative disadvantage for many students to be able to persist and to graduate. The dissertation includes quantitative and qualitative data types measuring inequalities outside and inside of college with two large student record data sets from one minority-serving open-access public community college and data from a student feedback survey. Across these various analyses I find that students with precarious backgrounds, weaker academic preparations, lack of support from family and friends, and lack of positive in-college interventions, and those with Early Alert flags or enrolled part-time, have the highest risks of dropping out. I further find that interventions in the first semester of college such as tutoring and positive interactions with professors are associated with an increased chance of persisting and graduating. Overall, I find that practical support in the form of intensive advising, tutoring, financial aid application help, and other forms of assistance and help-seeking skills ameliorated the negative impact of pre-college disadvantages such as low-income status and belonging to the first generation in a family to attend college. Finally, I find an association between financial struggle and lack of a social support network especially for students who discontinued. These findings support policies that would fund programs that combine academic support, on-campus work opportunities, and financial incentives to connect with advisors and tutors and steer away from restrictive practices and discouraging signals such as flagging
Freedom Dreams of Young Black Boys: A Qualitative Study Among Black Male Elementary School Learners
Full text linkThe work conducted in this research builds on the work of many who have also worked to provide a platform to illuminate the voices of Black folks, especially Black boys. This research is not the first to make the case that Black boys are as fully human as anyone else, and yet they have internalized the white gaze, even as they are proud of their blackness, their color, their race, their culture. However, there exists limited research with Black boys in elementary school, particularly before the 5th grade (before 10 years of age).
This project was about freedom dreaming—a collective resistance. It was designed to gain insight into the ways in which Black boys imagine a New World as well as how they would use their imagination to lead society to the visualization and embodiment of love and creativity, rather than rationality, to understand the ways in which they want to reconstruct their social worlds and their relationships within them. It is within and through the imaginations of these young Black boys that freedom dreams will critically problematize the world in which they are socialized.
In pursuit of the objectives, a descriptive literature review breaking down the responsive practices designed to challenge white supremacy resist anti-Blackness while honoring Black history and culture—namely, culturally sustaining pedagogy, critical literacy, and racial literacy—was conducted. It further develops recommendations for creating the space for Black boys to reflect on both their love for being black and their sentiments toward and understanding of the injustices that come with being Black. The findings of this work illuminate the freedom dreams, voices, and lives of Black boys through art-based critical literacy that is empowering, agentic, resisting, and liberating.
Continuous and intentional re-reading of the transcripts and the boys’ writings and drawings made it clear that here was more to uncover with what the boys were trying to express about what it means to be a young Black boy in America. The knowledge of the Blackness the boys had been carrying in their bodies before my work with them that summer moves beyond conversations with their families. They are not colorblind or ignorant about social justice issues, especially racism. The data I collected from the boys show that from their awareness and body of knowledge, they collectively, as a community, do not feel they live in a just and fair society.
My work is a continuation of the work of those who came before me. It is my hope to return this to them, as they have gifted their work to us to learn from, grow from, and love from
Essays on the Impact of Monetary Policy Shocks
No full textThis dissertation consists of two chapters.
Chapter 1 - Households’ Balance Sheet Adjustment in Response to Monetary Policy Shocks.
Household’s balance sheet and housing decision have played crucial role in understanding the transmission of monetary policy in the last two decades. Monetary policy can affect the broader economy through household finances via the income channel and the wealth channel, and especially of they are debt or liquidity constrained. This chapter studies the unhedged interest rate exposure (URE) following Auclert (2019) for households using micro-level data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for the years 1994 to 2012. Using the URE, I examine households’ exposure to interest rate changes via differences in income and consumption, and maturing assets and maturing liabilities. Additionally, I use the local projections methods by Jorda (2005) to calculate the impulse responses of URE to monetary policy shocks using pseudo cohorts based on demographic and financial variables. I find that wealthier households (mainly owners with mortgage) adjust their URE or increase their exposure in response to an expansionary monetary policy shock. And they do so by increasing their maturing liabilities. I also find a similar response for households with higher levels of illiquid assets accumulated. Older households increase their exposure to an interest rate shock anticipating a drop in the interest rate. I observe a similar but delayed response for households with the head of household between 20 to 34 years. These findings suggest that conditional on households’ demographic characteristics and financial positions, a monetary policy shock elicits heterogeneous response from households and can thus lead to weakened transmission of the monetary policy to the broader economy.
Chapter 2 - Response of House Price Index to Monetary Policy Shocks.
The housing market and monetary policy together have played pivotal roles in economic boom and busts either by affecting households assets through its price movements or by influencing refinancing or buying decisions for households. As housing accounts for a sizable portion of households’ balance sheet, the sensitivity of housing prices to monetary policy shock can aid in our understanding of the transmission of monetary policy to the broader economy. This chapter studies the transmission of monetary policy through the housing price channel and the effect of economic conditions on this mechanism. In this chapter, using the local projection method following Jorda (2005) I estimate the response of the house price index to monetary policy shocks as constructed following Gurkaynak et al. (2005) over the sample period 1994 to 2018. My results indicate that an expansionary monetary policy shock leads to an initial decrease and then an increase in the house price index after 10 quarters. Expansionary interest rate shock one-year ahead leads to a decrease in house prices. The magnitude of these effect varies conditional on the rates of unemployment. An expansionary change in the policy rate one year ahead is only successful in stimulating house prices after 2011 in high unemployment areas, whereas during the same time period, in areas with low rates of unemployment, the path of interest rate led to slightly negative initial response followed by an increase in house prices after 12 quarters. This heterogeneous response of house price index to the monetary policy shock indicate a weaker transmission of the policy to the broader economy
Stratigraphic and Geochemical Insights into Explosive Volcanism in Northwestern Nicaragua: Case Studies from the Momotombo-Monte Galán Volcanic System and Cosigüina Volcano
No full textLife on Earth is inextricably intertwined with volcanic activity, and humans are no exception. The atmosphere we breathe, the oceans in which we swim, the rocks upon which we live, and the soils in which we tend crops for nourishment all contain components sourced from the materials that have been erupted over the 4.5-billion-year history of our planet. The relationship between volcanoes and civilization still persists. Everyday our planet’s volcanic terrains host tourists riding boards down scoria clad slopes, farmers tending to shade-grown chocolate and coffee beans on volcanic flanks, workers in hard hats servicing turbines that generate electricity from hydrothermal fluids, and much more. While volcanoes provide, they can also destroy. An explosive eruption can obliterate a landscape in minutes, erasing structures and lives. Much progress has been made in understanding and monitoring hazardous volcanoes since the fateful eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. famously destroyed Pompeii, but there is still a great deal left to learn in order to properly forecast the timing and impact of explosive eruptions. This dissertation focuses on expanding our understanding of the eruptive history and triggering mechanisms of explosive volcanism in northwestern Nicaragua. A combination of field-based, analytical, and computational methods was employed investigate the Momotombo-Monte Galán volcanic system and Cosigüina volcano.
This work begins with a brief introductory chapter that presents background on eruption triggers and the history of volcanism in Nicaragua. Chapter 2 presents the results of a field campaign and subsequent geochemical investigation where the caldera-forming eruption of Monte Galán is identified and characterized. We then place this eruption into a regional stratigraphic context which allows the age of the eruption to be constrained to between 570 and 420 thousand years ago, making the tephra of this eruption some of the oldest assigned to a modern eruptive center of the Central American Volcanic Arc in northwestern Nicaragua. The similarity of chemistry between the eruptive products of this eruption and those of the neighboring Momotombo edifice, with which Monte Galán is structurally intertwined, raises a specter that the eruption hazards of Momotombo might be underestimated.
In chapters 3 and 4 the focus shifts north to a large compositionally zoned lapilli fall that was deposited 12 km to the west of the summit caldera of Cosigüina volcano. Early erupted dacite pumice and later erupted andesite scoria was sampled at fine scale and a combination of multiple geochemical approaches were applied to characterize matrix glass, plagioclase phenocrysts, and melt inclusions. The textures of the sampled clasts were also characterized using a combination of techniques at multiple scales. This work led to the discovery that prior to eruption the dacite and andesite were in close proximity in a shallow (~ 4 - 5 km), density stratified magma body. Geochemical evidence combined with the presence of equilibrated phenocrysts and phenobubbles suggest that pre-eruptive crystallization-driven volatile exsolution increased the overpressure in the magma reservoir, helping to trigger an eruption. Initially, the less dense dacite magma near the roof of the reservoir was exclusively samples but as the eruption continued the eruption sourced progressively deeper magma until only the underlying andesite was being sampled at the eruption’s culmination. The identification of these processes holds implications for monitoring Cosigüina and for the forecasting of future eruptions
The Mariana Trench Is Not Blue
Full text link“The Mariana Trench Is Not Blue” is a short (2,300 words) creative nonfiction piece about a slice of time when I crewed on Ocean Guy, a sailboat docked in Guam in 1994. I learned about the island’s dangers during what should have been a relaxing day snorkeling with my captain and first mate at Bangi Point, a famous coral reef. Part of the tension emanates from the boat’s terrible condition and from the trench itself which contains monsters larger than any of us--they seem to follow the three of us to shore
Critical Evaluation of Falsehoods in Physiology Using AI
Full text linkThe document outlines a structured approach for general health sciences students, including both undergraduates and graduates, to critically evaluate falsehoods in physiology using AI tools. Applicable to biology and other life sciences, the exercises are divided into three parts, each designed to enhance critical thinking and evidence-based decision-making. Part 1 focuses on debunking biological myths, such as the idea that muscle turns into fat if you stop exercising, by generating and refining AI responses. Part 2 involves using AI to gather and verify evidence-based information on health science myths, like homeopathy\u27s efficacy in treating low back pain, emphasizing the importance of accurate citations. Part 3, tailored for graduate students, presents a fictional legal case about spinal fractures and patient autonomy, requiring students to investigate the case\u27s implications and propose an evidence-based approach to patient care. Throughout the exercises, students reflect on the AI tools\u27 usefulness, rate their experience, and suggest improvements. This approach highlights the importance of integrating AI in education to foster critical thinking and ethical considerations in healthcare practices