Private school
Private schools known to many as independent schools, non-governmental funded, or non-state schools, are not administered by local, state or national governments. Children who attend private schools may be there because they are dissatisfied with public schools in their area, they may be selected for their academic prowess, or prowess in other fields, or sometimes their religious background. Private schools retain the right to select their students and are funded in whole or in part by charging their students for tuition, rather than relying on mandatory taxation through public funding; some private schools are associated with a particular religion, such as Judaism, Roman Catholicism, or Lutheranism. For the past century one in 10 U. S families has chosen to enroll their children in private school. In the United Kingdom and several other Commonwealth countries including Australia and Canada, the use of the term is restricted to primary and secondary educational levels. Private education in North America covers the whole gamut of educational activity, ranging from pre-school to tertiary level institutions.
Annual tuition fees at K-12 schools range from nothing at so called'tuition-free' schools to more than $45,000 at several New England preparatory schools. The secondary level includes schools offering years 7 through 12 and year 13; this category includes university-preparatory schools or "prep schools", boarding schools and day schools. Tuition at private secondary schools varies from school to school and depends on many factors, including the location of the school, the willingness of parents to pay, peer tuitions and the school's financial endowment. High tuition, schools claim, is used to pay higher salaries for the best teachers and used to provide enriched learning environments, including a low student-to-teacher ratio, small class sizes and services, such as libraries, science laboratories and computers; some private schools are boarding schools and many military academies are owned or operated as well. Religiously affiliated and denominational schools form a subcategory of private schools.
Some such schools teach religious education, together with the usual academic subjects to impress their particular faith's beliefs and traditions in the students who attend. Others use the denomination as more of a general label to describe on what the founders based their belief, while still maintaining a fine distinction between academics and religion, they include parochial schools, a term, used to denote Roman Catholic schools. Other religious groups represented in the K–12 private education sector include Protestants, Jews and the Orthodox Christians. Many educational alternatives, such as independent schools, are privately financed. Private schools avoid some state regulations, although in the name of educational quality, most comply with regulations relating to the educational content of classes. Religious private schools simply add religious instruction to the courses provided by local public schools. Special assistance schools aim to improve the lives of their students by providing services tailored to specific needs of individual students.
Such schools include tutoring schools to assist the learning of handicapped children. Private schools are one of three types of school in Australia, the other two being government schools and religious. Whilst private schools are sometimes considered "public" schools, the term "public school" is synonymous with a government school. Private schools in Australia may be favored for many reasons: prestige and the social status of the "old school tie"; some schools offer the removal of the purported distractions of co-education. Student uniforms for Australian private schools are stricter and more formal than in government schools – for example, a compulsory blazer. Private schools in Australia are always more expensive than their public counterpartsThere are two main categories of private schools in Australia: Catholic schools and Independent schools. Catholic schools form the second largest sector after government schools, with around 21% of secondary enrollments. Most Australian Catholic schools belong to a system, like government schools, are co-educational and attempt to provide Catholic education evenly across the states.
These schools are known as "systemic". Systemic Catholic schools are funded by state and federal government and have low fees. Catholic schools, both systemic and independent have a strong religious focus, most of their staff and students will be Catholic. Independent schools make up the last sector and are the most popular form of schooling for boarding students. Independent schools are non-government institutions that are not part of a system. Although most are non-aligned, some of the best known independent schools belong to the large, long-established religious foundations, such as the Anglican Church, Uniting Church and Pres
Liberal arts education
Liberal arts education can claim to be the oldest programme of higher education in Western history. It has its origin in the attempt to discover first principles –'those universal principles which are the condition of the possibility of the existence of anything and everything'; the liberal arts known as the seven liberal arts, are those subjects or skills that in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free person to know in order to take an active part in civic life, something that included participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, most military service. Grammar and rhetoric were the core liberal arts, while arithmetic, the theory of music, astronomy were the following stage of education. Liberal arts today can refer to academic subjects such as literature, philosophy and social and physical sciences. For both interpretations, the term refers to matters not relating to the professional, vocational, or technical curriculum. Rooted in the basic curriculum – the enkuklios paideia or "education in a circle" – of late Classical and Hellenistic Greece, the "liberal arts" or "liberal pursuits" were so called in formal education during the Roman Empire.
The first recorded use of the term "liberal arts" occurs in De Inventione by Marcus Tullius Cicero, but it is unclear if he created the term. Seneca the Younger discusses liberal arts in education from a critical Stoic point of view in Moral Epistles; the exact classification of the liberal arts varied however in Roman times, it was only after Martianus Capella in the 5th century AD influentially brought the seven liberal arts as bridesmaids to the Marriage of Mercury and Philology, that they took on canonical form. The four'scientific' artes – music, arithmetic and astronomy – were known from the time of Boethius onwards as the quadrivium. After the 9th century, the remaining three arts of the'humanities' – grammar and rhetoric – were grouped as the trivium, it was in that two-fold form that the seven liberal arts were studied in the medieval Western university. During the Middle Ages, logic came to take predominance over the other parts of the trivium. In the Renaissance, the Italian humanists and their Northern counterparts, despite in many respects continuing the traditions of the Middle Ages, reversed that process.
Re-christening the old trivium with a new and more ambitious name: Studia humanitatis, increasing its scope, they downplayed logic as opposed to the traditional Latin grammar and rhetoric, added to them history and moral philosophy, with a new emphasis on poetry as well. The educational curriculum of humanism spread throughout Europe during the sixteenth century and became the educational foundation for the schooling of European elites, the functionaries of political administration, the clergy of the various recognized churches, the learned professions of law and medicine; the ideal of a liberal arts, or humanistic education grounded in classical languages and literature, persisted until the middle of the twentieth century. Some subsections of the liberal arts are in the trivium – the verbal arts of grammar and rhetoric – and other parts are in the quadrivium – the numerical arts of music and arithmetic, the graphical and mathematical art of Geometry; each subsection includes the interpretation of information.
Academic areas that are associated with the term liberal arts include: Arts Philosophy Religious studies Social science Mathematics Natural Sciences For example, the core courses for Georgetown University's Doctor of Liberal Studies program cover philosophy, history, art and the social sciences. Wesleyan University's Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program includes courses in visual arts, art history and professional writing, history, film, education, biology and astronomy; the liberal arts education at the secondary school level prepares the student for higher education at a university. They are thus meant for the more academically minded students. In addition to the usual curriculum, students of a liberal arts education study Latin and Ancient Greek; some liberal arts education provide general education, others have a specific focus. The four traditional branches are: humanities education modern languages lower level mathematical-scientific education economical and social-scientific education Curricula differ from school to school, but include language, informatics, chemistry, geography, music, philosophy, civics / citizenship, social sciences, several foreign languages.
Schools concentrate not only on academic subjects, but on producing well-rounded individuals, so physical education and religion or ethics are compulsory in non-denominational schools which are prevalent. For example, the German constitution guarantees the separ
Finnish Americans
Finnish Americans comprise Americans with ancestral roots from Finland or Finnish people who emigrated to and reside in the United States. The Finnish American population numbers about 700,000; some Finns, like the ancestors of John Morton, came to the Swedish colony of New Sweden, that existed in mid-17th century. Finns first started coming to the United States in large numbers in the late 19th century, continued until the mid 20th century. However, there were some Finns in the United States beforehand. Many townships were established by Finnish Americans, including Herman, located in Baraga County, Michigan; the town is named for Herman Keranen, of Finland. A significant number of Finnish immigrants settled in northern Minnesota in the Arrowhead Region, along with portions of Aitkin, Crow Wing, Carlton counties working in the region's iron mines. A number of the Finns fleeing the Russification efforts emigrated to many of the mill towns of New England where they became known for their woodworking skills.
The first immigrants to North America arrived to the New Sweden colony by the lower Delaware River in 1640. Finland was an integrated part of the Kingdom of Sweden at the time, a Swedish colony in the New World was bound to include subjects from Finland as well. In two years' time, the number of Finns in the settlement had grown to fifty, was increasing. New Sweden changed hands to Dutch control in 1655, but many Finns had entered, the Finnish community, while small, was growing. Among the Finnish settlers of New Sweden was Martti Marttinen, who came to North America in 1654 and changed his name to Morton. John Morton, the politician who signed the U. S. Declaration of Independence on behalf of Pennsylvania in 1776, was his great-grandson. Migration to North America from Finland continued throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, but it was sporadic in nature and only a few individuals and groups dared make the move; this was due to the long distance between Europe and America, the difficulties associated with crossing it.
However, as the Industrial Revolution began with the turn of the 19th century, bringing with it such technological innovations as railways and steam ships, these obstacles began to disappear. While the rest of Europe was industrializing, Finland, by now a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, was to a great extent excluded from the revolutionary process; the society was agrarian, unemployment was rising, resultant from population growth and the fact that there was now little land left to cultivate in the country. America, on the other hand, lacked a work force. Rural life in Finland during the 1860s seemed doomed to remain laborious and forever at the mercy of unpredictable weather. In 1867, a severe crop failure in Finland drove masses of Finns from rural Ostrobothnia, into migrating to Norway, from where they moved to the United States and Canada; the Laestadian Finns longed for a rural way of life and religious toleration which they believed they would find in America. So a group of Laestadian preachers and followers immigrated to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan bringing their beloved sermons.
In 1873 the Finnish Laestadians started their own congregation at Michigan. By 1906 the Laestadian movement in America resulted in 68 churches and a communicant body of over 8,000. Today the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church of America remains in Michigan; the years between 1870 and 1930 are sometimes referred as the Great "Migration" of Finns into North America. In the 1870s, there were only 3,000 migrants from Finland, but this figure was growing. New migrants sent letters home, describing their life in the New World, this encouraged more and more people to leave and try their luck in America. Rumors began of the acres of land that could be cleared into vast productive fields and the opportunity to earn "a barrel of American dollars" in mines and railroads. There were professional recruiters, or "agents," employed by mining and shipping companies, who encouraged Finns to move to the United States. More than 90% of the Finnish immigrants lived in urban centers; this activity was frowned upon by the authorities of the Grand Duchy, was done in secret.
It was brought to an end in the late 1880s by legislation in the U. S. but the decade still saw a 12-fold increase in the number of Finnish migrants compared to the previous decade, as 36,000 Finns left their home country for North America. The movement was strengthened further in 1899, as the Russian government started an aggressive, coordinated campaign for the Russification of Finland. Many Finns chose to escape the repression by migrating into the New World, during the 1900s, there were 150,000 new migrants. Most Finns who left for America came from the impoverished rural regions of Ostrobothnia. Other prominent points of departure were the Torne Valley. Many of the emigrants left by ship from the port town of Hanko. In the years surrounding the turn of the 20th Century, settlement was focused around three specific regions: Several pockets of Finnish settlement appeared in New England. New York City was the prime destination for scores of general laborers. Cities such as Fitchburg, Worcester and Monessen, Pennsylvania attracted thousands of Finns to settle in both urban and rural settings.
In the Upper Midwest, a similar pattern took shape. Due to the region's similar geographic and climatic features to Finland, the heaviest levels of F
Finns
Finns or Finnish people are a Finnic ethnic group native to Finland. Finns are traditionally divided into smaller regional groups that span several countries adjacent to Finland, both those who are native to these countries as well as those who have resettled; some of these may be classified as separate ethnic groups, rather than subgroups of Finns. These include the Kvens and Forest Finns in Norway, the Tornedalians in Sweden, the Ingrian Finns in Russia. Finnish, the language spoken by most Finnic people, is related to other Finnic languages, e.g. Estonian and Karelian; the Finnic languages are a subgroup of the larger Uralic family of languages, which includes Hungarian. These languages are markedly different from most other languages spoken in Europe, which belong to the Indo-European family of languages. Native Finns can be divided according to dialect into subgroups sometimes called heimo, although such divisions have become less important due to internal migration. Today, there are 6–7 million ethnic Finns and their descendants worldwide, with majority of them living in their native Finland and the surrounding countries, namely Sweden and Norway.
An overseas Finnish diaspora has long been established in the countries of the Americas and Oceania, with the population of immigrant background, namely Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The Population Register Centre maintains information on the birthplace and mother tongue of the people living in Finland, but does not categorize any as Finns by ethnicity; the majority of people living in the Republic of Finland consider Finnish to be their first language. According to Statistics Finland, of the country's total population of 5,503,297 at the end of 2016, 88.3% considered Finnish to be their native language. It is not known how many of the ethnic Finns living outside Finland speak Finnish as their first language. In addition to the Finnish-speaking inhabitants of Finland, the Kvens, the Tornedalians, the Karelians in the historic Finnish province of Karelia and Evangelical Lutheran Ingrian Finns, as well as Finnish expatriates in various countries, are Finnic people. Finns have been traditionally divided into sub-groups along regional, dialectical or ethnographical lines.
These subgroups include the people of Finland Proper, Tavastia, Savo and Ostrobothnia. These sub-groups express regional self-identity with significance. There are a number of distinct dialects of the Finnish language spoken in Finland, although the exclusive use of the standard Finnish —both in its formal written and more casual spoken form—in Finnish schools, in the media, in popular culture, along with internal migration and urbanization, have diminished the use of regional varieties since the middle of the 20th century. There were three dialects: the South-Western and Karelian; these and neighboring languages mixed with each other in various ways as the population spread out, evolved into the Southern Ostrobothnian, Central Ostrobothnian, Northern Ostrobothnian, Far-Northern and South-Eastern aka South Karelian dialects. The Sweden Finns have emigrated from Finland to Sweden. An estimated 450,000 first- or second-generation immigrants from Finland live in Sweden, of which half speak Finnish.
The majority moved from Finland to Sweden following the Second World War, taking advantage of the expanding Swedish economy. This emigration has been declining since. There is a native Finnish-speaking minority in Sweden, the Tornedalians in the border area in the extreme north of Sweden; the Finnish language has official status as one of five minority languages in Sweden, but only in the five northernmost municipalities in Sweden. The term Finns is used for other Finnic peoples, including Izhorians in Ingria, Karelians in Karelia and Veps in the former Veps National Volost, all in Russia. Among these groups, the Karelians is the most populous one, followed by the Ingrians. According to a 2002 census, it was found that Ingrians identify with Finnish ethnic identity, referring to themselves as Ingrian Finns; the Finnish term for Finns is suomalaiset. It is a matter of debate how best to designate the Finnish-speakers of Sweden, all of whom have migrated to Sweden from Finland. Terms used include Sweden Finns and Finnish Swedes, with a distinction always made between more recent Finnish immigrants, most of whom have arrived after World War II, Tornedalians, who have lived along what is now the Swedish-Finnish border since the 15th century.
The term "Finn" also has the meaning "a member of a people speaking Finnish or a Finnic language". Historical references to Northern Europe are scarce, the names given to its peoples and geographic regions are obscure; such names as Fenni, Phinnoi and Skrithfinni / Scridefinnum appear in a few written texts starting from about two millennia ago in association with peoples located in a northern part of Europe, but the real meaning of these terms is debatable. The ear
American Collegiate Athletic Association
The American Collegiate Athletic Association is an athletic conference which competes in the NCAA's Division III. The conference was formed in 2017 by schools in the Northeastern United States, but has members in Michigan, Kentucky and California; the ACAA was formally announced as a NCAA Division III conference in February 2017, with plans to start offering official conference championships in the 2017-18 academic year. Unofficial championships were held during the 2016-17 year. Initial members were Alfred State College, Finlandia University, Mills College, State University of New York at Canton, State University of New York at Delhi, Pine Manor College, University of Maine at Presque Isle, University of Valley Forge. Finlandia, Maine-Presque Isle and Pine Manor were members of the Great South Athletic Conference, which disbanded in 2016. In November 2017, it was announced that SUNY Canton and UMPI departed the ACAA, effective July 1, 2018, would join the North Atlantic Conference. In January 2018, it was announced that Mount Mary University of Wisconsin joined the ACAA, effective in the 2018-19 academic year.
Mount Mary was a NCAA Division III independent school. On February 16, 2018, Pratt Institute announced that the college joined the ACAA, effective in the 2018-19 academic year. Pratt was a member of the Hudson Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and the United States Collegiate Athletic Association. On June 28, 2018, it was announced that Alfred State College will be leaving the ACAA, will join the Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference, effective 2019-20. In July 2018, it was announced that Thomas More College, now known as Thomas More University, joined the ACAA effective for the 2018-19 season. Thomas More was a full member of the Presidents' Athletic Conference. Thomas More will be re-joining the NAIA and joining the Mid South Conference beginning the fall of 2019. On November 30, 2018, SUNY Delhi, a North Atlantic Conference associate member in six sports, announced that it would leave the ACAA and become a full member of the NAC effective in the fall of 2019. At that time, five additional Delhi sports—men's and women's cross country, men's golf, men's and women's soccer, women's volleyball—will begin NAC play.
Three more sports—men's and women's basketball, plus softball—will remain in the ACAA until starting NAC play in 2020–21. † - Women's college, therefore not competing in men's sports. SUNY Delhi was a full member from 2017 to 2019. Official website
Lumber
Lumber or timber is a type of wood, processed into beams and planks, a stage in the process of wood production. Lumber is used for structural purposes but has many other uses as well. There are two main types of lumber, it may be surfaced on one or more of its faces. Besides pulpwood, rough lumber is the raw material for furniture-making and other items requiring additional cutting and shaping, it is available in many species hardwoods. Finished lumber is supplied in standard sizes for the construction industry – softwood, from coniferous species, including pine and spruce, hemlock, but some hardwood, for high-grade flooring, it is more made from softwood than hardwoods, 80% of lumber comes from softwood. In the United States milled boards of wood are referred to as lumber. However, in Britain and other Commonwealth nations, the term timber is instead used to describe sawn wood products, like floor boards. In the United States and Canada timber describes standing or felled trees. In Canada, lumber describes cut and surfaced wood.
In the United Kingdom, the word lumber is used in relation to wood and has several other meanings, including unused or unwanted items. Referring to wood, Timber is universally used instead. Remanufactured lumber is the result of secondary or tertiary processing/cutting of milled lumber, it is lumber cut for industrial or wood-packaging use. Lumber is cut by ripsaw or resaw to create dimensions that are not processed by a primary sawmill. Resawing is the splitting of 1-inch through 12-inch hardwood or softwood lumber into two or more thinner pieces of full-length boards. For example, splitting a ten-foot 2×4 into two ten-foot 1×4s is considered resawing. Structural lumber may be produced from recycled plastic and new plastic stock, its introduction has been opposed by the forestry industry. Blending fiberglass in plastic lumber enhances its strength and fire resistance. Plastic fiberglass structural lumber can have a "class 1 flame spread rating of 25 or less, when tested in accordance with ASTM standard E 84," which means it burns slower than all treated wood lumber.
Logs are converted into timber by being hewn, or split. Sawing with a rip saw is the most common method, because sawing allows logs of lower quality, with irregular grain and large knots, to be used and is more economical. There are various types of sawing: Plain sawn – A log sawn through without adjusting the position of the log and the grain runs across the width of the boards. Quarter sawn and rift sawn – These terms have been confused in history but mean lumber sawn so the annual rings are reasonably perpendicular to the sides of the lumber. Boxed heart – The pith remains within the piece with some allowance for exposure. Heart center – the center core of a log. Free of heart center – A side-cut timber without any pith. Free of knots – No knots are present. Dimensional lumber is lumber, cut to standardized width and depth, specified in inches. Carpenters extensively use dimensional lumber in framing wooden buildings. Common sizes include 2×4, 2×6, 4×4; the length of a board is specified separately from the width and depth.
It is thus possible to find 2×4s that are four and twelve feet in length. In Canada and the United States, the standard lengths of lumber are 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22 and 24 feet. For wall framing, "stud" or "precut" sizes are available, are used. For an eight-, nine-, or ten-foot ceiling height, studs are available in 92 5⁄8 inches, 104 5⁄8 inches, 116 5⁄8 inches; the term "stud" is used inconsistently to specify length. Under the prescription of the Method of Construction issued by the Southern Song government in the early 12th century, timbers were standardized to eight cross-sectional dimensions. Regardless of the actual dimensions of the timber, the ratio between width and height was maintained at 1:1.5. Units are in Song Dynasty inches. Timber smaller than the 8th class were called "unclassed"; the width of a timber is referred to as one "timber", the dimensions of other structural components were quoted in multiples of "timber". The dimensions of timbers in similar application show a gradual diminution from the Sui Dyansty to the modern era.
The length of a unit of dimensional lumber is limited by the height and girth of the tree it is milled from. In general the maximum length is 24 ft. Engineered wood products, manufactured by binding the strands, fibers, or veneers of wood, together with adhesives, to form composite materials, offer more flexibility and greater structural strength than typical wood building materials. Pre-cut studs save a framer much time, because they are pre-cut by the manufacturer for use in 8-, 9-
Rural area
In general, a rural area or countryside is a geographic area, located outside towns and cities. The Health Resources and Services Administration of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services defines the word rural as encompassing "...all population and territory not included within an urban area. Whatever is not urban is considered rural."Typical rural areas have a low population density and small settlements. Agricultural areas are rural, as are other types of areas such as forest. Different countries have varying definitions of rural for administrative purposes. In Canada, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development defines a "predominantly rural region" as having more than 50% of the population living in rural communities where a "rural community" has a population density less than 150 people per square kilometre. In Canada, the census division has been used to represent "regions" and census consolidated sub-divisions have been used to represent "communities". Intermediate regions have 15 to 49 percent of their population living in a rural community.
Predominantly urban regions have less than 15 percent of their population living in a rural community. Predominantly rural regions are classified as rural metro-adjacent, rural non-metro-adjacent and rural northern, following Ehrensaft and Beeman. Rural metro-adjacent regions are predominantly rural census divisions which are adjacent to metropolitan centres while rural non-metro-adjacent regions are those predominantly rural census divisions which are not adjacent to metropolitan centres. Rural northern regions are predominantly rural census divisions that are found either or above the following lines of parallel in each province: Newfoundland and Labrador, 50th; as well, rural northern regions encompass all of Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Statistics Canada defines rural for their population counts; this definition has changed over time. It has referred to the population living outside settlements of 1,000 or fewer inhabitants; the current definition states that census rural is the population outside settlements with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants and a population density below 400 people per square kilometre.
84% of the United States' inhabitants live in suburban and urban areas, but cities occupy only 10 percent of the country. Rural areas occupy the remaining 90 percent; the U. S. Census Bureau, the USDA's Economic Research Service, the Office of Management and Budget have come together to help define rural areas. United States Census Bureau: The Census Bureau definitions, which are based on population density, defines rural areas as all territory outside Census Bureau-defined urbanized areas and urban clusters. An urbanized area consists of a central surrounding areas whose population is greater than 50,000, they may not contain individual cities with 50,000 or more. Thus, rural areas comprise open country and settlements with fewer than 2,500 residents. USDA The USDA's Office of Rural Development may define rural by various population thresholds; the 2002 farm bill defined rural and rural area as any area other than a city or town that has a population of greater than 50,000 inhabitants, the urbanized areas contiguous and adjacent to such a city or town.
The rural-urban continuum codes, urban influence code, rural county typology codes developed by USDA’s Economic Research Service allow researchers to break out the standard metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas into smaller residential groups. For example, a metropolitan county is one that contains an urbanized area, or one that has a twenty-five percent commuter rate to an urbanized area regardless of population. OMB: Under the Core Based Statistical Areas used by the OMB, a metropolitan county, or Metropolitan Statistical Area, consists of central counties with one or more urbanized areas and outlying counties that are economically tied to the core counties as measured by worker commuting data. Non-metro counties are outside the boundaries of metro areas and are further subdivided into Micropolitan Statistical Areas centered on urban clusters of 10,000–50,000 residents, all remaining non-core counties. In 2014, the USDA updated their rural / non-rural area definitions based on the 2010 Census counts.
National Center for Education Statistics revised its definition of rural schools in 2006 after working with the Census Bureau to create a new locale classification system to capitalize on improved geocoding technology. Rural health definitions can be different for establishing under-served areas or health care accessibility in rural areas of the United States. According to the handbook, Definitions of Rural: A Handbook for Health Policy Makers and Researchers, "Residents of metropolitan counties are thought to have easy access to the concentrated health services of the county's central areas. However, some metropolitan counties are so large that t
