A new era for TA training
Pilot program offers slate of workshops for newest KSAS, WSE instructors

Allyson McCabe, center, director of the TA Training Institute, with Lu Zhang, a doctoral student who assists her in the program, and Ben Tilghman, co-chair of the GRO, who presented during the fall orientation/training session.

For any teaching assistant who feels overwhelmed by that stack of ungraded papers or the prospect of leading an hourlong class discussion: Help is on the way. The Homewood schools, in conjunction with the Center for Educational Resources, will roll out this week its new TA Training Institute's second phase, a series of weekly workshops that let all Homewood graduate students meet with faculty and advanced TAs in order to explore teaching and learning issues.
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Blogs pull back the curtain on undergrad life
The national "blogging" wave has hit Johns Hopkins' shores as several schools have turned to the popular Web instrument as a way to illustrate undergraduate student life. In December, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions for the Homewood schools launched Hopkins Interactive, a site whose centerpiece is a collection of blogs in which current School of Arts and Sciences and Engineering students document their day-to-day lives, everything from the classroom experience to the weekend scene in Baltimore.
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New center will study health effects of pollution
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has received an $8 million Science to Achieve Results grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a center to study the health effects of particulate matter, the microscopic particles that pollute the air.
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