The Apple Seed

Guest: Susan Madsen, PhD, Utah Valley University’s Woodbury Professor of Leadership and Ethics 

Guest: Julio Valdes, PhD, Civil Engineering Professor at San Diego State University  San Diego State  University Civil Engineering Professor Julio Valdes has spent a lot of time in the physics lab listening to the crackle of puffed rice in order to learn more about what happens in avalanches and manufacturing processes where crunchy stuff gets smashed.

Guest: Sheril Foster Bischoff, Trustee of the Literary Collection of her Aunt, Helen Foster Snow  News about China’s volatile economy, booming middle class and powerful government is easy to come by these days. But in the early 20th Century, news out of China was very rare. And, in the 1930s the news that the West received about China often came from an unlikely source – a dashing young American couple: Edgar Snow and his wife Helen Foster Snow. They crossed through dangerous military zones to cover student uprisings and the intense political conflicts between Nationalist and Communist forces. Oh, and she befriended Chairman Mao.  For this month’s installment of “From the Vaults,” we dive into the holdings in Special Collections at BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library, to explore the adventures and legacy of Helen Foster Snow.

Guest: Crystal A. Kalinec-Craig, PhD, Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching at the University of Texas in San Antonio  There’s recently been a trend in teaching fraction that involves music. An add-on to this idea is that using culturally relevant/familiar music might help the learning process even more—students who have a cultural context for the music might even benefit from its math connections outside of the classroom.

Guests: Jaren Wilkey, Manager of BYU’s University Photography office; Janis Nuckolls, PhD, Professor of linguistics at BYU  Quichua is a 2,000-year-old language that has evolved in ways English has not. Which makes it particularly fascinating to BYU linguistics professor Janis Nuckolls and the students she regularly takes to Ecuador to study Quichua and the people who speak it.  View the Photo Essay