MORNINGSIDE AVENUES
Notable Top special education degree The website Top Education Degrees recognized Morningside College for offering the nation’s most affordable online master’s degree in special education. The website’s “50 Most Affordable Online Masters in Special Education Degree Programs 2015” ranks Morningside’s program at number one.
Graduate courses for music teachers
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This fall Morningside College began offering graduate-level courses specifically designed for music teachers. The new 18-hour Music Education Strand is offered 100-percent online, and the coursework may be applied toward a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from Morningside.
ALD receives national award Morningside’s chapter of Alpha Lambda Delta (ALD) National Honor Society won a 2015 Order of the Torch Award. Six chapters were honored for outstanding chapter work in programming, internal communications, campus visibility and overall presentation of their application. ALD recognizes and encourages academic excellence among first-year college and university students.
ODK National Leader of the Year Hannah M. Hecht 2015, who graduated summa cum laude in May with a bachelor’s degree in English, was named one of five Omicron Delta Kappa (ODK) national leaders of the year. ODK is a leadership honor society that recognizes and encourages superior scholarship, leadership and exemplary character.
Author speaks at Morningside Drew Magary, author of the novel “The Postmortal,” gave a lecture at Morningside College in September, after much of the student body had read the book. All incoming Morningside freshmen were given “The Postmortal” to read this past summer. The freshmen discussed the book with upperclass student leaders during orientation activities on campus. In “The Postmortal,” Magary imagines a near future where the cure for aging is discovered and made available to people worldwide after much political and moral debate. The critically-acclaimed novel was nominated for the 2012 Philip K. Dick Award and the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Magary is a correspondent for GQ and a columnist for Deadspin. He also is the author of the book “Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood.” He has written for New York magazine, NPR, NBC, Maxim, The Atlantic, Bon Appetit, The Huffington Post, The Awl, Gawker, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Yahoo!, ESPN, Comedy Central and more.
Professor writes book on the histories of American holidays Why is Easter called Easter? Why is Christmas as commercialized as it is today? Where does the Valentine heart shape come from, since it does not seem very similar to a real heart? When did trick-or-treating originate? Has the Thanksgiving story always involved Pilgrims and Indians? These and many other questions are answered in the book “America’s Favorite Holidays: Candid Histories” by Dr. Bruce Forbes 1970, professor and chair of religious studies at Morningside College. Forbes’ book, recently published by the University of California Press, discusses the importance of Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween and Thanksgiving in American culture. It also discusses how these holidays came to be, as well as what they are today. “I wrote this book to survey scholarly information about these holidays and condense it in a way that would be interesting and available to a general audience,” Forbes said. “Much of the conventional information about these holidays is sugar-coated and sometimes flat-out wrong. This book is my answer, when someone asks me, ‘What’s the real story?’” “America’s Favorite Holidays: Candid Histories” can be purchased at the Morningside College Bookstore, on Amazon.com and at Barnes and Noble. –Channing Pick
