Day: March 23, 2023

Wearing an effortless smile and a crisp, gray suit with a cloth lapel flower, Tommy Nalls Jr. projects confidence. Which is the point. In a ballroom full of job candidates, no one wants to dance with a desperate partner. And, as badly as his district needs teachers, Nalls doesn’t want just anyone.
“They have to have this certain grit, that certain fight,” says Nalls, director of recruitment for Jackson Public Schools, in Mississippi’s capital city. “That dog in ’em, so to speak.”
Tommy Nalls Jr. at a teacher job fair in Starkville, Miss. The head of recruitment for Jackson Public Schools says he’s proud of his district’s rise in state rankings, from an F-rated district to a C. (Cory Turner/NPR)On this sun-kissed morning in March, he’s a couple hours north of Jackson, in a ballroom on the campus of Mississippi State University, at a job fair full of soon-to-graduate teachers and school district recruiters from all over the state, and even out-of-state, competing to hire them.
Many di..

What makes humans different from other species? To environmental engineer and Santa Clara University professor Stephanie Hughes, it’s the fact that we produce things that can’t be used again in nature. We break the cycle. Professor Hughes doesn’t even like to use the word, “waste.”
“I’m not very pleased with that terminology because really, humans are the only ones that have waste streams,” Hughes says. “In the rest of the world, this planet operates cyclically: Waste from one animal becomes nutrients for another.”
For many Americans, throwing something away means that it’s gone forever. But Professor Hughes wants students to learn that this is not always the case. Hughes has taken her students to tour a paper recycling plant, sewage treatment plant and household hazardous waste facility.
By training, Hughes is a chemical and environmental engineer with a particular love for sewage. She’s known for cruising around campus on her bike and lending her worms to students she’s inspired t..