Latest news with #UtahStateUniversity
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra: Meet Violist and Pianist Sabrina Lloyd
Sabrina Lloyd is a versatile musician who has been playing the viola in the Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra since 2012 as both a section violist and subbing as an assistant principal violist. Compared to the violin, the viola has a deeper and warmer sound, and is tuned to a lower-range. It's even often referred to as the alto clef instrument. Lloyd loves the lower range of the viola because it's less likely to squeal like the violin. She came from a musical family, with her mother being a violinist and her dad being a pianist and vocalist. Her mother taught her how to play the violin from the age of 4 and encouraged her and her sister to play the viola so they could play it in case there was no other violist in a performance. She also took piano lessons with her dad beginning at age 7. She said her dad had a more hands-off approach than her mom did, noting that it was a lot more casual. She then made the full switch to viola at age 16 with a new mentor, but said it was a gradual transition, and she was still playing solo violin repertoire before the switch, just because it was more abundant and fun. Although she'd taken violin lessons for several years, her first time playing in an orchestra was when she was in junior high. She also played in chamber music groups with her family, both at church and as a professional ensemble. Lloyd was born in New York, but grew up in northern Utah, where she earned her bachelor's degree at Utah State University in viola performance, as well as a French minor. Because her dad liked to travel, they also lived in California for a little bit, as well as Spain, before heading back to Utah. What brought Lloyd to the Front Range, though, was Colorado State University, where she got her master's in viola performance. She enjoyed participating in music festivals over the summers, like the Aspen Music Festival, in Aspen, Colorado, as well as the Castleman String Quartet program in Boulder, and programs outside of the United States in Quebec, Canada, and Fontainebleau, France. Stephen Wyrczynski was her mentor at Aspen, and his teachings stayed with her for years. Her other teachers — like Margaret Miller from CSU, Erica Eckert from University of Colorado in Boulder, and Russell Fallstad and Brad Ottesen from USU — were also vital in helping her become the musician she is today. The CSO is what brought her and her husband to Cheyennet. They lived in Boulder for a while before he started job hunting. At the time, Lloyd was already in the CSO, so he interviewed for a job in Cheyenne, and the rest is history. In addition to her position in the local orchestra, she also plays in the Fort Collins Symphony, the Greeley Philharmonic and the Wyoming Symphony in Casper. She's been with all of these orchestras for around a decade, as well. A fun fact about Lloyd is that she has perfect pitch, which she says is sometimes a blessing and a curse; when an orchestra is tuning, it can be a blessing, but other things, like singing 'Happy Birthday' in a restaurant, can make it a curse. When Lloyd isn't playing an instrument or singing, she's taking care of her three children or participating in at least two book clubs at any given time, and a fair chunk of her time also goes to being the personnel manager for one of her orchestras. 'It's a hard career path,' said Lloyd. 'The four orchestras I'm in and the personnel manager position are equivalent to one part-time job. Full-time orchestras like the Colorado Symphony pay quite nicely, but there aren't a lot of openings. ... It's very competitive ... but it's also a team sport, you have to work together (with those around you) to create a beautiful musical experience.' Lloyd said that if someone wants to go to school for music, they should be thinking about going to a school where they're on scholarship or won't be in a crazy amount of debt. Despite the hardships, though, Lloyd said she wouldn't have it any other way.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Utah State leaving Mountain West for Pac-12 in 2026
LOGAN, Utah (ABC4) — It is now official. Utah State University gave written notice that it is leaving the Mountain West Conference and announced that it will be joining the Pac-12 Conference beginning in 2026. Utah State University informed the Mountain West conference in writing that it will be departing the conference on May 29 and paid the mandatory deposit for exit fees, according to a statement from Utah State Athletics. Advertisement 'Utah State will compete in the Mountain West in 2025-26 and begin competition in the Pac-12 in the fall semester of 2026,' Utah State Athletics said in its statement. Jazz hire Austin Ainge as president of basketball operations According to documents obtained by through a public records request, Utah State University will be leaving the Mountain West Conference on June 30, 2026. USU has competed in the Mountain West the last 13 years. Utah State had to notify the Mountain West of its decision by June 1st, otherwise its exit fee would increase from $18 million to $36 million. Interim President of USU Dr. Alan Smith wrote in his notice to Commissioner Nevarez, 'Utah State appreciates the years of competition and collaboration within the Mountain West and wishes each of the member institutions success in the future.' Advertisement Utah State will enter the newly revamped Pac-12 Conference with Oregon State, Washington State, Colorado State, Boise State, Fresno State and San Diego State. Gonzaga will compete in the Pac-12 in basketball. The conference still needs to find one more football school by July 1st to be eligible for the College Football Playoffs. Latest headlines: Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to ABC4 Utah.
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Bring Back Communal Kid Discipline
On a trip to Prague a couple of years ago, my family piled into a rapidly filling metro car, and I wound up sitting next to my 6-year-old daughter, while her 4-year-old sister sat directly across from us, on her own. At one point, my youngest pulled a knee up to her chest and rested her foot on the seat. Almost immediately, a woman sitting next to her, who looked to be about 70, reached out and gently touched my daughter's foot, signaling her to put it down. My daughter was surprised, maybe a little embarrassed. But she understood and quickly obeyed. For a split second, I wondered if I ought to feel chastised: Perhaps the woman was judging me for having failed at some basic parental duty. But something about the matter-of-fact, almost automatic way the woman had intervened reassured me that she wasn't thinking much about me at all. She was just going through the motions of an ordinary day on the train, in which reminding a child not to put her foot on the seat was a perfectly natural gesture. Ultimately, I was grateful for the woman's tap on my daughter's foot. But the exchange also felt foreign. In my experience, that sort of instruction, from a random adult to a stranger's child, isn't much of a thing in America (or, for what it's worth, in the United Kingdom, where I currently live). Many people don't seem to think they have the authority to instruct, let alone touch, a kid who isn't theirs. They tend to leave it to the parent to manage a child's behavior—or they may silently fume when the parent doesn't step up. To informally test that assumption, I created a short online survey and ended up interacting with a dozen people from around the United States. Some were parents; some were not. Every single one said that outside certain situations—where they were familiar with a kid's parents, or where a child's safety was in question—they would hesitate before telling someone else's kid what to do, for fear of upsetting the parent. Marty Sullivan, a technology consultant based in Tennessee, gave a representative answer: 'Generally I'd prefer to avoid risking escalation.' These responses struck me as a bit of a shame, because the exchange between my daughter and the woman in Prague seemed to reflect something altogether good. And I know I can't be alone in that thought: Both historical precedent and cultural norms in other parts of the world reinforce the idea that a stranger's meddling in the disciplining of children can have significant merits. The highly individualistic approach to managing kids' behavior in public is particularly American—and a historical anomaly. David Lancy, an anthropologist and a professor emeritus at Utah State University, wrote to me that for the majority of human existence, it was unquestionable that ''the whole village' participates' in child-rearing. 'Siblings, peers, aunts, grandmas,' he told me, 'all have distinct roles, including 'correcting.'' When I asked Steven Mintz, a historian of families and childhood at the University of Texas at Austin, whether child-rearing in the United States, specifically, had ever involved a more collective approach, he seemed almost tickled: 'Did it ever!' he wrote back. He recalled that during his own childhood, in the 1950s, he was 'constantly corrected' by people other than his parents for his poor posture, hygiene, grooming, and language. Child-rearing into the first half of the 20th century was, he noted, 'far more of a communal and public endeavor'—an approach that entailed a fair amount of what would, by contemporary standards, probably be considered intrusion. 'Neighbors, teachers, shopkeepers, and even strangers on the street,' Mintz wrote, 'felt empowered, and often morally obligated, to correct a child's misbehavior, scold a lack of manners, break up a fight, or escort a wandering child back home.' Today, this sort of 'village style' oversight remains a norm in some pockets of the United States. Michelle Peters, a project manager in El Paso, Texas, whose family has roots in Mexico, told me that she has seen communities in both the U.S. and Mexico take a more collective approach to child-rearing. 'It is more common and more acceptable for adults to correct children who are not their own,' she said, and people feel 'a greater sense of social intimacy and immediacy,' which extends to caregiving in public settings. Yet in much of the United States, Mintz told me, the collective has given way to a 'privatized and protected model of parenting.' [Read: The isolation of intensive parenting] As in other aspects of parenthood, that closed-off approach gives parents more control but also puts them under more pressure. If you're the sole arbiter of your child's public behavior, you have to keep a pretty close eye on your kid at all times. That sense of responsibility can also produce anxiety: Rather than just parenting as I see fit, I often find myself guessing—and second-guessing—whether my kids are bothering people or violating some unspoken rule. (Is my daughter standing way too close to that guy? Does that shopkeeper mind that my kid is flipping through their magazines?) Amy Banta, a mom of three in Salt Lake City, told me that this is one reason she really appreciates it when other people step in to correct her kids. 'I cannot anticipate your every boundary that my child might possibly cross,' she said. 'You're gonna have to help me out.' If the goal is to steadily acquaint children with the conventions of polite society, it isn't clear that filtering all guidance through parents is the most effective approach. For one thing, kids are smart. A child who knows that his parent or other caregiver is the only one who will ever correct him might reasonably conclude that he can get up to no good whenever that adult turns away. What's more, I have found that a stranger's gentle intervention—as opposed to my nagging—can be a more effective means of conveying to my kids that the people around them are real people, with their own needs, whose space and comfort one ought to respect. Another adult's nudging can function as a kind of 'social proof,' as Banta put it—a reinforcement of the lessons a parent is trying to impart. [Read: A grand experiment in parenthood and friendship] Banta told me about a time when she took her then-5-year-old to a community-theater performance and he struggled to sit still. 'I kept telling him that he couldn't wiggle in his seat, because he was shaking the whole row,' Banta recalled, but 'he didn't want to listen to me, because he was having so much fun bouncing.' At intermission, another woman in the row asked Banta's son to stop shaking the seats so much. 'I looked at my son and said, 'See? It's not just me,'' Banta told me. He was far more mindful of his movements during the second act, periodically checking to see if he was bothering the woman down the row—who gave him a big thumbs-up after the show ended. The collective approach to correcting kids' behavior can have its drawbacks, of course. Plenty of people have truly unreasonable expectations about the way kids should act in public. Miranda Rake, a writer and mother of two in Oregon, told me that she thinks tolerance for ordinary kid behavior in much of America is too low. Even in Portland, which she considers quite laid back, she 'gets the stink eye' in many places and feels like she's 'on eggshells in a lot of coffee shops and certainly restaurants,' she said. 'There just isn't a culture of community around kids here.' In her view, that complicates the question of whether interventions from nonparents would make the environment more or less family friendly. Rake's concern is not entirely unfounded. In the United States, collective supervision of children has typically coincided with community norms that 'could be rigid or exclusionary,' Mintz told me, 'and the authority of adults could at times be authoritarian or abusive.' Meanwhile, in many modern societies outside America, tolerance for childlike unruliness is part and parcel of the more communal approach to raising kids. (That was also the norm for most of our evolutionary past, Sarah B. Hrdy, an anthropologist who has extensively studied child-rearing dynamics in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, told me. Where instruction does occur in such cultures, it tends to involve subtle, often nonverbal guidance—of the sort I encountered in Prague—rather than scolding or censure.) [Read: Is it wrong to tell kids to apologize?] The challenge of balancing tolerance and discipline aside, both Hrdy and Mintz observed that in many ways, American society is simply not set up for a thriving culture of community oversight. Where such a culture once existed, it was propped up by various forms of social infrastructure—the kind that has been steadily hollowed out over the past several decades, Mintz told me. American neighborhoods used to be more tightly knit. A lower proportion of mothers were employed outside the home, which meant that neighborhoods were filled with adults during the day who could keep an eye on one another's children. A strongly ingrained cultural respect for adult authority meant that 'few questioned a neighbor's right to reprimand a child for rudeness or risk-taking behavior,' Mintz said, and the potential personal risks (legal or otherwise) of disciplining a child not your own were fewer: 'Adults could discipline, correct, or even physically intervene without fear of being sued, shamed, or filmed.' In an era when fewer people know or interact with their neighbors, and social trust has waned, the thought of reviving collective child-rearing norms may seem a little far-fetched. And yet, the Americans I spoke with seemed, on the whole, largely open to being a bit more direct with other people's kids—if only they could have assurance that such involvement would be welcome. I'll come out and say it: I would certainly welcome it. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
29-05-2025
- General
- Atlantic
Go Ahead, Scold My Kid
On a trip to Prague a couple of years ago, my family piled into a rapidly filling metro car, and I wound up sitting next to my 6-year-old daughter, while her 4-year-old sister sat directly across from us, on her own. At one point, my youngest pulled a knee up to her chest and rested her foot on the seat. Almost immediately, a woman sitting next to her, who looked to be about 70, reached out and gently touched my daughter's foot, signaling her to put it down. My daughter was surprised, maybe a little embarrassed. But she understood and quickly obeyed. For a split second, I wondered if I ought to feel chastised: Perhaps the woman was judging me for having failed at some basic parental duty. But something about the matter-of-fact, almost automatic way the woman had intervened reassured me that she wasn't thinking much about me at all. She was just going through the motions of an ordinary day on the train, in which reminding a child not to put her foot on the seat was a perfectly natural gesture. Ultimately, I was grateful for the woman's tap on my daughter's foot. But the exchange also felt foreign. In my experience, that sort of instruction, from a random adult to a stranger's child, isn't much of a thing in America (or, for what it's worth, in the United Kingdom, where I currently live). Many people don't seem to think they have the authority to instruct, let alone touch, a kid who isn't theirs. They tend to leave it to the parent to manage a child's behavior—or they may silently fume when the parent doesn't step up. To informally test that assumption, I created a short online survey and ended up interacting with a dozen people from around the United States. Some were parents; some were not. Every single one said that outside certain situations—where they were familiar with a kid's parents, or where a child's safety was in question—they would hesitate before telling someone else's kid what to do, for fear of upsetting the parent. Marty Sullivan, a technology consultant based in Tennessee, gave a representative answer: 'Generally I'd prefer to avoid risking escalation.' These responses struck me as a bit of a shame, because the exchange between my daughter and the woman in Prague seemed to reflect something altogether good. And I know I can't be alone in that thought: Both historical precedent and cultural norms in other parts of the world reinforce the idea that a stranger's meddling in the disciplining of children can have significant merits. The highly individualistic approach to managing kids' behavior in public is particularly American—and a historical anomaly. David Lancy, an anthropologist and a professor emeritus at Utah State University, wrote to me that for the majority of human existence, it was unquestionable that ''the whole village' participates' in child-rearing. 'Siblings, peers, aunts, grandmas,' he told me, 'all have distinct roles, including 'correcting.'' When I asked Steven Mintz, a historian of families and childhood at the University of Texas at Austin, whether child-rearing in the United States, specifically, had ever involved a more collective approach, he seemed almost tickled: 'Did it ever!' he wrote back. He recalled that during his own childhood, in the 1950s, he was 'constantly corrected' by people other than his parents for his poor posture, hygiene, grooming, and language. Child-rearing into the first half of the 20th century was, he noted, 'far more of a communal and public endeavor'—an approach that entailed a fair amount of what would, by contemporary standards, probably be considered intrusion. 'Neighbors, teachers, shopkeepers, and even strangers on the street,' Mintz wrote, 'felt empowered, and often morally obligated, to correct a child's misbehavior, scold a lack of manners, break up a fight, or escort a wandering child back home.' Today, this sort of 'village style' oversight remains a norm in some pockets of the United States. Michelle Peters, a project manager in El Paso, Texas, whose family has roots in Mexico, told me that she has seen communities in both the U.S. and Mexico take a more collective approach to child-rearing. 'It is more common and more acceptable for adults to correct children who are not their own,' she said, and people feel 'a greater sense of social intimacy and immediacy,' which extends to caregiving in public settings. Yet in much of the United States, Mintz told me, the collective has given way to a 'privatized and protected model of parenting.' As in other aspects of parenthood, that closed-off approach gives parents more control but also puts them under more pressure. If you're the sole arbiter of your child's public behavior, you have to keep a pretty close eye on your kid at all times. That sense of responsibility can also produce anxiety: Rather than just parenting as I see fit, I often find myself guessing—and second-guessing—whether my kids are bothering people or violating some unspoken rule. (Is my daughter standing way too close to that guy? Does that shopkeeper mind that my kid is flipping through their magazines?) Amy Banta, a mom of three in Salt Lake City, told me that this is one reason she really appreciates it when other people step in to correct her kids. 'I cannot anticipate your every boundary that my child might possibly cross,' she said. 'You're gonna have to help me out.' If the goal is to steadily acquaint children with the conventions of polite society, it isn't clear that filtering all guidance through parents is the most effective approach. For one thing, kids are smart. A child who knows that his parent or other caregiver is the only one who will ever correct him might reasonably conclude that he can get up to no good whenever that adult turns away. What's more, I have found that a stranger's gentle intervention—as opposed to my nagging—can be a more effective means of conveying to my kids that the people around them are real people, with their own needs, whose space and comfort one ought to respect. Another adult's nudging can function as a kind of 'social proof,' as Banta put it—a reinforcement of the lessons a parent is trying to impart. Banta told me about a time when she took her then-5-year-old to a community-theater performance and he struggled to sit still. 'I kept telling him that he couldn't wiggle in his seat, because he was shaking the whole row,' Banta recalled, but 'he didn't want to listen to me, because he was having so much fun bouncing.' At intermission, another woman in the row asked Banta's son to stop shaking the seats so much. 'I looked at my son and said, 'See? It's not just me,'' Banta told me. He was far more mindful of his movements during the second act, periodically checking to see if he was bothering the woman down the row—who gave him a big thumbs-up after the show ended. The collective approach to correcting kids' behavior can have its drawbacks, of course. Plenty of people have truly unreasonable expectations about the way kids should act in public. Miranda Rake, a writer and mother of two in Oregon, told me that she thinks tolerance for ordinary kid behavior in much of America is too low. Even in Portland, which she considers quite laid back, she 'gets the stink eye' in many places and feels like she's 'on eggshells in a lot of coffee shops and certainly restaurants,' she said. 'There just isn't a culture of community around kids here.' In her view, that complicates the question of whether interventions from nonparents would make the environment more or less family friendly. Rake's concern is not entirely unfounded. In the United States, collective supervision of children has typically coincided with community norms that 'could be rigid or exclusionary,' Mintz told me, 'and the authority of adults could at times be authoritarian or abusive.' Meanwhile, in many modern societies outside America, tolerance for childlike unruliness is part and parcel of the more communal approach to raising kids. (That was also the norm for most of our evolutionary past, Sarah B. Hrdy, an anthropologist who has extensively studied child-rearing dynamics in traditional hunter-gatherer societies, told me. Where instruction does occur in such cultures, it tends to involve subtle, often nonverbal guidance—of the sort I encountered in Prague—rather than scolding or censure.) The challenge of balancing tolerance and discipline aside, both Hrdy and Mintz observed that in many ways, American society is simply not set up for a thriving culture of community oversight. Where such a culture once existed, it was propped up by various forms of social infrastructure—the kind that has been steadily hollowed out over the past several decades, Mintz told me. American neighborhoods used to be more tightly knit. A lower proportion of mothers were employed outside the home, which meant that neighborhoods were filled with adults during the day who could keep an eye on one another's children. A strongly ingrained cultural respect for adult authority meant that 'few questioned a neighbor's right to reprimand a child for rudeness or risk-taking behavior,' Mintz said, and the potential personal risks (legal or otherwise) of disciplining a child not your own were fewer: 'Adults could discipline, correct, or even physically intervene without fear of being sued, shamed, or filmed.' In an era when fewer people know or interact with their neighbors, and social trust has waned, the thought of reviving collective child-rearing norms may seem a little far-fetched. And yet, the Americans I spoke with seemed, on the whole, largely open to being a bit more direct with other people's kids—if only they could have assurance that such involvement would be welcome. I'll come out and say it: I would certainly welcome it.
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lagoon encourages students in science with Physics Day at the park
FARMINGTON — High school and middle school students from across the state arrived at Lagoon Friday to learn more about physics. To prepare for the trip, each student works on some type of project in class and presents it fair-style at the amusement park. Physics Day has been going on for over 35 years, and more students participate each year. What began as a way to get students involved in science, physics and technology has evolved to become a favorite student and faculty activity. 'It's not a hard sell,' Utah State University physics department representative JR Dennison laughed. 'The students come up with their projects all by themselves. … A lot of them spend weeks working doing this. They learn a whole heck of a lot.' Multiple events happen throughout the day, including the ride presentation. Each student team was tasked with making a mockup of a potential Lagoon ride. The tricky part came in figuring out the science of how the ride would work in reality. Students spent weeks working on dioramas — painting, decorating, thinking of themes and most of all, figuring out the logistics of how it could work. George De St. Jeor and Matea Peterson from West Point Junior High School created a ride inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' painting. The girls spent hours researching and creating their final project. 'We both really love art and so we wanted to do a story-themed ride,' De St. Jeor said. 'We had to make sure that it had enough inertia and friction to work in the real world.' Peterson joked, 'It was very hard, and it is only made out of paper. I'm sure in real life it would be even worse.' The kids also had the unique opportunity to build a robot and participate in a robot sumo wrestling competition. Students built, programmed, and ran the robots to find the champion. 'A guy named Jeff, who works at the Air Force, came and helped us. From experience, we learned how to make this,' said one bot-fighting student, Emmyr Suarez. 'We can knock down other robots.' One of the main events allowed students to take an egg-drop device on the sky-ride and drop it from the highest point on the ride. Students went one after another, dropping eggs as they rode along the track. Other students helped gather the machines on the ground to determine whose egg survived. In addition to the young students, professionals in the field and college students presented their work with interactive presentations and demonstrations. Ethan Wayland, a current USU student, showcased his team's work on making satellites. 'The last satellite we made was only 10 centimeters, which is really small,' Wayland said. 'I love coming to these kinds of events and talking to kids. Especially with a range of ages, it is fun talking to elementary and high school kids. A lot of them are interested in space, so it's cool to talk with them and connect about it.' The day at the park aims to promote careers in STEM and encourages students to engage in hands-on learning. 'The critical thinking of physics is learning to look at something and think your way through it,' Dennison said. 'It's absolutely essential in every direction you can take in life.'
