Category: school

crunchy bits and squeezy bits and cranky bits

I started this post a week ago. I have a lot of drafts of posts lying around collecting dust. Seriously, I must have well over a hundred draft posts in various stages of completion. And seriously, I think they are dusty. Some of them even have cobwebs.

—

Life has been hectic again (when hasn’t it?) and I’m trying to fit all the bits and pieces together.

A large item that’s been on my mind is that I’m finally going to try to make a push to finish my degree. Sadly, I am really not all that close, even to being ABD. I finished my coursework ages ago. But coursework was the easy part, what with the structure and the regular, manageable assignments with regular, manageable deadlines. My other requirements are larger and more nebulous, with typically much fuzzier deadlines. I have this bad tendency to push off my own research until I’ve worked my way through my other obligations. The trouble is that my other obligations manage quite easily to fill up all of my available time.

Since May, Phoebe and Theo have been in childcare 5 days a week, an increase from the 3 or 4 days they had been going. This gives me more available time. In theory. In practice, there have been more weeks than not during which there was at least one holiday, vacation day, or sick day. Since May I have travelled to a conference in Chicago for work, visited my family in California, visited my in-laws in New York several times, had a short trip to New Hampshire, a visit to New York City for BlogHer, and then most recently another trip to Chicago for a funeral. My job has kept me busy with deadlines for conferences and papers, plus meetings and running subjects. Our house continues to kick my butt, with its demands for upkeep. My head has been full of concern for family and friends.

Each time I have gone back to my own research, I have had to regroup, and remind myself of what I was doing, what I’d done last, and what I was about to do. (I’m working on figuring out better systems for keeping myself on track and moving forward, but I will probably save that for another post.)

—

I know that I can do better than this. I feel like I’ve just been making excuses. I used to be an effective and productive person. I’m trying to get there again, and right now it feels a lot like crunching. I’m trying to squeeze everything tighter to make room for my research. Honestly, all this compression has made me cranky.

One of the few places I can find time to squeeze is my time spent online. Since I rarely get to see friends in person, I’ve been clinging to my online world, the interactions with friends I see in blogland and on Facebook. But I have to cut back. I have started cutting back. (In the last couple of months or so, I’ve had several unhappy exchanges and experiences that have soured my online world and that has helped me pull back. Though, again with the cranky.)

Since I started blogging several years ago, I have spent a lot of my time offline (such as while I’m driving or doing laundry or dealing with other largely thoughtless tasks) thinking about my life online. Often thinking about posts I’ve read, or posts I’d like to write. I somehow need to shift my focus so that I spend that time thinking about articles I’ve read and papers I should be writing.

I’m not saying I’m going to quit blogging, but I can’t participate as much I have in the past. I probably will start leaving even fewer comments, even though I intend to keep reading posts.

I still hope to post here from time to time. Maybe even a couple of times a week if I can do so in a constrained amount of time. I hope to dust off some of the drafts that have been piling up for the past several years, and maybe I’ll still manage to get out some of the ones that have been cluttering up my head.

I’ve been sticking with Project 365, taking and posting at least one picture a day, and that will probably continue to be my main creative outlet. Taking pictures is something I can do in a few minutes if I need to, or that I can do during my time spent with Phoebe and Theo.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post, but it feels like I’ve been leaving my blog hanging.


This photo doesn’t really have anything to do with anything in this post, but I like it.

Advanced Topics in Procrastination

The Department of Procrastinatory Arts and Sciences at Big Urban University announces its Fall, 2008 course offerings:

PR 101: Introduction to Procrastination
Topics covered include puttering, stalling, and dawdling for beginners. Required of all students working towards degrees in Procrastination. (Requirement may be waived if the student has avoided registering for the course for 3 or more semesters.)
Instructor: TBD

PR 125: Procrastinators Throughout History
Leaders, visionaries, revolutionaries. This survey course highlights the great procrastinators of the world and the accomplishments they would have been famous for, had they ever managed to complete them.
Instructor: Putterington

PR 126: Procrastinators Throughout History II: The Arts
This course examines the works of the Grand Masters of Procrastination. Students will learn to appreciate the unfinished symphonies, uncompleted novels and half-painted canvases that might have rivalled the finished works of the artists’ better known contemporaries.
Instructor: TBA

Procrastinating 225: Special Topics in Procrastination
Details on the course topic are expected to be available by the fourth week of the semester, by which time the professor hopes to have finished writing the syllabus. Or at least started it.
Instructor: McDawdle

PR 234: Getting Things Partially Done
This hands-on productivity course will help speed you along in the steps from thinking about doing something, getting started in deciding to get something started, and starting to get something done that will look like progress towards the accomplishment of things.
Instructor: TB

PR 235: Putting Things Off
Postponed until Spring semester

Other courses, which are planned for some time later:
PR 175: The Science of Stalling and the Fine Art of Puttering About
PR 187: The Procrastinator in Contemporary Society
PR 285: Creative Time Mismanagement
PR 335: Advanced Seminar in Dawdling

———–
This course bulletin is offered up for this week’s Monday Mission, which asked for posts in the form of course descriptions.

learning some lessons (a crankiness review)

This has been a bit of a week for learning for me. I love learning. I am a bit of a long-term student. And even my career goals for after I get the PhD involve continued research. But the truth is, sometimes, the learning process can involve some crankiness. I like to feel like I know stuff, but often learning involves being shown that I don’t know stuff. Which is not always comfortable.

Take Monday. I had my violin lesson. I hadn’t had much time to practice last week, and there were 2 new, unfamiliar pieces. Worse, I didn’t practice until late in the week, meaning I more or less couldn’t remember the pieces at all from the previous lesson. And while Phoebe has lately been encouraging me to practice (she points at the violin, and then plays quietly nearby while I practice), she has less interest in listening to me struggle with a new piece that I play poorly (she kept leaving the room). Resulting in a shorter practice session. End result: Monday’s lesson was not my best. The topic of my lack of rhythm came up. Sigh.

Take Yesterday. I noticed that a deadline for abstract submissions for a big conference was today. I had meant to submit an abstract for the work I did for my master’s project. (Re-submit, actually, as the abstract I submitted for a previous conference was rejected.) I decided that I should make the push, and spent 4 hours re-writing the abstract yesterday afternoon and evening. I then sent it to a professor (one of the reader’s for my master’s project) on the off chance she would have time to look at it and give suggestions. Remarkably, she generously agreed to read the abstract, and even came back with several helpful suggestions. She said I should definitely submit the abstract, but that it would need to be “re-written.” Crap. I thought re-writing was what I’d just done. But I re-re-wrote, and was up till 2:00 in the morning. It apparently still needs re-re-re-writing, though. (The deadline was extended, so my professor will send me more comments tonight or tomorrow.) It will definitely be very good for me to learn how to write a better abstract, but, well, I hadn’t thought the first one (or second or third) were all that bad. Showing that I indeed have stuff to learn.

Take today. Another lesson in a different domain. I took Phoebe to Whole Foods this evening, as we need some stuff for a dinner we’re having tomorrow. (The aforementioned veggie dinner.) I was trying to get out the door by 5:00, with the plan of picking up some dinner for Phoebe at the store. We didn’t manage to leave till 5:15. Phoebe usually eats around 5:30. The store is 20 minutes away. I gave her some cheese before we went in the store, thinking it would hold her till we finished shopping, when she could eat some more.

We went in the store, I plopped her in a cart. Then I plopped her in another cart, because the straps on the first cart weren’t properly attached. Then we started shopping. And more time passed. Then Phoebe realized she was cold, and I’d left her sweater in the car. (It was about 90 degrees out, but downright chilly in the frozen food aisles.) But while Phoebe is generally a very happy and well-behaved toddler, she becomes less so when her needs aren’t met. Such as when she is cold and hungry. We almost ended up leaving without most of the items on the list. After buying a bit of bread and milk for her (yes, I went all out for the gourmet dinner), and returning to the car to warm up, eat and get her sweater, we were able to then complete our shopping mission in relative calm. You’d think I would’ve known providing adequate food clothing were among the basics of parenting.

Now, it’s 1:00 a.m., and I am back at work on the abstract re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-write. I’m completely wiped out and cranky and am no longer sure I can manage to get the abstract done. Is it too late to change careers?

a tale of two buildings

I’m a grad student at a large urban university in the American Northeast. This school has many buildings. Some big, some small. Some old, some new. This is the story of two buildings.

Building A and Building B are neighbors. They live on the same major street that runs through the center of the university. Between them runs a small street.

Both buildings are academic buildings, filled with classrooms and offices for faculty and staff.

Building A is an older building. It’s of a moderate size. It’s got character, mind you, but it’s a bit run down. Well, in some ways it’s quite run down. The heating and air conditioning are quirky, so it’s usually too hot or too cold. The stairways are narrow, and the elevators often on the fritz.

Building B is a newer building. Taller. Concrete. Modern. When you walk in, you are greeted by a cavernous entryway, tiled in marble. In the center is a large metallic abstract sculpture, somewhat evocative of a globe. Everything is expansive and expensive. Shiny.

When you walk into Building A, the space that you enter is a bit dimly lit. There’s a somewhat dingy carpeted sort of lounge area with some cushioned seats in front of you, and to your right, there’s a an area with a linoleum floor and a few cafeteria-style tables and chairs. Building A has a few vending machines: a soda machine, a candy and snack machine, and one of those hot beverage machines that can give you a watery cup of hot chocolate or a cup of coffee that you might turn to in a fit of caffeine desperation, but would never choose to drink.

In Building B, though, you can stroll up the sweeping double stair case with its wide marble steps to the second floor, where you can buy a scone and a caramel macchiato at a Starbucks. Or you can opt to get a more substantial lunch, or perhaps a light salad, at the gourmet soup and sandwich shop next to the Starbucks.

Building B is a showcase building for the university. Higher ups in the administration have installed their offices in part of the building. Building B often provides venues for important guest lecturers and other high-profile university events.

Building A is a respectable building, but next to Building B, it looks downright shabby.

These two buildings have in common that they house academic departments and graduate programs that focus on investing in the future. One of these two buildings is called the School of Management, and houses the business programs. The other building is called the School of Education, and houses teaching programs. Do I even need to tell you which building is which?

I’m really not making this up. The two buildings really do face each other, often seeming to me as some sort of concrete and brick manifestations of the very attitudes and trends of our society. Education programs are underfunded, schools are underfunded. Meanwhile, the focus of society is on the business of making money.

So many of our schools are struggling to make do. Many classrooms are overcrowded, many schools are short of up-to-date textbooks and resources. But a good school is not just about the size of the classroom and the quality and quantity of materials: a good school needs good teachers. It’s saddened me over the years to learn of so many bright and idealistic people who enter teaching, only to suffer burnout. The public schools, and especially the city schools, lead to the fastest burnout. Among many factors that contribute to this problem is that teachers get the short end of the stick in our society in terms of pay and prestige. In spite of the difficulty of the task, the need for commitment, the knowledge, patience and strength required to do this incredibly important work, public school teachers are typically not paid well. Certainly, they are not getting the sort of income that those who choose to follow career paths laid out in business professions.¹

Those who enter education programs, who choose to become educators, are often considered impractical dreamers. Sometimes it’s assumed that they aren’t motivated enough, or even bright enough, for other career options. It is taken for granted that teachers will not get paid particularly well.

Let’s face it. Our society values money. And pay is often a reflection of prestige. And teachers are just not getting as much of either of those as they deserve for their contribution to society.

This is just to say that I hope for a day when the pride that universities show in their education programs equals that of business programs. But in order to see that shift, our society will need to re-evaluate attitudes towards education professions.

——————-

¹ From the U.S. Bureau of the Census.²
Earnings for “Management, professional, and related occupations”

  • Median: $45,620 Mean: $59,139

    • Earnings for “Education, training, and library occupations”

  • Median: $31,555 Mean: $34,553

    • ² I seem to be developing an addiction to using footnotes in my posts.

    unceremonious

    Lots of folks are graduating around now here in the US. From middle schools, high schools, colleges. My nephew even just graduated from high school. (No, not the one that was born in January. He’s barely in kindergarten!) All the stuff in the air about graduations has me thinking. About graduations I haven’t had.

    No, no, I’m not lamenting the fact that I’m still in school. This prolonged incarceration educational endeavor is largely by choice. And I’m making progress on the schemes for tunneling my way out.

    The graduations I’m recalling, or not recalling as the case may be, are ones from my past. Or that weren’t in my past. Here’s a weird thing I realized about myself that I hadn’t disclosed in my recent confessional of weirdness: I don’t have a high school diploma.

    However, in spite of not actually having technically “graduated” from high school, I have both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. Ha! How’s that for weirdness?

    Okay, here’s the story. My family moved around a lot when I was growing up. I actually went to 4 different high schools. The first was in Colorado, the second in Hawaii and the third in California. When I was a junior in high school, which was while we were living in California, my mother remarried. And my mother and I moved in with my new stepfather. In France.

    So, high school number 4 was in France. It was an international, bilingual school on the IB system. I was due to be a senior. The last two years of the IB (International Baccalaureate) program were actually cumulative. But starting in the last year of the program (terminal) would have had me going in a year behind in all my courses. So they put in me première, basically junior year. I had just finished 3 years of American high school, and didn’t want to wind up in high school for a total of 5 years. However, the powers that be assured me that completing my 4th year of high school at the new school would suffice for finishing my high school education, at least as far as American universities were concerned. I could get some sort of stamp on my transcript saying I’d finished 4 years of high school.

    So that’s what happened. I finished that last year of high school, and apparently got that stamp on my transcript. I never even saw the thing. But it was enough to get me admitted into the American university of my choice. (Brown, if you were wondering.)

    But there was no high school graduation. I was never a senior. All my school friends in France were just finishing their penultimate year of secondary school.

    Another 4 years went by, and I was scheduled to graduate from Brown. Except for the fact that I took a semester off along the way. (Following extreme burnout from working 3 jobs and raising 6 puppies. Another story.) So, in May of 1993, I did not graduate from college. However, this time, I went through the ceremony. (Hey, all my friends were doing it.) I was scheduled to finish in December, 1993 anyhow, and it wasn’t uncommon for folks to attend the commencement ceremony a semester ahead.

    And yes, I did finish Brown in December of ’93, as scheduled. There was some sort of ceremony that December for the midyear grads, but really it was more of a gathering in a hall. No diplomas. Because they only got awarded in May. So hey, I got to have the graduation ceremony all over again in May of ’94. And this time, I got my diploma. Well, actually, that’s not exactly true, either. What I got was a formal-looking roll of paper with a note inside saying that my actually diploma was being “engrossed” and would be sent to me in the mail. (Yes, it the paper actually did say “engrossed.”) (And yes, I did get that diploma in the mail at some point. In fact, I just found it tonight, stumbling across it while trying to find an old journal. It’s been sitting, gathering dust, on the bookshelf next to my bed for probably several years. I had no idea it was there.)

    Fast forward 10 years . I finally finished my master’s project at my current school in August of 2004, making me eligible for September graduation. I’m not even sure if they had a September ceremony. (Again, I could have “walked” in the May 2004 ceremony, but this time I opted not to. For one thing, my program doesn’t have a department, so you have to leech yourself on to some other department’s ceremony.) September came, and nothing much happened. As far as I knew, the completion of the degree had gone through: master’s project submitted, paperwork submitted, official admittance to the PhD program. But no actual evidence of a degree.

    And then at some point that fall, I checked my online transcript, and the magical words had appeared:

    DEGREE AWARDED
    Master of Arts
    Major: Applied Linguistics
    September 25, 2004

    Woohoo! Call me master, baby! But still no diploma.

    And then finally, on October 23rd, 2004, a tube appeared in my mailbox. I remember the day well, as it was the day before my wedding. (My second wedding to John.) My mother and sister were visiting. And I had gone out to walk the dog and check the mail. In my pajamas. Flannel polar bear pajamas. And I came back in with that tube. Still wearing my pajamas, I gathered my mother, my sister and my husband (who I was about to remarry), and I sang a wordless (dooooo doo doo doo doooo doo) version of “Pomp and Circumstance.”

    I opened my red cardboard tube.

    I had been awarded a master’s degree.

    thought I’d share

    Sometimes, I make myself laugh. This is what I just wrote:

    Examples 17 through 22b were coded as “reconstructed dialog.” However, the dialog was obviously constructed rather than reconstructed as the interlocutors are styrofoam packing peanuts:

    17. They’re all “Pauly, don’t you want to try just one of us?”

    One of the questions on my takehome final is a brief study of the usage of the quotative be+all, a close relative of the quotative be+like. We’ve been given a small corpus of 50 examples of this quotative, including some from blogs. Such as this excerpt from this one:

    People who eat pennies are stupid. I mean, it’s obvious what’s going to happen. Your body isn’t going to be able to digest a damn penny, okay? Same goes for shards of glass or thumbtacks or pieces of errant plastic or even little lego pieces. I’m past that. I’ve moved on. Matured. But when it comes to these damn packing peanuts they call out to me like they know what I’m thinking. They’re all “Pauly, don’t you want to try just one of us?”” and I’m all “No thanks Mr. Packing Peanut, I think you’ll just give me a stomach ache” and they’re all “Oh, c’mon — what’s the worst that could happen?” and I’m all “I could get sick” and they’re all “Sicker than when you got food poisoning from Pizza Hut?” and I’m all “How did you know about that?” and they’re all “We’re packing peanuts, Pauly — we know all.”

    Let this be a warning to all of you. Anything you write and publish on the web could turn into data fodder for linguists, or even worse, linguistics students. Bwahahaha.

    Oooh. There’s something I could research: the distribution of spellings of evil laughs on the web. There seems to be a bit of variation in the onset (bwahahaha vs muahahaha vs buahahaha vs mwahahaha) not to mention variability in the number of “ha”s. (We can get from two “ha”s, as in bwahaha, all the way up to…I’m not sure how many. I got as far as googling

    “bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha”

    and was amused to get 7180 hits, and this:

    Did you mean: mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

    Hey, remember how I said I like sleep, and should be in pretty good shape to get some tonight? Not if I keep screwing around like this. So I’m all “I totally need to get back to work.”

    final countdown

    Damn. I can’t even write that, even think that, without getting that song running through my head. (da da doo doo, da da doo doo doo, da da doo doo, da da doo doo doo…) (By the way, Wikipedia seems to let you play snippets of songs now. But I must warn you, this song is insidious. There is also no pause or stop button on the Wikipedia player.)

    What was I saying? Oh yeah. My class is almost over. The takehome final is due tomorrow. I’m in decent shape timewise, I think. Also not in such bad shape gradewise, in spite of my previous stressings. (Have I ever mentioned that if there is extra credit available, I feel compelled to go for it? Even if I don’t need it? I’m trying to resist the urge to do the extra credit question on the final, since I’ll get more sleep if I don’t do it. And unless I seriously screwed up on the last assignment, I don’t need it.)

    Ah, sleep. If only I could get some sort of credit for that. Screw the credit, if only I could just get more of it. Have I mentioned that I love sleep? Oh, right. I have.

    another high school movie?

    I’m trying to do actual work here (I have a big assigment due on Monday), but John just sent me a link to this trailer (which he saw on Pharyngula). What with my recent attention to high school movies and associated terminology, I felt I should share.

    10 Things I Hate About Commandments:

    high school movies and clique taxonomies

    It’s no wonder I’ve been having traumatic high school flashbacks. In my class on Monday, there was an extended discussion of terms used to categorize cliques (and outcasts) at the various schools that people had attended. (Keep in mind, for most of the students in the class I’m taking, high school was fairly recent history.) This was all relating to our assigned reading, primarily a text by Penelope Eckert about an ethnographic study she’d done in an American high school. The Eckert text (the same one that had a sentence that made me laugh out loud) discusses the terms Jocks and Burnouts, terms used by the teenagers in the Detroit area suburban high school she studied.

    So the kids (yes, I’m freakin’ old) in the class were all relating the terms used in their schools. “We had jocks and greasers” or “we had preppies and townies”. Terms like “skaters” and “band kids” were bandied about. To be honest, I don’t remember all of what they said. I was too busy feeling old and having flashbacks to various movies that make reference to clique structure and terminology. Which is basically every American high school movie ever made.

    But lets go over some examples, with the terminology:

    1. The Breakfast Club (1985)
      This movie featured 5 students of differing categories: Jock, Princess, Criminal, Basket Case and Brain.
    2. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
      This quote about sums it up:

      Grace: Oh, he’s very popular Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads – they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.

    3. Heathers (1989)
      This movie has the exclusivity (and cruelty) of the popular clique taken to the extreme, with the 4 members (3 of whom are named Heather) called “The Heathers”.
    4. Clueless (1995)
      I don’t remember what terms this movie used explicitly, but I found this reference to the clique structure:

      On paper, Clueless would sound like just about any other high school comedy. It’s got the popular girls and the jocks, the dreamboats and the bitches, the stoners and the slackers.

    5. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
      One character gives a tour to another, a new kid at the high school, and explains the who’s-who of cliques:

      Over there you’ve got your basic beautiful people. Now listen. Unless they talk to you first, don’t bother.

      This movie went for somewhat exaggerated cliques, with Audio-video Geeks, Coffee People, White Rastas, Urban Cowboys and Future MBAs.

    That’s all I got for now. I’ll have to do more research into this issue at some point. (Translation: I’ll watch some high school movies.) I am on the lookout for new references on this subject matter. If anyone has any clique terminology to add, whether based on your own ethnographic studies, knowledge of the literature, or familiarity with bitchin’ high school movies, please let me know.