I really don’t like screwing up. When I notice my screw-ups later, it freaks me out and I think about my mistake for days. Probably not the best use of my time and energy, and I’m working on that part of my personality, but there it is. It bothers me that I was put on the gifted kid reading and writing track all through school, where I was encouraged to read and write beyond what was considered “standard” for my age, but was never taught of the rules of grammar or punctuation past about the fourth-grade level.
I’m still not sure why there has to be a separation between being given the space and time to be creative, and being given the basic tools to do the creative stuff correctly. Maybe it’s that teachers only have so much time to teach students everything, and sometimes it has to be either/or.
What is comes down to is that I, along my “gifted and talented” cohort, will probably spend too much time in our adult lives vacillating between two emotions: feeling super awesome and amazing one moment (whenever we recall our childhood memories of all the adults around us oohing and aaahing about our above-average brains), and then feeling utter lameness and shame (whenever we make horrible grammar and punctuation errors and the so-called average kids, who got to learn the rules, laugh their heads off at our giftedly dumb asses).
It’s entirely possible that I’m the only smarty-pants who ended up slightly neurotic due to my elementary school career. But for anyone else (neurotic or not) who could use a little basic grammar and punctuation knowledge, here’s a list of helpful sites to visit in the privacy of your own home or cubicle. No one will ever have to know that you aren’t as smart as your test scores might show.
Sometimes it’s hard to change your ways so as to avoid evilness. I love books (have I mentioned that before?) and am probably the last human on Earth who would buy a damn Kindle thingy and start reading my “books” on a screen. However (here comes the part where I clear my throat and mumble about how sometimes change is good and it’s possible I was wrong), in light of the unavoidable fact that textbook publishers are vile bastards with severely bankrupt karma, digital textbooks may be the way to go. Cheaper, lighter, easier on the back, healthier for the trees, etc.
Digital textbook company, iChapters, is currently running a series of campaigns highlighting how the lives of students have been changed by technology (good changes, one hopes). Part of their campaign strategy involves a $1,000-for-textbooks sweepstakes, which is good for you if you’re an under-funded college student and would just pee your pants if someone gave you that much money for books.
I read all the fine print. You have to be 18 and live in the U.S. Five students will win, and apparently all you have to do is sign up here. According to the rules, you don’t have to buy anything to win, just sign up by filling out the little entry form. Also, you can sign up once every day during the promotion period (July 15th 2009 through August 29th 2009) and it will count as a valid entry. Good luck, people.
How horrible a mother would I be if I sat my kids down, looked them in their sweet, trusting eyes, and told them that only the most ass-kicking one of them was going to get funding for food, shelter and clothing, and the loser was going to be on their own? I would be deemed an unfit parent because there is just no way to make it acceptable to have people compete for what are supposed to be basic rights.
I’m a big dumb sucker, and have apparently been suffering under the delusion that, much like food, shelter and clothing for offspring, education was one of the most basic rights an American citizen could expect. Aaah, now I hear it, the big giant buzzer going off in my ear, rudely letting me know that I was mistaken. Crap.
Only the winners get the funding. And how will the “winners” be decided? By data. And since there seems to be only one way to collect and analyze that much data (there are a lot of schools in this country), I’m assuming we’re back to the a**loads-of-standardized-testing portion of education reform. Woohoo! I was just missing that GW guy so much, and now it feels like we’ve got him back. I’m so relieved.
The less-cranky optimist (and usually fervent supporter of Obama) in me is hoping for some really excellent fine print that will prove my fears about this education reform plan wrong. Seriously, someone tell me I’m wrong and this plan isn’t evil. Maybe competition will bring out the best in everyone, and every school will get the money it needs.
President Obama is saying that the testing will be different this time, that it will be better. Let’s hope so. I get it that fixing the education system is probably very close to being insurmountable, and I get it that there isn’t enough cash available to hand out to every school that needs funding. But really with the competition and the data? The American Way bites.
If you’ve ever read the About Page on this here blog, you’ll know that somewhere on my extensively planned path to the land of the Perfectly PhD-ed Career, I was derailed (mostly voluntarily) by my own personal efforts to ensure the continuation of the species (Mommyness replaced my dream of Tenured Professorness).
I’ve been a mommy for less time than I spent thinking my future held a stunningly windowed office in an ivory tower. Which is why, although I’m stupidly happy in my kid-laced life (the animal instincts make it biologically impossible not to like your kids), I still have barfy feelings when I think about sitting for the orals I never actually had to take.
If you spend enough time thinking that the years of school will all culminate in your standing before the brainy version of a firing squad, it will be difficult to convince yourself that it’s okay to just let that fear go. As I had been imagining this for myself since I was in about the fifth grade, and didn’t derail until I was about 26, you can see why I’d have a hard time leaving the nausea behind.
If you’ve managed to stick with your goals of being educated to some point nearing ridiculousness (which I fully support, by the way) and you’re nearing the orals portion of your PhD, then I would suggest reading An Orals Survival Kit. It’s up on Tomorrow’s Professor blog, and was written by three UC Berkeley PhD candidates (which means they’ve recently passed their orals and know of what they speak).
It is like standing in front of a firing squad. Your executioners are four professors who are experts in their fields. You writhe before them as they take turns posing questions almost beyond your grasp. The threat hangs constantly over your head: Fail to satisfy them, and your graduate career will end.
That’s how many graduate students imagine their oral exam. But the reality doesn’t have to be that bad.
While it’s true that a Ph.D. oral exam can be the most terrifying hurdle in graduate school, it can also be a positive and rewarding experience. Truly. For many students, the stress associated with preparing for orals is largely because they will experience the exam format for the first, and last, time. Too often, no one explains what to expect or how to prepare. More…
Below is PayScale.com’s shiny chart showing which college majors may lead a college graduate to a decent salary. For the full list, go here.
I tend to peruse these things with my manure-proof haz-mat suit on, just in case. School rankings lists, for example, are rife with opportunities for the less-than-upstanding number crunchers to make one school look better than another. This list, whether or not it’s perfect, is at least devoid of school names, which means no politics were involved with the making of the list. I also like that the engineers are clearly winning. But the fact that Social Work and Elementary Education are at the very bottom of the list is a sad little encapsulation of mankind’s priorities.
The short version of the methodology is that the numbers are based on the full-time salaries of college graduates who earned only a Bachelor’s degree in their particular major. For the full methodology, you can go here.
Aaaaahh…back from vacation. I apologize for the technical difficulties (it sucks when one’s fear that controlling less and relaxing more will surely lead to everything going to hell turns out to be a well-founded fear). But now I’m back and have alerted the technical people and we can move on.
Here’s an informative higher education tidbit I came across: Will Sitch gives anyone interested in a working professional MBA program a thorough break-down of UC Davis’s version. The classrooms are located off-site, thirty minutes east of San Francisco, and because the course schedule is designed for working professionals, it requires in-class time only every other weekend. Mr. Sitch is three quarters in, and seems pretty happy with what the program has to offer.
In the post, Mr. Sitch answers questions about the caliber of the MBA program, professor quality, student quality, how well the schedule works for a working professional like himself, and why he chose UC Davis’s program over Santa Clara’s or UC Berkeley’s programs.
Being a huge fan of higher education and the college campuses that go along with it, I could still see his point regarding why he’s fine with missing out on campus life while earning his third degree:
“…the reality of the part-time MBA program is totally different from a full-time program. Believe me: you wouldn’t benefit at all from having class on campus (assuming the campus was closer). A part-time MBA is so much work! You’re not going to have ANY free time for any extra-curricular activity.
When I did my M.A.Sc. full-time at Carleton University in Ottawa, I really liked being on campus. I lived on campus. I knew all the Profs, chilled with all the other grad and post-doc students, ate at the cafeterias and worked out at the campus gym. I occasionally left campus, but not very much. It worked for me then, but I couldn’t imagine trying to attend a real campus while working.
Listen, when you go to class you’re going to be speeding because a morning meeting ran late. You’re going to get there, do the non-essential reading while you scarf down lunch/dinner, and as soon as class is over you’re going home. Maybe, if you’re one of the cool kids, you’ll get an adult beverage with friends before you speed home. There’s no time to hang out. There’s no time to talk to profs. There’s no time to hit the gym or go to the library or walk in the park.
The Profs at UC Davis WP-MBA come to the campus. They teach. They have an office hour. They go home. They’re all available through email (and some by cellphone), but you’re not going to need them much. Maybe it’ll be different in upper-year courses, but there’s so much instruction provided in course notes, books, textpaks, and course websites that you’ll have everything you need already.”
Saturday July 04th 2009, 12:25 am
Filed under: Uncategorized
My husband and I both were raised in regions where surviving the brutal heat of summer was something to be proud of and, apparently, nostalgic for. We also feel compelled to inflict three-digit heat on our grossly unprepared, rainy weather children.
Seattleites only ever burn themselves on highly caffeinated hot beverages laced with precisely foamed milk; they’ve never run barefoot across their dry lawn and into the heat-shimmered street, waved their swimming-pool soaked dollar at the ice cream truck and then hopped from burning foot to burning foot, waiting for their Sno Cone. Fireplaces and lattes are as hot as Seattle gets. It’s sad, really, and so my spouse and I feel that our Vitamin D deficient offspring need some sweltering sunshine to be soaked into their bones on an annual basis so they won’t grow up to be pale heat weenies.
Which means that I’m on vacation and have re-posted enough previously posted bits to keep everyone occupied. Have a lovely two weeks.
Do smarty-pants professor types feel they need a bigger challenge? Was defending their dissertation not enough? All of those years of undergraduate and graduate work, living somewhere near the poverty line, working and striving for those extra letters after their names? Why do obviously intelligent humans do this to themselves? Because they want to spend their working days in a place of higher learning, with ivy-covered walls and trees that change color in the fall, with a tenured position, teaching hundreds of fresh, shiny little faces, each one eager to learn all that the prof has to teach.
These days, actually landing a tenured position at a college or a university is right up there with the Holy Trinity of Nearly Impossible Occurrences: winning the lottery; playing in the NBA; and being struck by lightning. And do you know what makes landing a sweet teaching gig even harder? Being married to another PhD-havin’ brainiac who would also love to land a tenured position. What are the chances both halves of a PhD couple will actually end up making a living in academia?
The Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University has noticed that women don’t move as quickly or as easily through the gauntlet as their male counterparts do. A major part of this can be attributed to gender issues. But there seems to be another glitch in the Tenured Woman system: a high number of female academics are partnered with other academics, sometimes in their field. Here are the problems that situation can bring about, according to the Clayman Institute:
“Both married and domestic partners in dual-career relationships suffer decreased job mobility and the benefits in terms of opportunities, experience, salary, and working conditions that mobility can bring. This is especially true for women in the sciences, who are more often partnered with other academics. While only 7% of the members of the American Physical Society are women, for example, an astonishing 44% of them are married to other physicists. An additional 25% are married to some other type of scientist. A remarkable 80% of women mathematicians and 33% of women chemists are married to men in their own fields. Such partnerships are at cost to their mobility and advancement given the rarity of dual offers.”
Starting in November 2006 the folks at Stanford’s Clayman Institute began conducting a nationwide survey of 30,000 faculty. The point? A very good one:
“The Institute’s ‘Dual-Career Academic Couples’ study will culminate in policy recommendations aimed at helping universities recruit and retain greater numbers of women in leading faculty and administrative positions. Restructuring university practices will help transform the way universities do business and grow academic cultures where women, too, can flourish.”
I love it when research institutes use their powers for good, not evil. I found some interesting bits about dual-career issues, women in academia, gender issues, and what some folks are doing to try to increase the female population in the upper echelons of academia, especially in the math and science fields.
These three links add up to the motherlode of links on dual academic career couples and women in science. You could spend weeks trying to find the info these lists have.
I am a reader. I was raised by three voracious readers: Mom, Dad, Stepmom. I come from a long line of book addicts. My parents read to my brother and me a LOT. I remember desperately wanting to learn to read and it seemingly taking forever to get to the part in school where the teachers taught us the secret code. The first book I ever read (cobbled together slowly as I added new words to my list) was Puppies Are Like That. I read it on the floor of my bedroom, up past my bedtime, crouched next to the feeble glow of my nightlight.
Finally achieving reading independence was such a good day for me. My parents were not huge fans of television; there was little or no TV watching at either house. Being able to read meant I would not be dying of boredom as I had feared.
This was a legitimate concern, as the most entertaining bits of real estate in my tiny hometown were the library, the high school football field, and the bike-trailed grassy fields behind the middle school where we jumped our bikes and tried to avoid rattlesnakes. There were no video game arcades. When I was in the fourth grade, we did get a (as in singular, one) Pac Man video game. Then we (and by ‘we’ I mean the whole damn town) had two pinball machines and the Pac Man. Score.
Almost equaling my nightlight reading moment was my first solo trip to the one-room cinder block cube that was the town library. I asked the librarian how many books I was allowed to check out at a time. She said, “As many as you can carry,” and I just about pissed myself with happy-shock.
I grabbed about 15 picture books from the kid section before she changed her mind, and as soon as she checked them out for me I ran out the doors to my phat pink Schwinn (flowered banana seat, flowered basket, BMX knobby tires that my Mom had had put on as a nod to my tomboyish nature) and pedaled furiously home. I ran to my room, sat on my floor and read the whole stack, one book after another. Fifteen minutes later, I hopped back on my bike and rode my little way back across town to the library. I shoved the books into the return slot, and checked out a whole new stack.
Seeing that I was not understanding the complex workings of the public library system and worrying that I would collapse from exhaustion, the librarian explained the way most people use the library—sitting around at the tables, reading what they want to on the premises, and then taking everything else home and keeping it for a while. It was thoughtful of her to illustrate the big picture for me. Thus began my lifelong obsession with libraries. Which goes along well with my addiction to the printed and bound word.
I still crave books more than most things. My earthquake preparedness kit has more books than cans of food (in the event of an earthquake the library would be shut down along with the rest of the city, and what would I do then? Am I the only one who thinks of these things?). Along with my jumper cables, my spare tire and some blankets, I have two books in my trunk in case I break down or there’s some kind of roadside reading emergency. I fully admit to being a total spaz.
Given everything in the previous post, it will shock no one to learn that I started to read to my kids when they were in utero. They both have impressive personal libraries, but we supplement their kiddie-lit collections with twice-weekly trips to the library. We frequently discover new authors and check out every book he or she has written. Our most recent find is Jon Scieszka (rhymes with ‘fresca’).
My daughter thinks The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales is hilarious. We are also enamored of Baloney (Henry P.), an alien who’s late for school and has the best excuse ever. I, of course, love Science Verse and Math Curse, and my son thinks the Trucktown book Smash! Crash! is loud and shiny. My daughter and I are starting on the Time Warp Trio series next.
In the midst of our Jon Scieszka streak I was reminded that he was recently appointed by the Librarian of Congress as the first ever National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. I’d heard the interview about it on NPR and was stoked that someone so happy, excited and humorous had been given this responsibility. He sounds very enthusiastic in all of his interviews (see below) and has a list of the stuff he thinks he should ask for as the Ambassador: cape, sash, bejeweled goblet, jetpack, Popemobile, Ambassador underwear, epaulets and a red phone.
Part of why Scieszka is such a vastly entertaining author is that he’s trying to get kids interested in reading. Boys have proven more difficult to convince. To remedy that, Scieszka started Guys Read, a site that promotes the following ideas to get boys to read:
–Letting them choose what they read
–Expanding our definition of “reading” to include:
–nonfiction
–graphic novels, comics, comic strips
–humor
–magazines, newspapers, online text
Anyway, it’s a cool site, Jon Scieszka’s a cool guy, and I think he’s a perfect choice for National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.
