Geeky Mom

We’re three weeks into the semester and I’m not sure I feel we’re totally in the swing of things. My students may find this, so I will paint this in broad strokes. In fact, I hope they do find this. It would mean they’re doing what I expect.

Last semester, when I taught this course, we really focused on blogging. We didn’t have a heavy-duty reading assignment until 2-3 weeks into the course. This semester, I decided to do both–have the blog and do some reading and leave it up to the students as to whether they blogged about the reading or something else related. The thing is, most students are averaging about 1 post a week, though I’ve assigned 4 posts (two over each long weekend). I know this blogging thing works. The hard part is motivating the students to get going on it. Most are motivated (from my recent study results) by receiving comments either from other students or from other bloggers. I had given them the assignment to find something to comment on and to comment and leave our url so that we might get some traffic to our site. I even showed them how to do this in class on Thursday.

I did my own assignment over the weekend and indeed, we did get a link and a comment. So I modeled what I wanted, and I guess I’ll discuss what I did in class. I’m also planning to do a brainstormin exercise a la jo(e). I feel like I need to mix it up in class a little. The students were kind of dragging on Thursday. Partly, I think the weather was a factor and it was beginning to sink in that college is going to be a lot of work and I think we’re kind of tired of the book. We should have gone through that faster.

The thing that’s hard is that my philosophy about teaching is that the students should take responsibility for their learning. Creating the environment for that is much harder than lecturing, just giving paper assignments and then grading them. I come to class with more questions than answers and I think some students find that unnerving. And if the students don’t wrestle with my questions, there’s a lot of dead air and I find that unnerving.

The kind of teacher I want to be is one who inspires in her students the desire to learn more. I’ve always had a few students like that. Whether I’ve had anything to do with it or not, I don’t know. But I recognize that I’m not always that inspiring. But I want to be, and so I keep working at it.

technorati tags:teaching-carnival, teaching, learning, writing, blogging

Okay, I can’t stay away. You people make me think too much. I was just glancing at blogs while I waited for my Death-to-the-Diet Brownies (recipe tomorrow) to cook, when I ran into Phantom’s post (Phantom Scribbler: Diversity)). I had read Jody’s post which she references and even looked up the demographics of our current school–so very white, like 94%. I had occasion to return to the issue of diversity while out driving today. I had gone over to our local nursery to get some flowers but decided I didn’t like their selection, so I punched Home Depot into our navigation system, thinking while I was at it, I’d check out some shelving. I knew there was one nearer to us than the one we usually went to up north, near a mall and Target and many other stores.  So off I went to a town I hadn’t ever been to. On the way back, the navigation system (whom we call Muffy–long story) took me through a town we had considered living in.  The town is lovely, one of the older suburbs of Philadelpha with large Victorian houses and a quaint downtown.  The house we were looking at was an old central hall colonial. It was huge and had a large yard.  But there were bars on the windows and bars on the windows of all the other nearby houses. The high school was practially in our back yard and all the students were outside and they were almost all African American. In fact, despite the town itself being 75% white, the schools are 75% African American. And we balked. We looked up the school information which was worrisome, much lower scores, for example that other schools in the area and then there were the bars.

Driving through the area today, it seemed much quainter then. I drove right through the downtown area and saw people of all different races walking around, enjoying the day.  There was an arts festival going on and there were banners hanging and more people out than usual, I suspect. And I had a moment of regret. I’m always lamenting the lack of diversity around here and yet, I had run away from it here, too scared to take the risk. Living there would have put us on a train line. It certainly would have changed a lot of things about our life.

I am not comfortable with the way I reacted to the possibility of living in a diverse neighborhood, but as this shows, it doesn’t take much to move us into segregated areas.  Go ahead, play with the model. Just a 30% preference to be with similar people creates a pretty segregated situation. At a 60% preference, you end up with almost 100% segregation. 

And, as Zuska was writing the other day about the lack of women in science, it takes a real push from the majority for change to occur. If, as apparently has happened in this particular town, all the white people go to private schools, there’s no way to achieve any kind of diversity in the public schools. I don’t have the answer. I don’t know why I, as an individual, have not been more active in pursuing a more diverse environment for my kids. We’re all talk and no action over here, or as my college roommate used to say, all hat and no cattle.

technorati tags:diversity, segregation, public schools

Yes, this topic won, barely beating out Faculty, Teaching and Technology, which I promise to write about tomorrow, since I could probably write about that topic all day every day. I have some cogent thoughts about it and some good input in the comments to my last post on the topic. (Geeky Mom: Technology burnout)

I decided not to say I hated Katie Couric, because I don’t. I don’t know her at all and there are a couple of things I admire about her. But overall, I’m disappointed. But it’s also a very sticky wicket. I’ve been waiting since about 1986 for a female anchor, so it’s about time for that. And I hate that any criticism that’s launched at her gets twisted into something gendered. Go to YouTube and search for Katie Couric. It’s not pretty. For example, she did this contest for her sign off line and the Jimmy Kimmel show spliced together her real discussion of that with a flashing of her breasts. I ask you, would they have had Matt Lauer flash his audience as a signoff. I don’t think so.

The fact that she had a signoff line contest is part of what bugs me about her. I know she wants to seem friendly and “indclude the audience” but have some guts and just pick something already. You’ve had three months. I mean really. Add to that that she said after one of the stories I saw, “I just love that story.” She just doesn’t seem serious enough. It feels like she’s turned the news into a parlor game.

Part of me thinks, well the news format was determined by some white guys over the last 50 years. Maybe the news should change its format, but I don’t think the direction she chose is the right way to go. It just doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like journalism in the same way that Fox News doesn’t feel like journalism.

It’s a shame, really, that our first female anchor has to be someone who, in my opinion, is not a real journalist and about whom the country has some gender-based hangups that they probably couldn’t get past even if she were a real journalist. There are some good female journalists they could have chosen–Martha Raddatz, Cokie Roberts, Diane Sawyer–to name a few. CBS’s own Lara Logan is an excellent journalist though perhaps it’s too early in her career to move to anchor.

I think, though, that most of my feelings about Katie are a bit amorphous. I’m not always sure why she makes me cringe. She seems phony in some way or trying too hard or something. I think agree with the following sentiment:

I wish I knew exactly why it was that I loathe Katie Couric so greatly. She has never personally attacked me or my family. She’s never done anything directly to offend me or anyone that I care about. She’s been nothing but an on air personality which, incidentally, has all but driven me mad for the last 15 years of my life with her plastic appearance and ridiculous hair styles. . . . There are few people in this world that have ever been able to have the effect on me that Katie has been able to have. Very few have been able to literally make me cringe at the sound of their name, and even fewer have made me want to scream at the sound of their voice.

Yahoo! 360° – Something to think about…. – Ding Dong ~ September 13, 2006

I long for real news again. Since ABCs gone down the path to 9/11 and CBS has become some kind of variety show, I’m watching NBC–I guess.

technorati tags:katie couric, CBS, tv news, media

Specifically, what I didn’t realize was how much my confidence in my ability to do research had been blown to smithereens and scattered to the four winds.

New Kid on the Hallway: Minor epiphany

I have no confidence when it comes to research. New Kid, thankfully, has regained hers, but me, not so much. And yet, I’m plugging away at my dissertation anyway, as if I had all the confidence in the world.  I mean, really, what else am I going to do?  But, I think my fear of research keeps me from even considering a faculty position. Because what if they ask me to do *real* research? Then what? They’ll know that I’m just talking out my butt.

I think there are lots of reasons for my fear. First, and foremost is that I’m now in a field, a very loose field, that I wasn’t formally trained in. My dissertation is in Composition and Rhetoric, but all my research training in literature. Even in literature, I found research somewhat overwhelming. What if I missed something? What if I’m just saying everything that everyone else has said for 100 years?  There’s just so much to read. 

I have kept up pretty well with comp/rhet research and of course, have read lots more since starting my dissertation. But I again often find myself feeling overwhelmed. I especially feel overwhelmed when I feel like I have to recap the entire research background on topic x before I can even begin to speak for myself. I hate that.  I find myself thinking sometimes as I’m writing, is there research on this particular point? Did I look?

And worse, there’s the quantitative part of my research, which I have *never* done, never had a class in.  I’ve read plenty of articles based on quantitative research, but never been trained in how to do it. So, I had to read a bunch of books about it instead, and thankfully, I had a colleage from the social sciences help me determine what kind of statistical analysis would be useful. Otherwise, I would have been screwed. I also didn’t know how to write that stuff up, so I struggled. I read models of papers or book chapters that had similar studies. I Googled. And then I forged ahead anyway.

Basically, I’m always worried that I’m doing something wrong, like the kid who isn’t sure what the rules are and goes ahead and plays around anyway, but with the nagging fear that she will be punished any minute and not be sure what for. It’s not a good feeling.

And then there’s the informality of my voice.  My writing is only slightly more formal in my dissertation than it is here. I don’t use big fancy words. I feel pretty confident about this most of the time, but then I’ll see a “dialogic” thrown in somewhere in something I’m reading and I think, man I don’t use that word. Am I gonna get dinged for that?

And then, there’s the practical bent of what I’m doing. I’m not a theory person. Although I’m defining a new approach in my dissertation, which is based on a theoretical foundation, my main intent is practical. I want people who read my dissertation to get some new ideas for teaching and to appreciate that they’re based on sound pedagogical principles, both from the realm of writing and from the realm of education more broadly.

So I feel like I’m always doing something wrong and that my research isn’t real because it’s practical and not theoretical and I present it too informally. And while I’d like to call myself a maverick for breaking down some kind of research hierarchy, the truth is, I just feel like a fraud.

I ignore this fear most of the time because if I didn’t, I’d never do anything, much less write a dissertation. But one day, I’m going to face this thing down. I just don’t know how right now.

technorati tags:education, research, teaching, composition

Work

The work week was kind of crazy. I worked on Monday since it was the first day of classes. And as you could probably tell from the previous post, I was a little stressed out.  On Wednesday, I spent about 2/3 of the day answering Blackboard questions. As I indicated below, part of my frustration with answering these questions was that most of them (there were a few exceptions) were easily answered via the FAQ.  I still managed to get a fair amount of other stuff done, but it felt really squeezed. I know that things will settle down next week and I can step back a little more and assess what really needs to be done.

On the plus side of work, I finally received my new computer. I chose to replace my desktop with a MacBook Pro.  I am so happy about my choice. One of the best things is that I installed Parallels so that I can virtually run Windows and Linux on my mac.  It’s really useful to me to be able to test things on different platforms and to explore applications.

Dissertation

The last few weeks have been pretty productive in terms of writing.  I wrote about 30 pages over the last two weeks, writing only about an hour a day. I didn’t write every day. The pattern that’s fallen out so far has been 3 days a week during the work week and both weekend days. I’m seriously considering filing an extension for May.  I have one more chapter to write and although my goal is to finish by the end of September, I just don’t think there’s enough time for my committee to read it, for me to make revisions and to get it all in on time for the December 7th deadline. I’ve been running about 2 weeks behind my imposed deadlines, so that pushes the final chapter to mid October. If I didn’t have to file an official extension, I wouldn’t think twice about this, but because I have forms to fill out, I’m a little reluctant to take this route.  Generally, I’m happy with my progress.

Teaching

The first two days of class have gone pretty well.  I had really bonded with my last class and I’m sure this class will be similar.  We’re blogging again, along with several other classes. As last year, it takes a while for the students to get a hang of the blogging thing. Different from last year is our focus on a particular topic–higher education. 

The kids and home

We’re all adjusting to being back in a routine and an earlier one at that. The first day, of course, everyone popped out of bed the minute the alarm went off.  Now we’re all dragging a little.  We’re actually getting up a full hour and a half earlier than we did last year.  Geeky Boy seems to be adjusting well to middle school. Mr. Geeky meets him at home at 3:00 and then he does his homework. He seems more organized so far than last year.  We’ll see how long that lasts.

Geeky Girl also changed schools although her new school is the school where her afterschool program was located, so it wasn’t totally new. She’s a very different being than Geeky Boy–kind of an organization freak.  But she doesn’t always read the directions very thoroughly or interprets things however she wants.  When we suggest she might be wrong about her homework assignment, she gets upset.  So that’s challenging.

Mr. Geeky’s on leave which I think is good for us right now. He has work to do, of course, but his pace is slower than the rest of us.  It’s especially good for me with the dissertation thing going on. It’s good to have one person in the family who isn’t going full steam ahead. 

I’m planning a fair amount of downtime this weekend, starting with taking today off to make up for Monday. We’ll be going a bit slower this weekend since we’re not gearing up for school, which will also be good.

technorati tags:reflection, education, parenting