Light and Momentary

The End

Thirty days, thirty posts. And now, friends, I will give you the gift of silence -- at least for a day or two. Thanks for reading!

'Tis the Season

The Advent wreath is on the dining room table with its candles slightly askew; the breviaries are all stacked up with their ribbons in the right spots. The Lego Advent calendar will be here Tuesday, just in time to start the countdown. (I picked the pink one this year, which may cause some raised eyebrows and laments about the decline of Western civilization. (As the crotchety twig is bent, man.))

It's also time for another Advent ritual: it's the Christmas knitting season. This year I am aiming low, friends-- I will not be spending Christmas Eve knitting like fury. I will not be weaving in ends on any gifts as their recipients pull into the driveway. But I am making my dad a pair of thrummed slippers. Did I tell you about these last year?

Thrums are little bits of combed unspun fleece, soft and squishy and highly feltable. They make a delicious lining for these slippers. I made four pairs of them last winter, and I was pretty sick of the pattern by the fourth pair. But it's a new liturgical year, and I'm taking another crack at the slippers. Don't they look cozy?

The pattern is Ysolda's Cadeautje, if you'd like to knit up a pair of your own. I'm going to try to get up to the cuff tonight. Christmas is coming quickly, after all.

Your questions answered, sort of

Three of the comments on my November 1 post about potential NaBloPoMo topics had to do with education. Swimmermom asked about picking colleges. My answer is not very illuminating: the Venn diagram of "colleges he got into" and "colleges we could (just barely) afford" contained exactly one school. Jody asked me to write about how much high school stinks, which makes for a short post (Jamie says: yes, it does; hang in there, Jody). And Rosemary asked about homeschooling.

I homeschooled for four years, motivated by my firstborn's tricky combination of adamantine will and superconducting brain. I was, frankly, kind of a nut. Last week I was flipping through an old file folder in search of his vaccine records and came across this record of a week in the middle of his kindergarten year:

"Finished Great Expectations!" enthused 2003 Jamie. I think if I had a piece of advice for my 2003 self, it would be to chill out. I was facing some pretty fierce grandparent opposition to homeschooling (from one grandparent in particular, who had a regrettable tendency to make stuff up in support of dubious assertions), and I felt the need to be a one-woman demonstration of the power of homeschooling. I would help them steward their gifts! I would enrich their environment! I would share the wondrous world with them! I would occasionally get really crabby and stressed out because I was trying to make a kindergartner and his third-grade brother memorize all 1085 words of The Raven! (Oh, wait, the crabby/stressed out bit wasn't actually part of the plan.)

Maybe the most important thing I have learned about kids and education is that I don't need to be quite so wound up about it. Kids are wired to learn: they're going to pick up things I don't even expect them to. Good luck with your decisions, Rosemary -- probably Bearing or Melanie B. would have more current advice about third-grade options. But I can tell you that it will probably work out fine, whichever way you decide to go.

Percentages

Percentage of the leggings I have finished: 100. They were a little long for Stella, so she thought perhaps she'd wear them on her head.

Percentage of the NaBloPoMo posts I have finished: 90. Well, technically it's only 86.667, since this post is not yet complete. Close enough, I'd argue. How about another wacky picture of those wacky leggings?

 Percentage of the grading I have finished: 79.167. ALAS. I think I need another funny picture here, so that I do not weep.

In which I am flexible

If you have been reading this blog for any length of time you will have gathered that I'm a little rigid about Thanksgiving. I've cooked an Indian feast for Easter and I love to see what new thing I can flambé for Christmas dinner, but there is One True Thanksgiving Meal, and I will not depart from the Path. My husband suggested that perhaps there might be a little white bread in the stuffing this year (cornbread stuffing FTW, baby), and I snorted, "That's how you'll know when the pod people have taken over, dear, when there's white bread in your stuffing."

I think the reason I got a late start this year was that one of my boys asked if I would please please pretty please use one of the decorative copper molds to make a molded cranberry sauce. I was willing to prepare an alternative to the One True Cranberry Sauce because I'm flexible and gracious like that, but I kept tripping over the decision. I needed to do something new, right at the beginning, even though I never do anything new for Thanksgiving. I always start with the cranberry sauce, see: I boil up the cranberries with apple cider and a pinch of cloves and another of salt, and then at the end I add the merest drop of maple syrup. Cranberry sauce is meant to be astringent, in my view. It should make you pucker. So I squinched up my face at the Joy of Cooking recipe, which called for 2 cups of sugar. "That," I told my 13yo, "is more sweetener than I have used in total across all of the batches of cranberry sauce I have made in your whole existence."

I went with it, because I thought the syrup might be important for stability. Joe liked the way it looked, but he and everybody else said they preferred the old cranberry sauce. Candor compels me to tell you that this might be Stockholm syndrome induced by all those years of wince-worthy cranberry sauce, cranberry sauce to put hair on your chest. It's kind of cool, though, that cranberries have so much pectin (or something?) that they can stand up tall like that -- no gelatin, just natural cranberry uprightness.

As you might imagine, I had a bunch of stuff to do today. I made myself a List. To my amusement, someone edited it.
Are you familiar with Schichttorte? It's that 20-layer German cake that everybody eats on the fourth Thursday in...oh, wait. No. It's exactly the sort of thing you'd want to whip up if you hadn't done any of your Thanksgiving prep in advance...and you were a raving lunatic in possession of a time machine and six hands.

We made do with pies instead.

 It was a lovely day, filled with board games and good conversation and plenty of yummy food. I hope that you had a great day too, and that somebody else washed the dishes for you.

What's cooking?

I should have parceled my Thanksgiving tasks for this week a bit more explicitly. My Gmail inbox is empty (empty! wheeee!) and my Christmas tasks are all completed, but I am nowhere on Thanksgiving dinner. Nowhere.

What's on the menu at your house? Are you feeling behind too?

And a few more things

Because that list wasn't long enough:

• Be very kind and patient with the kid who is puking
• Do not catastrophize about how this is probably going to take you out too so you won't be able to cook Thanksgiving dinner or finish the grading or or or
• Go to bed early -- it could be a long night

Alllll The Things

I'm not teaching this week, which makes me feel that I ought to Get Stuff Done Like A Boss.

There's Christmas stuff that needs doing:

• order cards plus I went to the PO and bought stamps
• figure out niece/nephew/goddaughter gifts
• and husband gifts, because his birthday is also sneaking up on me
• and take REALISTIC STOCK of the Christmas knitting situation, remembering that frantic late-December knitting is an invitation to repetitive strain injuries and not to a peaceful Christmas three gifts. that's it. end of discussion, self.

(This is a fun picture of the boys, isn't it? It's from the same batch as the Christmas card picture.)

There's personal stuff that needs doing:

• OH THE GMAIL inbox zero, baby, at least for the next ten minutes
• and I'd love to repair some knitting: fix the socks, fix a sweater, add hooks/eyes to my new green cardigan
• and I'd also love to finish those rassafrassin' leggings and the alpaca hat
• I've been putting off a blood draw since September because it has to be done fasting
• and I've had "replace sunglasses" on my list since...oh, man, since August
• do you know when I last worked out? neither do I. I'm having trouble even stating this as a goal. --Monday workout! 30 mins, 9.07 miles on an exercise bike; Thursday workout, 2.74 mile run/walk while the turkey got up to temperature; Sunday workout, 3.5 mile run
• in my wild time-dilating fantasies of Thanksgiving break I am getting pictures into albums but...that's probably crazytalk

There's family stuff awaiting my attention:

• haircuts
• jeans/underwear purchases
• end-of-year giving
• and what is even in that stack of papers on the desk?
• furnace cleaning/inspection scheduled
• scheduling sump pump maintenance 
• dentist appointments x 3 and make that other appointment and call Geico
• also oil changes
• and Eagle Court of Honor planning: date, venue, invitations
• and we should rake the leaves if the snow melts -- leaf-raking is never really done, but I'm calling it close enough

There's always work stuff that needs doing:

• give feedback on 24 22 21 16 14 7 5 papers
• post slides and readings for next week, plus 2 grad assignments and 1 undergrad assignment
• work on that interesting peer review
• get R&R comments to co-authors TODAY
• submit conference expenses (oh, yeah, and update professional organization memberships to submit as well) whoa, that was a pain
  
• work on poster for January symposium
• and in an ideal world I'd re-fit those models and send off a new draft to my co-author after weeks months of procrastinating

I might need a fortifying nap first, though.

PS I published this and then realized I had completely forgotten about a big one: Thanksgiving dinner. Whoops!

Nevermore

I finished those dragon mittens. They're blocking now, which should smooth out the wonky bits.

Never doing that again.

Next up: a brainless hat in nice chunky baby alpaca.

Links I like looking at

Look at this nifty map that shows how the wind is blowing across the US! I like watching it, even if it keeps telling me that my wind is blowing down from the NE and not up from the SW. I'm pretty sure I could run out to my north-facing porch after my shower and not get frostbite. Wait. This was going to be a quick and easy linky post and suddenly somehow I am writing about flashing the neighbors.

 

This video, spotted in Eve Tushnet's Twitter feed, makes me smile. When Elwood and I were first married, we used to rent Fred Astaire movies with some regularity to watch on our VCR. That is kind of a weird hobby, I know, though not as weird as standing on the front porch wet and naked. 

I don't pay much attention to fashion (though I do usually manage to get something on before I exit the house, especially if it's snowing), but this dress caught my eye. The idea of knitting a dress with fingering weight yarn is pretty much preposterous, especially with an estimated yarn cost of ~$180 for my size, but wouldn't it be gorgeous in those greeny gold shades of Loft?

Plagiarism and the future

I don't really say the word "plagiarism" with my students these days; I find that the label obscures the issue. In their minds plagiarism equates to really wicked transgressions like kicking puppies, and no one wants to be labeled a puppy-kicker. Even if, you know, the puppy just happened to wander past as you were practicing some of your best Zumba moves and WHOOPS suddenly it's an inadvertent exercise in puppy ballistics. I call it something else when I address it, which I do frequently.

In the 80s when I was in junior high and high school, it took a perverse act of will to plagiarize directly. You had to copy your material word for word out of the Encyclopedia Britannica, a hassle in itself. One reason why plagiarism is so widespread is that it's so very easy these days: Google sends you skipping out across the web, where CTRL-C CTRL-V captures an astonishing quantity of information on any subject you'd care to name, and Bob's your uncle. Topic researched! 

I suspect we're also seeing more plagiarism because we're relying more on underpaid adjunct faculty. The most painful, time-sucking aspect of my job? Plagiarism. I find that plagiarized writing is generally conspicuous, but tracking down its source and extent is v-e-r-y s-l-o-w -- we don't have software like Turnitin and the administration doesn't plan to change that. I love almost all of my job. I do not love grading, but I know that providing students with feedback is important. Dealing with plagiarism, though, I despise. I'd rather have a root canal and a colposcopy at the same time. (Full disclosure: have never had either and am not a patient patient. Perhaps a smidgin of exaggeration there.) If I were still being paid adjunct wages it would be sobering to think about the cost per hour of dealing with plagiarism vs. just giving the student the benefit of the doubt.

(I just tried to picture myself sliding on past one of those sudden dramatic voice shifts that tells me there's been some CTRL-C CTRL-V action and had a total failure of imagination. I'm like the phosphorescent-muzzled Hound of the Baskervilles, only I'm tracking down the spots where the student Half-Assed-Her-Skills.) (I am trying and failing to make that pun work better. Who's got a cleaner Baskervilles pun for me?)

It's not just about higher education, of course; primary and secondary schools that are required to emphasize standardized testing are necessarily schools that de-emphasize writing. There are only so many hours in a day. And the work of nailing your own words to the frame of someone else's ideas requires practice and informed feedback and rewriting, not just finger-wagging and unstructured "peer review" tasks.

Still another factor is grade inflation. I could, technically, have failed a lot of students for plagiarism. I could have given a lot of zeroes. But it's hard to explain to people who have been out of college for a while just how much the culture has changed. Students are not accustomed to getting Fs. If I start handing out Fs every time I see some CTRL-C CTRL-V footprints, the students are not going to say, "Don't you appreciate how Dr. Gladly upholds high standards?" What they're going to do instead is flip their lids. GPAs driven by grade inflation set the expectations for our program, which is why I ran my new sterner policy for final projects past my chair and the clinic director before I announced it in class. I don't want to create administrative hassles for them if student GPAs fall because of those final projects. And also? I announced it in class after my students had completed their course evals for the semester. Cowardice? prudence? -- you tell me.

I used to get really wrathful about plagiarism, but I went to a helpful workshop in the spring. Plagiarism is not so much a symptom of the Decline Of Western Civilization And Kids Needing To Get Off My Lawn Already; it's a behavior often seen in students who don't yet understand what they're writing about. Students are generally on board with the idea that they shouldn't use someone else's exact words, but they'll often change a word or two and call it good. [E.g., "students are typically in agreement with the concept that they shouldn't use someone else's precise words, but they'll often modify a phrase and call it satisfactory."]  This is called "patchwriting," and it reflects preliminary understanding. Part of the hassle is figuring out where that line falls and how to grade students who veer too near it. Part of the task is teaching students that the goal is not just to cross the assignment off the to-do list; the goal is to learn the material.

I am curious about what this will mean for academics ten years from now. I think the situation is likely to get worse rather than better. Does it become acceptable at some point? Some of my students think it already is.

Once I told my students that encountering plagiarism is like being handed a smoothie that didn't spend enough time in the blender. You take a big swig and UGH-- there's a slug-like hunk of half-frozen banana sitting on your tongue. You didn't want a slug salad; you wanted a smoothie, with everything all blended together. I told them that I didn't want to spot anyone else's words or ideas or essay structure sitting on my desk, waving its horns at me in loathsome slug-like fashion. I wanted them to blend it all up together into something new, made to their own recipe.

But I'm teaching some students who need a better blender.

Declaring bankruptcy

I'm not declaring actual bankruptcy. I'm not declaring any kind of bankruptcy, actually, but I'm considering email bankruptcy. What if I set up an auto-reply at work that said "Dr. Gladly thought about her email inbox and decided she just.couldn't.even" and an auto-reply at Gmail that said "Jamie is SO DONE with stupid school district messages and stupid sub requests for church ministries and stupid irrelevant Scout announcements that she is unplugging for a while. Perhaps your message is a very nice message. Maybe you could send it again in 2017"?

Except that's too long, because all the people who would read it are probably also up to HERE with the email. 

[she ranted on the internet]

[while gesticulating at the people who subscribe to this blog by email]

[link for that is in the right sidebar, if you're interested]

I was going to write a nice happy post about how stoked I am to be involved with RCIA this year, but then I spent most of my available time dealing with some of the 42 emails that had accumulated in my work inbox since Tuesday afternoon-- 42 not including the easily deleted announcement-y kinds of things. We will not even discuss the state of my personal inbox.

I think I need an email Plan. Who's got one for me? 

From the sublime to the ridiculous

***Please, if you're a pray-er, before you read this goofy post say a prayer for my friend Liz. Her baby is in the hospital with a mysteriously enlarged heart.***

Tonight we were sitting at the dinner table talking boisterously about the Trojan War. Even Stella was into it, thanks to Marcia Williams. The kids wanted to know: whose fault was it? What if Peleus hadn't married Thetis? What if Eris had managed her penchant for strife a little better? How much agency did Helen really have? I sat there and soaked it in, feeling grateful for my book-loving family. I thought, "I probably shouldn't blog about this. It would sound awfully pretentious."

BUT THEN, friends, then I was returned to earth with a thunderous thump. The topic slid somehow to the secret-secret room. 

What, you may ask, is the secret-secret room? I will tell you. Ten years ago when we had this house inspected, the inspector opened up a doorway into the uninsulated room over the porch. We knew that there was storage space up there, but the previous owners had screwed down the door at all four corners. We expected it to be like a crawl space, full of spiderwebs and squirrel poop. It's actually a reasonable place for kids to play. It's where our vast Lego collection lives. You can see it in the first picture in this post.

What you can't see in that picture is the secret-secret room, a little tucked-away space that's even more low-ceilinged and poorly lit. And did I mention the uninsulated part? Somehow Joe got it into his head that he was going to move out of his perfectly pleasant room, the one with big windows and a view of our lovely leafy backyard tree, and into the secret-secret room. "I can fit a dresser in there!" he insisted. "And a mattress too!" 

Which is true, as long as they come from the Barbie Dream House. (Oh, man, I just googled Dream House vs. Dreamhouse without thinking. Now my browser is going to be full of pink plastic architecture until JANUARY, isn't it? Or even SUMMER?)

The three youngest kids ran upstairs with a tape measure. All of them were seized by secret-secret room fever. "Mom," Stella implored, "may I have the big boxes from there? I need a table in my room." "Sweetheart," I told her, "you cannot fill your room with giant cardboard boxes. We can talk about finding a table for you." Joe was the nuttiest: he really believes it would be awesome to sleep in there. And I guess if you buy into cryotherapy + the hygiene hypothesis, he might be right.

I was trying to knit one of those everlasting dragon mittens while also trying to persuade my children to let sleeping dust-dogs lie. (These are not just any sleeping dust-dogs, either. Think dust-deerhounds.) Finally, I gave up. "Je voudrais annoncer: j'ai oublié comment on parle anglais." Joe, undaunted, launched into halting French. "Je voudrais dormir..." I waved my arms and demanded Swedish instead. 

He vaulted to the computer. "Okay, Google," he said eagerly. "Tell me how to say 'I want to sleep in a box' in Swedish."

So it's great that they know who King Priam was. It would also be great if they were clear on the concept of furniture. Or insulation.

Let's talk about books

Earlier this fall I read The Physician. It was one of those books that I plunged way down into, one of those books where I had to make myself come up for air. Maybe there were some inaccuracies, maybe it was a little weird to be so invested in a story of medieval medical practice, but I loved it. 

It's the first in a trilogy, and I dove right into the second book. As it progressed, I liked it less and less, and then still less. But I had really loved the first one, so I read the third one. OH MY WORD did I dislike it. It made me wonder what I had failed to observe in the first one, because how could it not be similarly flawed? (Does that logic make sense to anyone but me? It makes sense to me.)

I haven't really wanted to read fiction since then -- too disgruntled, I guess. Maybe I need a really good book to pull me out of my disgruntlement. What should it be?

Old before his time

The boy who turned 16 at the end of October is a newly licensed driver. Remember those posts I wrote about teaching kids to drive? I kept meaning to share an insight that occurred to me near the end of his preparation: the first 10 hours with the kid behind the wheel will be 80%  of the work. There's plenty of stuff to teach after that, but most of the time your heart will be comfortably down in your thorax and not fibrillating in your pharynx.

Tonight he was reflecting on his first solo trips in the car. "I'm surprised by the extent of my inner old man tendencies," he said. "I was coming home from my friend's house, thinking how strange it was that no one could tell me what to do, and I thought to myself, 'I am going to drive EXACTLY the speed limit and NO ONE can stop me.' And then tonight I was driving home from karate and there was no good music on the radio. I thought to myself, 'I guess I'd better listen to NPR.'"

With the rest of my evening I am going to work on a dragon mitten for my 10yo. This pattern is more recognizably dragon-ly than the dragon mittens I improvised back when my brand new driver was 11, but I am wistfully certain that the speed with which the recipient races toward adulthood will be just the same.

Home

I spent last night in Chicago with my college roommate, and part of the day with family I haven't seen in a while. I'm back in Gladlyville now, and I have a boatload of catching up to do. Ergo: a short post, even though I no longer have to peck it out on my antediluvian iPod. It's the halfway point for NaBloPoMo.

Conference blogging

One presentation down, two to go. I was a little surprised a couple of weeks ago when I realized that all three presentations describe different aspects of the intersection between my two credentials: one today about the impact on kids, one yesterday about the implications for students in this discipline, one this afternoon about my research into caregiver experiences. I'm pleased to be talking about those different angles. Up at 5:something again, but the bright side is that I can walk over to the stunning cathedral for Mass. Back to the Midwest tonight!

Faux Pas

Oh you guys you guys you guys. I went to dinner tonight with the Ravelry folks and it was very pleasant except for a painful social misstep at the outset. Aaaaaaack. We met at Fluevog. (Go google them if you are unfamiliar with the name. I'll wait.) One of the women picked up a shoe that struck me as utterly improbable. Like, I can't even describe them in a plausible way. She said, "What would you wear with this?" And I, thinking we were on the same page about these nutty shoes, said, "Clown pants and a rainbow wig?" We were not on the same page about those impossible shoes. I was so embarrassed. Please tell me a faux pas story in the comments so I know it's not just me. Please.

iPod Blogging, continued

Hi, you guys, there are all kinds of things I could tell you about my day. I jolted awake ridiculously early, and lay awake trying to remember the middle Brady boy's name. (Peter, right?) I gave up and got up and walked out into the early morning sunshine. I was really startled to see a group of young people sitting on the sidewalk, clearly gearing up for a wake-and-bake. Then when I passed the Cozy Cannabis Cafe I remembered: I'm not in Kansas any more. I would love to tell you all about my day, but I have (a) little patience with thumb-typing and (b) a really pitiful Internet connection that might very well refresh the page while I'm trying to save the post. More tomorrow...

iPod Haiku

Wifi on the train / Bare fields, pale November skies / Cranky kids nearby