Archive for April, 2007
Boris says I’m an educational extremist in some aspects. I think it’s more accurate to say that I agree with several uncommon philosophies that fall to the edges of typical ideological spectrums on the topic, but it doesn’t mean I think they’re unilaterally better (the yardsticks you measure by determine the winners as much as the things being measured themselves). However, I do believe unschooling is a good way of looking at education; since it forces the student to treat life itself as their school.
My sentiments on unschooling are similar to my sentiments on improvisation. (I started doing improv comedy in high school.) I believe improvisation is effective because life is improvised. We aren’t usually given scripts at the dinner table, at our board meetings - not printed ones, anyway. Being aware of creating your own script in performances and how what we say and do influences the flow of conversations on stage makes you more conscious of the unwritten social scripts you’re handed and gives you more control over what to do with them.
Just as improvisation teaches you that you are responsible for shaping your presence and performance throughout your daily life, unschooling teaches you that you are responsible for shaping your learning. It is perhaps unfair for me to say this, since although I consider myself an autodidact, I have always been “schooled” in the conventional sense as well. Unschooling is true life-long learning because you don’t try to artificially separate learning from life. You learn exactly what you need to learn in order to get the things you want to do done - just in time learning. Not everyone needs to know calculus. Not everyone needs to know how to run lighting for a Broadway musical. You learn what you need.
Note that I believe people should be exposed to and aware of opportunities for learning as much as possible - I should certainly know there’s something called “algebra,” what it is and how it might help me, and how I might learn it if I so desired. But I should also know that there are things called accounting, and gymnastics, and auto mechanics, how they might help me, and how I might learn them. Being exposed to and aware of something and having it available for you to choose is very different than being forced to learn it.
If you worry that for the first few months folks would “slack off,” you’re not alone; the unschooling literature I’ve read almost always discusses this point at length. The consensus from the unlearning side seems to be that after an initial adjustment period of up to a few months, the pace of learning kicks up to an even faster rate than before (as measured by standard curricular metrics). I’ve not yet found refutations of this from sources speaking against unschooling - if anyone has seen them, I’d love to read them.
We also need to revise our definition of “slacking,” or more accurately our definition of what constitutes a valid activity or pursuit. First, burnout needs time to wear off. Adjusting from a rote world to an unstructured one takes time (I’m reminded of transition programs for ex-prisoners who have just been released from jail). This is time well-spent; it’s the reason we take vacations, time off for mourning a spouse’s death, sabbaticals, paternity leave; humans need time to restructure their thinking and settle into a new role.
Second, people are smarter than our behavioristic educational system has trained us to think. We’re not dumb animals who will never do anything if there’s no carrot attached. People naturally have drives and interests of their own; if allowed the freedom, they will find them. If one of those interests is playing video games, well - hey, that’s something! You can learn art, computer science, psychology, writing, physics, and many other things from getting interested in video games. You can become fascinated with cooking chemistry after making fudge one afternoon or slide into history after talking with a war veteran over lunch in the park. And you’d be free to chase that interest down as far as you wanted; there would be no dioramas of Jane Eyre due the next day standing as a discouragement for learning about your interests. You become passionate about everything you learn, so you learn how to learn. In the absence of an enforced intellectual currency system (this paper is worth 100 points, your quiz was worth a B), you learn how to assess and create value in your own life and in the lives of others.
Ironically, I believe that a lack of structure in an educational system teaches people better than anything else how to appreciate structure through creating their own. You appreciate most what you have to bring into being yourself, and tend to make sure you get the most out of what you create. Through making their own structures, students learn how to appreciate the reasons behind deadlines, regular meetings, and even the inefficiencies of bureaucracies. Hierarchical structures become things composed of rational thinking people that one can deal with, not illogical idiocy from on-high. As part of unschooling, students may choose to enroll in a formal course, later on even a program of study. But they do it in pursuit of a goal of their own and know they retain full power and responsibility for their own learning; they’re not in a course because they’re “supposed” to be.
This is the same reason I’m advocating less structure in Olin’s curriculum, incidentally. I believe we need structure. I believe we need to learn how to create those structures ourselves, how to design our own education. Yes, it’s less “efficient” than the optimized mass-production-factory approach. But education isn’t about efficiency as measured in the common sense - or indeed, in any measurable sense at all. (Think about it: it is logically impossible to specify an evaluatory metric for “innovation.”) We need to take advantage of this gift more fully.
I’m still learning about unschooling and different paradigms for education, so if you know of good resources (from any perspective at all) or want to talk and think about this, holler. I love thinking about these kinds of things with people.
Friday, April 20th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
I want closed captioned glasses, gosh darn it. I feel like a broken record for saying this over and over again, but there’s so much in the world you can’t have access to if you’re disabled. My nemesis is audio. But the vision-impaired, the mobility-challenged, the - it’s not that we’re less capable people, but we are in a way handicapped because we can’t access some portion of the world most people take for granted. We may get a lot of support and encouragement and help, but the world is fundamentally not designed for us, and that is what makes the term “disabled” instead of “differently-abled” apply.
It’s for purely selfish reasons that I’m saying this, I’ll admit. Making complex technological aids to benefit a small fraction of people in the world isn’t efficient in the least. But it makes a world of difference to that small fraction, let me tell you. Of the videos on Google, I’ve watched many of the ones with subtitles not because they’re the best, but because I can understand them. When MetaOlin watched videos for our discussion assignments, I wasn’t able to participate because I didn’t know what they were saying - I read books on the same topic instead as an alternative, but it wasn’t the same. I love that all the rooms at Olin have flashing fire alarms, because in high school I was restricted to living in one of two dorm rooms because the rest didn’t have alarms with lights, so while my friends upgraded to new halls and cool rooms, my roommate and I were stuck.
I was so happy when DVDs came out and when I discovered movie transcripts online - so thrilled with closed-captioning that when I was a kid and our street got its first captioned television I’d stand in my neighbor’s back-yard watching their TV through the porch window just to see words on the bottom of the screen; I didn’t care what the show was. It could be CNN talking about tax laws, which is one of the most boring things in the world if you’re ten years old. Whatever. People on TV were talking. I could understand them. That was enough.
It’s like having a driving hunger for information that’s locked away from you and doesn’t have to be, a pang in your stomach you don’t even notice because you’ve lived with it so long and don’t ever expect to be fed in that way. You can’t imagine it unless you’ve experienced something similar.
Imagine living in Germany and not being able to understand German, but one day waking up and realizing that - you still can’t understand German, but all the radio announcers are suddenly speaking English! It’s like a world opening up, and you’ll spend the entire day just listening hungrily to different radio stations, your entire day is spent rejoicing that you can understand radio shows. Before this, maybe you could ask a bilingual friend what the radio show was about, and feel guilty taking their time to translate things. You could hire a language interpreter or page through a dictionary and make yourself awkwardly conspicuous. If you were really lucky you could get a script of the radio play, park your car on the side of the road (making yourself an hour later than your friends who could keep driving through the show), and flip through the booklet as the actors talked, but those were few and far between and as good as it got. And now you can listen to the radio whenever you want. You don’t have to make any special arrangements or put anyone through any more trouble. Any radio show you want. Any time.
It’s a tremendously powerful feeling.
So why am I writing this? I’m writing this because I know most of the people reading this blog are hackers, engineers, creators in some way. The people reading this post are going to be the ones that build the world we live in tomorrow and the technologies we use to interface with them. And when you design these things, and you think of what features to put in them, please give a thought to accessibility. Please go out and make sure wheelchairs can navigate the blocks of the city you’re designing, that color-blind people can read the websites you’re making, that we don’t need five perfectly articulating fingers to man the controls of your device. Provide transcripts and subtitles if you can; make plaintext content easy for screen readers to pick up on - you don’t have to do everything, I know we can’t always do something, but anything you can do helps.
Even if it’s only going to help one tenth of one percent of all the people who use it. You never know who’s in that tiny group of people. I can ask you to design for me or for people like me, but there are millions of others out there in the world. They might be your friend or neighbor, your uncle or classmate. Someday you might be one of them.
When you design things, think about whose worlds you can open up with what you’re making.
Friday, April 20th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
April hasn’t been such a great month.
Week 1: Grandfather has heart attack.
Week 2: Grandfather’s funeral. My first car accident.
Week 3: Grandmother’s brother passes away.
Week 4: LOOK, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.
Since we’re a very tight-knit family, the ripples of these things happening spread far and hit hard. Please, people, no more of this stuff until graduation, okay?
On a lighter note, mental frameworks are possibly our most powerful tools. How wonderful it is to have convenient ways of understanding things! (How uncomfortable to not be able to fit into the frameworks you hold!) How easy it is to slip into categories! How dangerous!
Sometimes mental frameworks that are just slightly off are more dangerous than ones that are completely out of whack. At least the second type tends to get noticed and fixed.
Thursday, April 19th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
This is the only coherent sentence in this post; you have been warned.
I’m spending the next 18 days walking through checkboxes towards a carrot on a stick because I need to graduate. On a very raw, fundamental level, this bothers me immensely. On the other hand, I’m walking towards the carrot now. I feel guilty about this at the same time as I know it’s the right - or at least the “right” - thing to do.
Actually, I’m walking towards the carrot because Gill says I need to graduate, and I believe that my advisor’s counsel is probably much wiser than my youthful frustration is making it out to be at the moment. Right now I’m too mad (at myself, mostly) to be rational about much. Intellectually, I know he’s absolutely right and that this would be the stupidest time in the world to stop trying. But in that flaming pit in the center of my chest, there’s a voice that’s been repressed for 20 years and wants to say “screw diplomas; school should be about learning, not ticking off points on a nice big chart.” But that’s using radical ideologies as a convenient excuse for practical slacking, and that’d just be dumb of me.
I think my idealism switch exploded and kept - is keeping - me from getting things done properly. It exploded in part because a lot of crappy recent events have piled right behind each other (my grandfather’s heart attack, losing 3 days of work to a really depressing funeral, my car getting wrecked and having to walk everywhere until it’s fixed), because I rode my life too close to the edge of the limits of what I could handle and wasn’t able to cope with the unexpected crashes, because my coping mechanisms for life are outdated and need upgrading, because of a lot of things.
I’m still operating in part on my strategy for the last 1.5 decades, which can roughly be described as “learn everything fast enough ahead of actually arriving at the class that it’s all easy anyway, and last-minute your deliverables creatively enough that they do well.” Unlike what seems to be the usual trajectory for Olin students, I didn’t crash and discover my limitations during my first year. Nope. I’m 7 semesters late for that, and there are no contingencies for seniors discovering that well crap, it’s not easy any more. At least I’m finding my limitations in college instead of while… I’m doing open-heart surgery or something that actually counts.
But this technically “counts.” Diploma diploma diploma. I know why I “need” one, but why should I need one? I know I need to sell out and buy into the systems I want to change so that I can change them more effectively from the inside, and I know that’s a fact of how human society works that I probably can’t ever change (you never know) but it doesn’t mean I have to like it (and I don’t; I really don’t).
The perfect is the enemy of the good. “It doesn’t matter if you do it well as long as you get it done.” This eats at me. I want to take pride in everything I do. I want to release finished results that I deem worthy of calling mine. I don’t need to stop taking so much pride in my work, but I need to take on less work so I can pursue the work I do to the level where I am able to take pride in it. I’ve been cutting meetings and tasks and work and turning down offers for everything like a churning rotary trimmer whacking pretty flowers down left and right.
At some point in my life, I should probably work as a field applications engineer or some other form of highly educated tech support. In this hypothetical scenario, I would be the best goddamn tech support ever, because I would be so obsessed with helping customers that all the responses would just be way over and beyond. And I would get fewer tickets done than my peers and consequently less pay and promotions goodness, but ridiculously good reviws from the few folks I did get to help out. And I’d be less effective than I could be, and screw myself over completely because I want to help people too much.
Because helping other people is a lot easier than focusing on your own damn problems, isn’t it?
Bedtime. Then wake up and work more. Good donkey.
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
This post was inspired by a discussion with Woodie Flowers in which he compared the manpower (small closed group or solo author) and expenditures (small, but higher than warranted) put into producing an average textbook and the collaborative manpower (huge!) and expenditures (whoa!) put into producing a feature film.
What if textbooks looked like this? Not just as “supplementary materials” or “outside exercises,” but imagine showing this (without narration, but with really great music as in this clip on Youtube.
What if bio class looked like this:
- Before the first day of class, have students read handouts - short handouts, almost like field guides - on different components, phenomena, and apparatus in the cells that appears in the video - but don’t tell them that - and don’t expect them to read them very well, don’t give them any quizzes on the material, just let them read it (and some will read it blindly and robotically, and some will complain, and some will frantically attempt to memorize it, but whatever.)
- On the first day of class, introduce yourself (5 seconds), remind everyone that they had read something prior to coming to class, hit the lights, and without further explanation, start the movie (with music, no narration).
- Hopefully by this point most of the students will be going “WHOA! I think that was my part but what was that and how does this work and what are the spiral things poking off the yellow blobs and what was that?”
- Break students into groups according to the reading they did (so that each reading has a representative in each group). Have them go through the video and produce an explanation - or narration - of the clip, as best they can.
- Then have these small groups pair off, with each group in a pair talking through their narration or explanation of the movie to the other group. When that’s done, bring the class together, fielding quick questions or discussions for a few minutes if there are any pressing outstanding debates.
- Next, hit the lights and watch the long movie with the narration by the original movie creators, asking the class to note how they explain the phenomena - not that this is a correct interpretation, but that it is a variant of one. Get a little meta afterwards. Ask them about the effectiveness of the movie, the accuracy (and biases) of the “official” narration; encourage them to write to the creators of the movie with comments, thanks, and suggestions.
You can go on from there. The intent is for students to always have more questions than answers, and to be sufficiently driven by those questions to find their own answers, and to recognize that there is no “absolute” way to search correctly for an answer, and often not an “absolute” answer at all. (The bio textbooks I’ve seen are written with the material portrayed as gospel where the fact of the matter is that they’re theories in development, just like any other field, and this is our best guess as to what’s going on at the moment.) This is how you develop fluency as a scientist, the ability to move within a field and converse with your fellow practitioners.
Olin BioEs: is this the kind of stuff Joanne is into with regards to teaching biology?
Monday, April 16th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
I’m trying to stop myself from turning into an radical; one-sided rants, no matter how much passion they are delivered with, don’t do much towards promoting understanding between different sides. I’m trying - often with great difficulty - to seek out, understand, and appreciate perspectives disagreeing with my personal beliefs without making it a token “here, I’ve heard them out” act, a secret opportunity to convert people to “my side,” or a wishy-washy they’re-all-right-in-their-own-way fence-sitting that saves me from having to consider the issue any further or take a stance regarding it.
Other people think differently than I do. This does not mean their perspectives are misguided, irrational, misinformed, or necessarily “less” in any way, or that all choices are equal and therefore it does not matter which perspective you happen to have. (There I go implying the prevalence of numeracy in my world view again by implying that all things can have a greater-than, equal-to, or less-than relationship).
I’m trying to gain the ability to step out of the orthogonal, comparative, and numerical world view of engineering and the hard sciences, which has become so ingrained in my way of life and thinking that it’s difficult for me to notice it. I’m trying to do this by stepping into the perspectives of other disciplines first; the social sciences, the arts, various facets of nonacademia. Hopefully eventually the ability to step “out of” a discipline’s viewpoints will not require me to step into the premade viewpoint of another one; I want to build and understand my own way of thinking and understanding the world wherein I am conscious of what I am accepting as fact, what I am questioning, what I am proving to myself. I don’t need to build my thought structure from scratch, but I need to understand what I’ve got.
The above paragraph is a good example of how you can never really escape the space that surrounds you. The notion that an individual can have her own viewpoint is cultural; I am a person, not just a member of a group. The notion that ways of thinking are “built,” or that there are such things as “fact,” and that things can (or should) be “questioned” or “proved” - as I speak of avoiding bias and assumptions, I expose my own. (Even the notion of bias itself is a bias.) The statement that I am seeking to understand thing, and the implication that understanding gives me some level of control, and that this is a positive result, is a sort of lens. The refusal of blind acceptance is in part a rejection of attempts to understand that point of view.
These kinds of questions are important because when we strive for a goal, we must recognize that this goal is one of many possible goals we could be striving for, one of thousands of places we could be standing. If I’m to work towards my variant of educational reform, or for a certain usage of my language, or a spread of certain media, or the tenets of a certain religion, I need to understand that the reason I’m working towards it is because I think it is best, and that this does not necessarily make it the best one. Cinderella’s sisters all thought their foot would be the best fit for the slipper. But unlike the fairy tale situation, we have no absolute “slipper” metric, no absolute judge of what is “best” or “good,” unless we make or believe in such a metric or Creator of metrics ourselves.
It does not mean, either, that no such metrics or Creators exist, or that they do, or that we can or can not prove or disprove their existence. We believe in what we cannot prove, but the notion of proof - and of belief, for that matter - are themselves cultural constructs (at least that is how they are defined within the culture that I am speaking from at present).
The meta-level of this post is jumping through the roof.
To make things a little more concrete, here are some notes I took from Clotaire Rapaille’s book The Culture Code which I’ll briefly describe as “the cultural ethnography of purchasing perceptions of individuals from various countries, written for the layperson.” The subtitle declares it to be “an ingenious way to understand why people around the world live and buy as they do.” In the chapters I took these notes from, Rapaille is describing his perceptions of the “codes” of American culture (he’s originally French but moved to America).
Americans associate themselves with adolescence and impulsiveness, health with movement, home with returning to a circle of belonging, jobs with self-identity and money as proof and gauge of their self-made efforts, quality with functionality (rather than polish or bells and whistles - the 80/20 point) and perfection with stasis and subsequently death.
Great service is more important to Americans than great quality. People have stronger bonds to companies they receive good service for broken products from than to companies whose products never break down at all.
This matches up with what I’ve noticed in schools; students who interact frequently with the teacher in a positive manner (even if they’re struggling but trying very hard and making some progress) tend to be more highly regarded by that teacher than a student who is perfect but unobtrusive. But I digress.
What Rapaille describes are cultural constructs, viewpoints, unconscious stories we’ve been given by Mother Culture (to use the syntax of Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael - which I admire the craftsmanship of but don’t always agree with, by the way). These are examples of the kinds of things I am trying to become aware of so that I may make a choice regarding my conduct within, around, and using them.
Finally, because I am becoming far too verbose in an attempt to precisely articulate that which I mean to comment on (and there are many subtleties that I feel are important for me to set out now as I build up the basis of my attempts - I’m well aware that I’m falling into the conventions of mathematics and Western philosophy as I do so -), I’ll let someone else speak for me in part, and describe the cultural code and story which, in bothering me for much of the past 13 years, has eventually led me to write this post (if your culture believes in both such causality and in free will). The paradox of the preservation of change.
…when human beings find they enjoy or appreciate some aspect of life, they “institutionalize” it and protect it from further change. What was once a rational response to social need becomes a ritual, performed without regard to its origins. This leads to a puzzling contradiction when a society learns that it can benefit from technological change: scientific discovery becomes a kind of ritual. In this view, scientific research laboratories are the institutionalization of change; they are the facilities set up so that “tomorrow can be better than today.” –Richard Burke (paraphrased)
Monday, April 16th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Hurrah, vague rantings with many indeterminate objects and ambiguous sentence subjects!
The only way to guarantee something gets done is to take the initiative to make it happen yourself.
Note that this isn’t “the only way to get something done” or saying that “you have to do it yourself.”
I’m tempted to say that you’re entitled to complain about something only if you’ve done all you can to both understand the various sides of the entire situation and to fix it, but that’s unfair. I can’t declare the metric I use for myself to apply to the rest of the world. (Why do I not complain much, except about my own actions? Now you know.)
My actions need to become much more binary (because they tend to backslide into a grayscale gradient). If you see an action that needs to be taken, either do something about it and commit to it fully, or get out of the way and leave it behind. I mean really leave it behind. Don’t just put it in your “to-do-later” list. Don’t even have a to-do-later list. Be here. Now. Act here. Now.
As long as I’m spitting out disjointed fragments of thought: I’m sorry if I’ve been giving off radio silence (via email or in person, mostly) and been oddly distant lately (on occasion; it’s not a 100% of the time thing) and given no explanation. It’s partially out of necessity; there’s a lot of stuff going on in my general life-the-universe-and-everything domain right now (workdeath included), and I’ve withdrawn somewhat so as not to impose crap on other people. I’ll be fully back as soon as possible, and I’ll try to do better at making it clear to people when I’m unable to fully interact with them at some particular point in time (even if the intent of the interaction is to make me feel better - I really appreciate it, and it means a lot, but I can’t always respond to it at that moment). I’m really bad at saying no, so what you usually end up with is half-assed interactivity. I’m trying to say no when it needs to be said.
Sunday, April 15th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Ok, now I’m really curious. Neither Chris Morse nor Nick Tatar knew the answer to this one, and when Chris and I searched the internet later, we couldn’t find much either.
What are the historical origins of the modern ABCD/GPA grading system used in American universities today?
It’s got to come from somewhere, right? But we can’t find where it started. Note that we’re focusing here on the ABCDF (5-point numerical, with letters standing in for number grades) system, and there are many other possible systems used elsewhere in the world, but usually they are just different numeric scales.
Here’s what we’ve found so far.
- Wikipedia says it comes from a man named William Farish, and references a book by Neil Postman.
- In Neil Postman’s Technopolgy: The surrender of culture to technology (1992), he includes the following sentence: “In point of fact, the first instance of grading students’
papers occurred at Cambridge University in 1792 at the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish.” That’s it. He goes on to talk about how nobody knows who Farish is, really.
- The preceding sentence has a footnote that we… can’t access because we don’t have the book. Need to get our hands on this book so we can see where Postman gets his information from (or at least we’re hoping that’s what the footnote shows).
Postman goes on to say a few more provocative things (emphasis mine):
And yet his [Farish's] idea that a quantitative value should be assigned to human thoughts was a major step toward constructing a mathematical concept of reality. If a number can be given to the quality of a thought, then a number can be given to the qualities of mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, intelligence, even sanity itself… Our psychologists, sociologists, and educators find it quite impossible to do their work without numbers. They believe that without numbers they cannot acquire or express authentic knowledge.
I shall not argue here that this is a stupid or dangerous idea, only that it is peculiar. What is even more peculiar is that so many of us do not find the idea peculiar… If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did.
In every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by his famous aphorism “The medium is the message.” This is what Marx meant when he said, “Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with nature” and creates the “conditions of intercourse” by which we relate to each other. It is what Wittgenstein meant when, in referring to our most fundamental technology, he said that language is not merely a vehicle of thought but also the driver. And it is what Thamus wished the inventor Theuth to see.
This is, in short, an ancient and persistent piece of wisdom, perhaps most simply expressed in the old adage that, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Without being too literal, we may extend the truism: To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number.
Friday, April 13th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
All metrics are broken. Metrics measure specific aspects, aspects pointed out by various models. If there is no perfect model, there is also no perfect metric. Any claim to fairness espoused by a metric is a shadow of an unattainable Platonic ideal, just as any representations of a geometric point must fall short of the ideal zero-dimensional object.
My heart often gets in the way of my head. After MetaOlin class today (Chris Morse, on pedagogy with a subtopic of grading - Gill Pratt came in partway and joined the discussion) I was… enraged. Furious. Things were not fair. Never could be. I had - have - unfair advantages and was propagating injustices by the positions I took, the places I lived, the people I studied with. This falls far short of the trembling, seething frustration I was experiencing. It was a rage I couldn’t justify or name, even when Chandra tried to talk me down from it afterwards.
I exploded out on a Greening Olin bike and splattered mud all over my clothes and came back from Wellesley still seething a little, but in a simmer instead of an explosive rout. I’m typing this in an attempt to quell the rest of it down so that the voice of my head speaks louder than that of my heart, so that I can be productive and do things that will make a difference in the areas I care about.
Chandra just came in and asked me how the bike ride was. I said it was good and that I was still coming down from it. She apologized for Meta breaking me so much (it really has). I said no, that’s okay, it’s my own damn fault, and besides real learning only takes place when breaks (usually a mental model, but that often correlates to equipment, experiment, personal, emotional, or some other form of failure). So years from now I’ll look back on these as a transformative experience. Or something. “Yes, but I’m sorry you have to experience pain now,” she said.
Life is pain, your highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. –The Princess Bride
Just need to duct-tape my brain together well enough to get my paper done. Trouble with these “transformative experiences” is that they’re rather inconvenient; you can’t choose when or where they’ll appear, and often you don’t have space for them in your life… so you smush them when they come.
Lunchtime.
Friday, April 13th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
From a discussion in my qualitative research methods class today:
It doesn’t matter what you’re doing as long as you know you’re doing it.
There is no “best” or “recommended” methodology for doing things, no position you’re supposed to take that’s “better” than another. Choose your own way to do your work, because ultimately whatever works for you is best. Also, reflection and self-knowledge is vital to good work in the social sciences, because no research project is “untouched by human hands.” We’re all filters. I need to remember that.
I want to write more about this, but I need to take a nap so my brain unlocks enough for me to do AHS capstone. I have this terrible mental block (getting back to campus made me so depressed tonight because I knew I had capstone hanging over my head), burning eyes and a headache, and I’m definitely not coming from a place of abundance right now; I’m stressed, I’m grouchy, and I’m starting to snap at people.
I want to immerse myself in ethnography for a while. It’s such a deliciously complex world with all these twists and tunnels and blossomings of ideas, especially when you understand technology and can write software to simulate social networks and facilitate data sorting. There are so many things I would like to go to graduate school in; sociology, product design, education, and computer science (or electrical engineering, but it’s undeniable that I’m drifting towards the software side of things). Maybe I can get a master’s and three PhD’s? Yeah.
Naptime.
Thursday, April 12th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »