La Dudarina

La Dudarina has been at turns challenging and at turns the funnest person on earth. The night weaning is slowly getting better, so that around 3/3:30am she does ask to nurse, but after I tell her no she settles pretty quickly. Sometimes I ask if she would like me to hold her hand while she cries and she says yes. Then she cries for a minute or so and goes back to sleep. At 6am I do nurse her when she asks and then we start the day. This is FAR better than what we had before, which was asking several times a night and then waiting it out around 3am until I gave up (usually 5:30-6am). We just had me spend several more nights in the other bed and have also largely cut out a nursing before bed (she often still nurses once in the evening, but before reading books and lying down).

As for being the funnest, well, those of you who have had a kid at this age know what I'm talking about. She is starting to do more creative/imaginative play so we've been cooking a lot. She also likes to play games with her dolls and stuffed animals where she has them act out things she is trying to figure out, like walking, forward rolls, and hitting her head on the bed's headboard (she does this sometimes at night when being dramatic and flinging herself off the pillow). It is so cool to see her mind work.

So, since it's been a while since I've posted pics of the Spunky Monkey, I've uploaded a bunch of recent ones, including her Halloween outfit (even though she only went next door for one piece of candy). Knock yourselves out.

Active teaching and learning

So I've been thinking about teaching a bit, even though I'm at the part of the semester where every student email grates on my nerves and making myself prep for lecture requires self-cajoling and several mini-bags of M&Ms (oh Halloween, how you have ruined me). I've been thinking about what it means to be human, what it means to teach others, and why we need to change the way we do things.

Passive learning is a feature of many animal species. They observe what others do, then try to copy it, with varying levels of success. A mother chimpanzee does not intentionally teach her juvenile how to crack a nut or fish for termites, she just does it and if the juvenile decides to watch, she learns (apologies to any folks out there who study chimps and think I am massively oversimplifying).

Humans are more active learners. Sure, lots of our learning is passive, from observing over time, maybe from trying to repeat what we observe. But in humans we also see a lot of active learning, of the teacher putting thought into how to convey an idea or skill and engaging with the student. Active learning leads to better transmission of ideas and skills, which is one of the reasons we can build a car and a chimpanzee cannot.

So why do we continue to use so much passive learning in our teaching? I'm not saying we should throw it out, and budget issues make it a necessity in large, underfunded classes. Sometimes basic information transmission requires passive learning. But when active learning is so much more effective and satisfying, why don't we do it?

I'll tell you one reason I don't do it as much as I should -- aside from the issue of teaching Giant Gen Ed in the fall semester -- preparing for passive learning always seems like less work. Academics have been trained to talk. I can put a powerpoint together pretty easily on just about any topic that I need to teach. The more time I put in, the fewer words tend to be on the Powerpoint, but I can give a reasonable talk on most topics in humanology. Preparing active learning exercises or interludes for a course is daunting and appears time-consuming at the outset.

On the other hand, academics haven't been trained in active teaching -- or at least, that's how it seems. On the one hand, the particular strategies that work in our classrooms aren't taught, and that is endlessly frustrating to me because we would be more efficient teachers if we knew the tricks of the trade, which would allow us to spend more time on research. On the other hand, we wrote proposals, did dissertation research, and wrote dissertations. Research and writing are active learning. So we know it works, we even have some sense how to do it in certain situations.

So, again, why aren't we doing it?

I have been forcing myself to use active learning more, even in Giant Gen Ed. And I can tell you something that may make you (and me) more likely to use it more: you can do a shitty job and it still works better than decent passive teaching. You can do a shitty job and students will still greatly appreciate the effort. And the more times you do a shitty job with active teaching and learning, the better you will get, until you are doing an okay job, a semi-decent job, and then one day you will do something in class and say to yourself Damn! I didn't know I was that good! Not that that has happened to me yet, but I am projecting from the progress I am making.

I'll give you one last reason we need to increase the amount of active teaching we are doing. Students can now get their content from the internet, from an eBook, from their friends on Facebook. We are no longer the controllers of content. But if we want students to understand the massive amount of information available to them, we need to be the ones to control the framework, to teach them the theory or jargon to some extent, but to apply critical thinking skills to the articles and blog posts and Facebook statuses and Tweets that they read. And no matter how much you talk about critical thinking skills to your students, it should be obvious that they will not learn these skills without being confronted with having to try them out. I mean, it's how you learned how to do it.

A few basic strategies that are working for me are below. They are heavy on the things you can do in large groups because that's what I teach in the fall, because that's the kind of format where people tend to do the least active teaching, and because I think that's where we have the least information on how to do this kind of teaching. Share more ideas for all sorts of classes in the comments!

• Doing polls (you can do this with an iClicker or show of hands) where you think the students will answer one way based on intuition/cultural conditioning, then show them the contrary evidence, then get them to do quickwrites (1 minute freewrite) reacting to this, then get them to share their reflections
  
• Doing polls applying what you just taught them to a new situation
  
• Quickwrites (1 minute freewrite) asking them a personal question that relates to material you just taught or are about to teach
  
• Peer review of work, so that they learn the review process, revision process, as well as whatever material you wanted them to learn in the original piece they wrote
  
• Online forums with discussion questions where they have one deadline to write their post, and a second deadline to write substantive follow-up comments to others
  
• Literature reviews/original research projects
  
• Not only coming up with discussion questions for class, but then starting the class off with why they wrote the question and their tentative answer
  
• Group work of all sorts (I bet you have cool, specific projects you could share in the comments)

Well? What am I missing?

Two hours

That's how many hours I got of sleep last night. Ouch.

I couldn't go to bed until 1am because I was writing an exam that I had to get to my TAs by this morning, and then La Dudarina decided 3am was a great time to wake up, sit up in bed, refuse to go back to sleep, and basically just wait until I nursed her. We have been trying to night-wean her, and now she is basically refusing to sleep unless I nurse her. So she's not sleeping because I'm not nursing her (until 6am -- we're not stopping nursing just trying to stop nursing through the night). I think it's because she's old enough to understand and wait it out. We had night weaned in the past, it had gone fine, but then a few illnesses and rough nights later and we were nursing again.

The way we did it last time, and again this time, is that I slept in the guest room for three nights while TD dealt with La Dudarina. It went supereasy last time and this time. Then last time I rejoined the bed after three days and things were great. This time, not so much. Last night was the second night of getting up at 3am and staying up, and the few nights before that were pretty crappy too.

I am out of ideas and nearly out of sanity. I would appreciate any ideas and advice, with the following caveats: we are not stopping co-sleeping yet because we think it would seem like punishment if we did it now, and we are not stopping nursing altogether, just nursing at night. My current plan is to go back to the guest bedroom tonight and try a few more nights like that. Maybe this time she really needs a lot more time to reset her thinking about nighttime before I can be back in there tempting her with my boobs.

My eyes hurt, and I am so glad I can pilfer some of another grant's language in the one I am writing right now, because none of the new stuff I am trying to write now is at all coherent. Coffee and chocolate are not even helping. Urgh.

Pee Wee Herman

We were all listening to NPR this morning. Part of the "Tequila" song featured on Pee Wee's Big Adventure comes on, and I start to dance. "Remember this dance from Pee Wee?" I ask jubilantly.

"No, I wasn't allowed to watch Pee Wee growing up," TD answers.

"Wow. I grew up on Pee Wee."

"I didn't," he says with an air of smugness.

"That's the difference between our two families. See, I'm so much awesomer than you --"

"I LIKE ME BETTER."

End scene.

On Ass-Kickin

I think it has to do with my background in the labor movement. But I have noticed that I am unafraid to share my thinking with large groups of people, when normal academic social mores would predict that I keep my mouth shut.

Example 1. I was recently at a SuperSpecial Spiffy Conference with lots of famous people... and me. I am still wondering why I was invited. I had occasion to hobnob with the famous folks, take good notes, and keep my mouth shut. Instead I talked, I broke up a few fights, I dictated the terms of one of the meetings, and otherwise acted as though I knew what I was talking about. These things were all well received (in a sweet way, where lots of senior folks kept talking about me to each other and then introducing themselves to me over the course of the week), but now I have the sinking feeling that I have to make sure my research matches all my big talk. Yikes.

Example 2. I gave a talk recently in another department, to an audience that recently disparaged my discipline (though I don't think they realized I am in that discipline). So I quickly reframed my whole talk to discuss the historical and cultural context of my discipline and the particular science that I do in order to push back on the jerks who have a problem with my field. Again, seemed to be well-received. Again, now I have the sinking feeling I need to get moving on grants and pubs.

I'm just the Ass-Kickin type, I guess. It certainly makes life fun!

Hangin' in there

My first boyfriend's father was a drunk. He always had the same line when anyone asked him how he was doing. He'd crook his finger as though hanging from a ledge, smile his sloppy smile, and say "hangin' in there!" And then laugh like it was the funniest line anyone had ever heard.

I feel a little like I'm hangin' in there. Though, I'm not really laughing.

I don't have anything in particular to complain about, just an overwhelming amount of work, and possibly some big decisions to make. Do we switch our childcare so we have something more workable than what we have now? To which of the options we now have? When do I take my semester of teaching leave? Do I pass on Giant Gen Ed after a few years or remain a minor celebrity on campus (seriously, I can't do a supermarket run for some milk without a "Hey Professor!")? Do I try to wean La Dudarina when she is two (okay, I already know the answer to that one is no)? Do I leave her in April regardless of whether she has weaned, or take her with me to a conference? Do I lead this new project? Do I follow up on collaboration with Crazy Person Who Has Amazing Field Site?

Two weeks ago the family was sick (it was a marvelous, one-at-a-time pukefest). Last week we were in City That Once Had A Wall for a conference for me. It was the most amazing academic experience of my life so far. I've never been so respected or taken so seriously, I've never built up such close relationships with other colleagues so quickly, I just had a blast talking science all day with a bunch of smart people.

Unfortunately, this week I am struggling to catch back up. I'm still not done answering all my email. I have a major seminar talk to prep for later this week that I haven't even started. I have no idea what I'm going to say.

So how am I? Hangin' in there.

My students cheat

So I had my first-ever case of cheating recently. Two students cheated off each other in an exam in my Giant Gen Ed. They did so rather blatantly, and when I walked closer to them to inspect, they continued cheating. I was so surprised, and, since I'm a typical professor, I'm completely untrained in this, I said nothing to them at the time, but collected their exams and kept track of their ID numbers and names. When I got the exam results back, sure enough they had answered 46 of 50 questions exactly the same way (some right, some wrong).

I went through my university's academic integrity system and sent them form letters. I explained what I witnessed and the exam results, I also made sure to calculate the probability of this being a chance occurrence (a great piece of advice from my chair).

One student immediately confessed and apologized. Minutes later the other student wrote a less contrite, not-totally-confessing email, but also apologizing. I decided to give them both zeros for the exam (I think my TAs might think I was being too easy, but that my chair thinks I was too harsh -- oh well).

Anyway, the story I wanted to relate was the experience I had meeting with each of them. I want to start by explaining it was one male and one female student, that they are of the same ethnic heritage and country, and that for both English is their second language. This complicated things for me (maybe it shouldn't have, but it did). The confessor was near tears and very stressed out and apologetic during the meeting. She said how absolutely overwhelmed she was by the semester, by the material of the class, etc, she discussed how hard she studied but that, in the end, she freaked out and decided to cheat. I asked why she cheated when she knew it was wrong and she couldn't really articulate why. I asked (and perhaps this was wrong) whether English was her second language and how long she had lived in the US. When it turned out she hadn't been here that long I asked if that was hard, and expressed how hard it has been for me to spend time outside the US speaking a different language in the past. We talked about resources on campus to help her with this and I strongly advised her to seek them out.

The second student's conversation was identical in most respects, including his time in the US and how overwhelmed he was. The one difference was, when I expressed sympathy for him, he became emboldened and almost surly, and started to tell me how my class had too much content and it was too hard to follow, and it wasn't fair that we couldn't ask what was on the exam, or that the answer was always "the lecture, readings and quizzes," etc etc. Somehow, my not being a total asshole made him feel like maybe he had a right to cheat or something, like if only I taught the course better he wouldn't have been driven to it.

I thought this was pretty interesting. I have often lamented that I don't look older than I am and that I don't have any gray hairs, because frankly I have to deal with more shit from students for being both young and female. One of my TAs has been in an email battle with a student because this student 1) wants to switch TAs because she's decided her TA (not this TA she is corresponding with) doesn't speak good enough English, 2) is afraid to talk to me and 3) says I am just too inexperienced a prof to be able to handle her problems. Too inexperienced? Really? I'm an expert in my field, I've been a scholar for a decade, I have three more degrees than you from fancy-ass universities and I'm not experienced enough? Fuck you, student. #1 was enough for me to not want to make any effort in your direction, but #s 2 and 3 are ridiculous. (Oh, and I eventually told my TA to stop responding to this student's toxic emails. They weren't worth her time and were enabling obnoxious behavior.)

So yeah. It's been an interesting week with teh students. Maybe at my haircut today I can get some graylights put in. Do they do such a thing?

On my activism

In my second year here I've finally felt comfortable enough juggling family and work life that I could start my organizing again. It feels like riding a bike again after a long hiatus -- except this is a tricked out, cushy, commuter bike and I was previously riding a rusty old dirtbike with wonky handlebars and one wheel. Which is to say, things are easier here. But the arguments are exactly the same. I was rehashing this to TD this afternoon.

Me: So Bastard Colleague from Hell* was teasing me about how I was playing hardball today in an [activism] meeting. It's just that he doesn't know me from my old [activism] days in grad school. I was going easy on her.

TD: I'm sure you were. I mean, were you lighting her house on fire?

Me: No! I wasn't even threatening her family.

*This is BCH's requested pseudonym, from a while back. This is just the first time I've had the chance to use it.

October Scientiae: The Road Not Taken

I seem to have two tendencies that manifest themselves differently depending on the situation: I either rush headlong down a path without a lot of thought towards the consequences, or I spend a lot of time planning out my future and then try to follow that plan well.

In the first case, I tend to do this when I don't feel like I'm getting any help from anyone. Maybe someone could offer me some perspective or information or expertise to guide my thinking, but since they're not, I deliver them a big "screw you" and march off to whatever seems to make sense. To some extent, this is how I did my dissertation research, how I applied for my first post-PhD job, how I got the job I have today. I didn't think through methodology or secure funding in the best way in my research, and now I have a dataset that I need to mine, but it isn't as complete as I'd like. I do regret this a lot.

In the second case, I tend to do this when most comfortable, when there are people around me I feel I can go to for confirmation that I am on the right path. So in navigating my first year here, in writing my first grants here, I had a fairly easy time organizing my thinking and planning my time, simply because I felt I could trust those around me to guide me well.

So what I want to notice here, when it comes to the Road Not Taken in academia, is how much mentorship matters when it comes to the paths one takes, and the regrets (or lack thereof) one has afterwards. Mentors need to be trusted, honest figures, they need to be accessible, and they need to be the kind of person you can talk to when your ideas are only half-baked. Mentors need to be able to set aside their own self-interest from time to time. Mentors have to have at least some social cognition abilities that allow them to read emotions and the state of mind of their mentees.

When I have made mistakes, it was because I didn't think anyone would help me (and the reality was, no one really would at that time). I wasn't looking to have my hand held, or to be told explicitly which path I should take. I was looking for someone with expertise and an open set of ears to hear me out and offer some advice. Without that I was forced to find my own answers.

It's ok for the paths we take to have obstacles. In fact, if they don't we're being too easy on ourselves. However, when there are avoidable obstacles, ones that create no learning opportunities but only cause pain, early scientists need to be able to look at more senior scientists and get help. Some things we need to learn ourselves, and some things need to be taught. Too much of academia is about passive learning, or about finding out things by yourself. We don't teach a skill set to our students or junior colleagues, we just hope they catch up. But it's time to start taking the particular skill sets required to be an academic seriously. I haven't been trained in academic integrity, in publishing, in research methods, in writing, in mentoring, in TA management, in lab management, in service obligations (I may be in the minority in receiving NONE of this training, but most of us can identify significant holes in our training).

My academic life has had a series of "ruinous" moments: alienation from a few faculty because of my activist commitments (which led to fewer pre-PhD publications), no significant funding for my dissertation research, a partially flawed methodology for said research, a very lateral move post-PhD, the audacity to have a child. And yet here I am, exactly where I want to be. So when I look back and ask if I should have taken another path -- performed better research, waited to have a child, taken a different position after the PhD -- my answer is largely no. My only true regret is the quality of my diss data, and at the end of the day I am not sure if I regret the quality of it simply because in hindsight I can see the problems so much more clearly. There are very few people who do what I do. It's entirely possible that what I did then was the best that could be figured out at the time, and now with new projects I am making up for certain methodological deficits.

When I think about my activism, I am only proud of myself, and disappointed in those individuals who could not separate personal views from scholarship. I don't regret a second of what I did there. When I think about La Dudarina, as wistful as I may sometimes be for those days when my time was my own, as much as I know that my productivity is "impaired" by having her, I simply do not want my life to be another way. I don't wish that I had made a different choice, because then I wouldn't have this fun person. Can I just tell you how much I love this person, how she delights me every single day, how she becomes more fun all the time? Just this morning she drew a circle with a dot in the middle and pointed to it, then herself, and then shouted her name. I then asked her to draw other pictures, and she drew a squiggle that she called "Dada" and another one that she called "shoes." She then correctly named the colors of several crayons. AND THEN, for the first time ever, this morning she said "I love you."

Who could ever regret that?

From the email files

1. 3:40pm on the day a major group project (that each group should have been working on over the last four weeks) is due, at midnight:

Dear [Kate's TA],

Would you be able to send me another copy on the information about the [vague thing that shows the student has no idea what is going on], I would very much appreciate it.

Warmly,
Lay Zee Ass

Hi Lay, I don't know to what you are referring. Can you be more specific?

[Kate's TA]

My group is [Group Name], and I wanted to know if you could re send [the assignment].

2. 6:50pm on the evening another midnight assignment is due.

Professor,

I am unsure of what [major theme of class] is because I don't have the book. Can you briefly explain?

Never Allowing Another Late Add Again

Never,

I do not have the time or luxury to answer your questions. This is a 700 student class. The lecture notes are provided on the website, as well as an audio file. Please actually look at the website! You are asking me questions that could be answered if you would bother to look at the material I spent many hours making.

Professor

That's an awful lot of piss and shit

This is almost a week's worth of diapers. When the weather is sunny and it's diaper washing time, we hang them on our clothesline in the backyard. The UV makes them smell much better.

Care and feeding of undergraduate research assistants

So I have these five undergraduates, and would have had more if I had had less of a spine (some might call me rather spineless to have agreed to the five I have now!). Problem is, it is a lot of work to figure out what to do with them. However, I committed to figuring it out this week and I think I largely have.

I don't feel comfortable setting a lot of undergrads loose in my lab right now because it wouldn't be good for my research. However, I have a lot of paperwork, much of which would be a good learning experience for my students right now. I need to write an IRB, which means I need to figure out not only what I am trying to do for this upcoming study, but how to explain it in layman's terms. I need to come up with a ton of questionnaires and protocols. I need to justify everything to the liability-fearing IRB. And my students do need to learn how to do all of these things.

So they are writing the IRB.

I've created two timelines, one for the structure of our lab meetings for the semester, and one that specifically allocates out all of the tasks I could think of that is involved in submitting an IRB for the first time. They have my old version of a similar study to steal from, as well as all of my old materials (protocols etc). We have been spending the last few weeks reading the literature to help us 1) come up with a good research question and set of data we want to gather and 2) learn about the available methods to gather said data. In addition to the weekly lab meeting, I meet with all of the undergrads every other week for twenty minutes each. Most of them came today with all sorts of questions and ideas, and they seem really excited by what they are doing. These are largely self-starter kinds of students so I feel like I can set them loose, give them guidance, and now I don't have to worry about them as much as I was at the start of the semester. Then we will come together to improve and edit the materials, I'll do all the final polishing, and off it will go.

What's great is I would have done all of this in isolation -- the learning of protocols, revision of my other stuff -- and it would have been fine. But I may not have learned quite as much, I wouldn't have put in the same kinds of effort hunting certain publications down, and I wouldn't have had anyone off of whom I could bounce my ideas.

So this has been immensely helpful to me, a good learning experience for my students, and will lead to a better product in the end. I'll check in as this project progresses, but right now this is making me feel good about the role undergrads can have in academic science research. This spring they will get to run the study (given IRB approval and grant moolah) and then at least some this summer will get to analyze the data. So in this case, I had the perfect solution to my many-undergrad issue that will ultimately lead to publications for me.