The Laursonian Institute

Yurt is about the only sound my brain makes right now.  Thanks, brain.  Keep on truckin.

Mondays are sort of weird days for me, since I don’t have class, but I’ve got lots of TA stuff to do.  Went to campus as early as I could get away with, though still later than I had planned.  I wanted to get to the gym in the morning and check it out, if not actually work out, but this morning as my alarm was going off at 6 am and I didn’t need to get to campus until 1… so I missed my first sort of engagement, but no matter.  Got to campus with a few hours to spare and did a little library reading.  Sadly, I couldn’t get my favorite desk at the biblioteca but I finally found a suitable one upstairs.  The library is much bigger than I realized, and I really haven’t had an opportunity to check it out fully yet.  I imagine they must have more computer-parts-endowed desks hanging around, but I never saw any today.  Success anyway!

Went to LIN 1 and class went fairly well.  Kids seemed fairly aware and the topic was fairly interesting for them, I think.  Read for a while in between LIN 1 and my next appointment and nearly got all the reading I had intended done.  Had a meeting with my co-TA and Professor Ojeda to talk about the stuff we want to do in sections this week.  We’re actually only showing a video, so we’re not doing much and the meeting was pretty short.  I tagged along with Dionne to her first section so I could see what the materials we had to work with were, and how to operate the VCR and stuff like that.  Stayed through her opening schpeel and snuck out at the beginning of the movie.  I’m feeling pretty confident about the sections at this point, after getting to see the students in other contexts a few times now.  Nothing to worry about!

Came home and finished up my reading, had a lovely dinner with Lewis, and decided to pretty much take the remainder of the night off.  I can feel myself getting pretty sapped this afternoon and since I’ve gotten myself fairly well covered for tomorrow I think I better take the chance while I can!  Silly as it is, not working is as important as working at this point.

September 29th, 2008 | Tags: reading, resting, taing | Category: school | Comments Off

With her faithful steed by her side, the Laurie plows ahead.

Well, there’s no good way to sum up my days these days except to say: I read the hell out of my day.  I woke up, put food in my mouth, read, went grocery shopping, read, had dinner, and finally finished reading!  Yay!  Knocked back my first Bloomfield essay today, which was nice to get off my plate.  I put together a little plan for what essays to read on what days, and I know it probably doesn’t matter much, but that’s how my brain works.  Gotta read long essays on less busy days, short essays in short spurts, etc., etc. So it was a long-essay day.  Got through a good, basic, foundational-type work from 1914 that sort of set out everything I’m supposed to know about the basics of linguistics in fancy-pants philosopher talk.  Except it’s all the stuff we learned all those years in undergrad, so it was more like a little review than a mind-blowing experience.  Still, nice to get the explanations of the basics by guys laying them down, instead of reading one of the modern textbook reduxes like the kids I’m teaching now.  Plus, I learned like 15 new words today, which is pretty impressive!  At any rate, the picture at the right there should serve as a pretty good summary image of my entire life at this point.  Looks cosy, doesn’t it?

Only other notable success today, besides actually having gone grocery shopping, is that I finally threaded my new sewing machine!  The directions they sent me were lacking some pretty crucial information, and Lewis and I both read through and failed to get it working the first night.  Watched a slew of youtube videos — the first constructive use I’ve found for them! — and managed to get my way through.  Momentary major disasters aside, I sewed two things together!  Hurrah!  Maybe tomorrow or the next day I’ll get to repair some of my stuff, which is what I’m really looking forward to.

I had planned to make pumpkin ice cream tonight, but I just didn’t have it in me after all that reading.  It’s crazy how difficult it is to switch modes from this stuff.  Like I’ve mentioned, I’m reading in a manner I’ve never tried before, and it’s both mentally exhausting and really rewarding.  I’ve never lived this cerebrally before, and it’s mind-blowing in its own way.  I feel like sometimes my mind just completely empties when I’m trying to do something like remember how to make a sandwich, and it’s not as if I’m thinking about linguistics… I don’t even know what I’m thinking about.   I’m just failing to do anything at all.  But I don’t mind so much, it’s a bit like being on my own private mental adventure, full of mystery and surprises around every turn!  With that in mind, tomorrow I start my first full week.  Phew.  I feel like I’ve been in school a year already.

September 28th, 2008 | Tags: forgetfulness, reading, sewing | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Guess I’m going to start writing these in the mornings, or perhaps more intermittantly overall.  This grad school stuff keeps me busy!

Yesterday was my first day in LIN 1, the class I TA for.  The way my classes are arranged now, I have all my “real” classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and all my TA classes on MWF.  The class went really well!  It was just about what I expected – bleary eyed freshman all hping they don’t have to buy the reader and don’t have to come to my discussion sections, which are primarily on Fridays.  The good news is, the discussion sections aren’t required, so they won’t show up anyway.  Talked with my Co-TA Dionne after class and got some good pointers from her.  She’s thinking about maybe getting our in-session exercises done this week so we can hand them to the disabilities center to get translated to Braille for our blind student.  Not only is this probably a reasonable idea, it’s also makes my anxiety level really decrease about planning my lessons.  If we do them together, especially with such an experienced TA (she’s taught this course, and TAed for it 6 times already!) I really don’t think I can get in too much trouble.

Spent a little while reading on campus after that, and I must say that so far the main library is very satisfactory!  Read quite a bit of Saussure in there while waiting for Lewis to get out of his Latin class.  I was on so much of a roll with my reading we actually put off meeting until a while later, and I got quite a lot done.  I finished up that Saussure last night, and I feel really triumphant about it!  It was a thick, heavy, reading and I feel like maybe for the first time I really understood and was totally behind what the author was saying.  I think the wiki note taking really does help.  Saussure also is a pretty hilarious graph maker, and I think later I’ll put up some of my favorite Saussurian hilari-graphs.

Also had the Linguistics Grad Student Association (do we have an official title like that?  I’d like to think so) mixer.  Had pizza at Steves, which was bueno!  They were sort of finishing up when we finally got there, since my reading took so long, and we wanted to drop by the bookstore and copy shop before hand to get the materials for our new class.  Sadly the readers were 45 bucks each, and the books 40 a piece, so we knocked back a few hundred bucks in books yesterday I was hoping we were done with already.  Oh well.   Anyway, the pizza party was friendly, and it was nice to get to gossip a little bit about what’s going on with our classes and the department and all that.  And to verify with our compadres that we’re all a little lost and overwhelmed at the moment.  Good times!

Came home, watched the debate, and finished that reading… a very productive night.  Debate wasn’t great, but it was interesting.  Guess that’s maybe what one should hope for on those things.  Today — to Berkeley!  Going to see Nina, Armand, and get my hair cut.  Should be great!

September 27th, 2008 | Tags: classes, debate, graphs, reading, saussure, taing | Category: life, school | Comments Off

First day of class today!   It went really well.  200a sounds like it’s going to be a really vigorous but thorough philosophical journey through early 20th century thought.  I’ve spent all day (and all night…) busting through the first of the first half of the Saussure reading, but it’s going pretty well.  I’m trying out a new reading technique whereby I take notes on a desktop wiki as I go.  I have really high reading comprehension (or so standardized tests always tell me) but this stuff is just too thick and too plentiful to read straight like I did as an undergrad.  Anyway, I definitely feel like I’m getting a lot out of it so far.

Only other thing to note today is that we got a kind of scary sounding email from the professor of the other class I’m signed up for – Theories of Second Language Acquisition – essentially telling us that it’s intended for people who either have a research project in mind or are already working on one, and that it might be best for the rest of us (read: the entire 1st year class, which all signed up) to take it next year.  So I swapped out of that one and now I’m back in the class I was originally so excited to take: Variation in Speech Communities.

Sadly, this all happened after the first meeting of that class, but no matter.  My best non-Lewis Ling buddy is in that class and we’ve agreed to an exchange of notes, and I’ve already gotten to look over the syllabus and handouts from today on the class website.  The syllabus makes the class look really demanding… but I think I’m up for the challenge.  It is, after all, the only other class I’ve got this quarter.  And though 200a is reading-tastic, we only have one assignment for the whole year:  a paper at the end of the term.  I think I can handle the extra work from 260.  Or at least, my fingers are crossed!    One more beneficial thing to note from this class swap:  I now TA exclusively on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and have “real” class exclusively on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  This is good!

September 24th, 2008 | Tags: classes, first day | Category: school | Comments Off

Can’t manage any more than a good bad list tonight.  I’m tired, frustrated, nervous, resigned, excited, aprehensive, defeated, and at the moment a bit taciturn.  Anyway:

The Good

• got the laundry done
• got my sewing machine delivered
• finished chapter one of the LIN 1 reading
• had a nice walk & talk this evening

The Bad

• see above list of tumultuous mood swings
• couldn’t figure out how to thread sewing machine
• something happened to Boo outside today (something peed on his neck? maybe?) and he’s been sad all day
• Lewis is maybe getting the flu
• failed to make dinner, or pumpkin bread, both of which I had big plans for
• spent an unjustifiable amount of time futzing with new email programs trying to get something to check my two addresses non-buggily
• additionally: something in my wordpress is fucking up, so I can’t even post this blog.

Tomorrow = first day of classes.  Happily, I’m not nearly as nervous as I could be about this.  I know most of the 1st years now, and I already know and like the professor.  We’ve been doing orientations all week, so I already know where the building is and all that, and I feel a bit like an “old hand” around the department.  I even have my “own” (read: shared with 6 other TAs) office.  Also, I only have one class tomorrow, and one class Friday, which seems like a nice small load.  Now to go to bed so I can get up at an appropriately early hour.

September 24th, 2008 | Tags: class, good/bad, nerves | Category: life, meta, school | Comments Off

Having one of those not-knowing-where-to-start blog days.  I’ll start at the beginning, and then not really finish anything because I’m tired and it’s time to go to sleep.

Had “New TA Orientation” at the Department this morning which wasn’t much about TAing and was a lot about the professors we’re TAing for sharing their teaching experiences with the new professors.  Not much to protest about, it was interesting to listen to and sort of helped put my mind in the framework of what Linguistics 1 is really going to be about.  Lots of actual useful information about the types of students, material that is always hard to teach, who to expect to preform well, etc, etc.  General goodwill for all.

Followed by “Department Orientation” which wasn’t much new news at all, and rather similar to the graduate student introduction-type day we had in March after we’d all been accepted but before we all committed to coming to UCD.  A little more frivolous this time, very amusing, and very jovial.  Plus lunch was provided.  Anyway, general got to catch up with some other folks, and a good time was had.

Met with the instructor I’m TAing for and my co-TA for this quarter.  Co-TA is very nice, professor is very nice, and everyone is twice as organized and twice as well prepared as I was fearing.  Not many frets over how TAing is going to go now, as several important things were discovered.  First, turns out the sessions aren’t mandatory.  Everyone who is there either wants to come, or needs help, both of which are great.  Second, the professor’s syllabus lists out exactly what it is the students will expect we’re discussing in sections.  Third, the class is rather hard, and the sections realistically will be all problem sets and very little “discussion” or “lecture”.  And lastly, the department and the internet are full of wonderful resources for problem sets, and I (lucky me!) even get the answer keys.  All I have to be is not boring-as-hell or needlessly confusing, and todo es bueno.

Came home, crashed out a bit, got lots loaded into my calendar (TA stuff mostly) and even put a little light reading under my belt.  I got the books for LIN 1 from the professor (another bonus: TAs get those class books for free and can even keep them…) so I thought I’d start putting a dent in the first weeks assigned readings.  It’s actually serving to excite me about some of the fundamentals and hows-and-whys of linguistics that got me into the major in the first place.  It’s turning out to be a really nice refresher course!

Had a nice hang out with Ben and Maya, possibly my favorite Davisites.  Taught Maya cribbage, had lots of tea, and finally got to try out our hookah!  Very enjoyable, and rather relaxing.  Tomorrow is our last big day off — class doesn’t start till Thursday, and it’s certainly felt like I’ve had a whole weeks worth of stimulation already.  Big plans in the works though — pumpkin bread perhaps, and laundry!  And perhaps a bit more LIN 1 reading.  Phew.  I’m really raring to start class though.  I’ve gotten all hopped up on orientations and I’m ready to go give my best and all that, tut tut, cheerio, etc.

September 23rd, 2008 | Tags: friends, games, orientation, taing | Category: school | Comments Off

The view from my bench

It certainly has been a day.

This is the first day in a long time I’ve actually been busy all day. I guess the first day since I left Ask. And the first day in nearly forever that I’ve been busy all day in a constructive, focused way. I’m not sure how I feel after all this orientation, except that I’m a little nervous, a little excited, and very tired. It both went better and worse than I expected. On the one hand, it was nicely informal (despite having to sign in all over the place to make sure you weren’t skipping stuff), which was relieving since I was worried about the nuts-and-bolts of the actual orientation part. On the other hand, it was much less informative and helpful than I was hoping. I think perhaps the information I’m looking for will become obvious tomorrow when we have our department TA orientation. Or at least, that’s what I’m hoping.

Really what I took away from today was a sense of both the enormity and accessability of TAing. It’s mind boggling to think of me in charge of 25 students, leading them in some meaningful way. Yet when I look at it in the light of tutoring 25 students, it doesn’t seem nearly so difficult. Scenes of all my various TAs have flashed before me all day, and it’s comforting to think that very little of the interaction I ever had with them mattered very much. There were certainly classes I had that were saved by the TA reviewing our materials, but also sections which seemed very little more than a waste of time and energy. I do hope to avoid that, but I also realize that an hour a week out of each of these kids’ lives isn’t a make or break session. If we can get by without it being too unenjoyable for either party, I’m going to call it a success.

September 22nd, 2008 | Tags: orientation, teaching | Category: school | Comments Off

Today sort of feels like the last day of freedom.  Tomorrow I’ve got a day-long TA orientation, followed Tuesday by a day of more orientation, then a day off, and then my first day of class!  Egad!  So I woke up this morning in a bit of a panic.  Sometimes I just burst awake in the wee hours, really feeling like I need more sleep, but completely unable to justify staying in bed any longer.  So instead I snuck off to the study and spent a few hours getting some pretty non-essential computer work done before Lewis got up and very sweetly made us breakfast.

I was a bit afraid to crash like yesterday, so instead I jumped right in to organizing the garage.  I’ve been wanting to set up a work area for myself out of the old kitchen prep table, and yesterday we got the last component – a bar stool so I can sit at my new “desk”.  Anyway, it was just about the last thing on my list to do before school starts, and today was finally the day for it.  I must say, after Lewis got his side together and we got all the various remaining furniture items assembled and put away the rest of the clutter.. it looks way better in there than I anticipated!  I’m really excited to have an excuse to hang out in there.  As an added bonus, I finally learned how to put together and use our socket wrench!  I’m never going anywhere without that thing again.  I should build some kind of holster.  Anyway, here’s our final product pictures of Lewis’ space and my space:

Laur side, with table and storage!

Lewis side, complete with desk and chair!

Still feeling a bit like I was being hounded by the Ghost of School Work Future, I tidied most of the rest of the house.  There are a few straggling boxes to be put away in the guest room, and our study seems to be in a perpetual state of near-disaster, but otherwise I got everything squared away.  When I think about these sort of chores I can just feel all my muscles tense up, but I need to remind myself that school is only so many hours in a day, and if Lewis and I could manage to have a fairly tidy and satisfying existence while both working 40 hours a week, graduate school is not going to destroy everything I love about life.

Now I just have to master this getting-up-before-8 thing again.  In a perfect world, I’d even get up so early I had time to go to the gym before class… phew.  Baby steps.  I only have to be on campus at 8:50 tomorrow.  The other thing I need to figure out is how not to carry stress in my teeth.  When I woke up this morning I felt like I needed a crowbar to unhinge my jaw, and at lunch today my teeth were so sensitive I could barely eat.  Everything was fine by dinner, which is great, but I definitely need to figure out some kind of strategy.  Arg.

September 21st, 2008 | Tags: chores, fretting, garage, teeth, triumph | Category: home, school | Comments Off

Alien pod part, missing plant greenery

It’s been really amazing having so much free time, and having gorgeous weather at the same time!  Today Lewis and I managed to move the mystery plants out of our soon-to-be-herb garden and into a shady spot below the tree in the corner.  It turns out our little plants (I do wish I had a name, or anything even google-able) have little root bulbs, like multi-rooted beets.  I was really surprised after I dug the first one up!   They definitely look like little alien creatures.  I hope they’ll do okay in their new location… they do look pretty hearty.

So that was the afternoon.  This morning we rolled out of bed fashionably late and got to our last welcome week seminar right on time.  It was an info session on using the UC library system, especially for the social science and humanities.  It was actually surprisingly informative.  It seems like the average incoming graduate student would know how to use a library, but either I’m rusty, or I never realized the extent of my privlages as an undergrad.  But there was also lots of good grad-specific stuff too, like how you can use the library for the classes you TA for, and what privliages a graduate student researcher gets (like getting a library proxy card for the professor you work for so you can check stuff out for them in absentia).  Another really sweet thing is that the way UCD runs things each subject gets assigned one of their librarians who is responsible for knowing generally their way around the resources of your field, so there’s actually a linguistics-ally inclined librarian just waiting to photocopy journals for me.  Yay!  The best part of the whole thing was perhaps that the librarians giving the presentation were really hilarious and entertaining people, and it made me really excited to start doing my own research.

Went straight from the library seminar to try out the ol’ UCD wifi network on my beloved lappy.  No glitches to speak of!  Got signed in, got on the network, and was off and running.  This makes my “things that I might not know how to make work on my linux lappy” list satisfyingly short.  I know networks can be a real beast, but I’ve had nothing but luck on my machine, and it’s been a total trooper since I got it.  Even managed to get streaming audio up and running last night, though I’m still stuck at getting flash in Opera (my own fault for using not-Firefox but I’m completely addicted).  All I’m saying is, as soon as we get Colbert Report videos working on this thing (actually they don’t work in Firefox for me either) I think I’ve got no “major” hitches left.  And that’s a pretty damn low-level major hitch.

The plant parts - I remembered!

A short run to the Co-op later, and we were home eating brie and apple sandwiches and contemplating our gardening triumph du jour.  I should remember to take a picture of those silly plants for the blog tomorrow, though they won’t be nearly as amusing now that they’re planted and you can’t see their little tuber-sacks.  Gardening pretty much sucked the life out of me this afternoon, so I read for a while on the lawn.  I’m really getting into my Flaubert, though it took me a while to warm up to it.  Cutest moment of the day happened about then, too.  We’ve been letting the Boo out in the afternoons to get his fill of fresh air and outdoorsiness, but he was distinctly less curious than he has been for the last few days.  I think at heart he’s an indoor cat that craves people more than he craves adventure.  Anyway, he had mostly been sniffing around for a few hours and seemed to have gotten pretty bored, but as soon as I sat down in the lawn he trotted right over to me making those little Boo blurts he does.  He sat down on my blanket, curled up against my leg, and was asleep mere moments later.  It’s as if he were waiting all day for someone to be doing nothing outside so that he could do what he wanted most – nothing.  With someone watching over him so he didn’t have to be nervous.

Which reminds me of the sort of sad event of the day, even if it’s only sad in a doting-parent sort of way.  Lewis was watering the newly relocated foliage, which is about as far from the hose spiggot as possible.  So the hose lives in this roll-up-house device for storage, that requires a lot of pulling to unravel.  The little plastic house isn’t secured to anything, so you end up pulling it across the yard a bit while you’re trying to get yourself more hose.  Anyway, the Boo was sitting nearby the hose house when Lewis pulled on it and it made a scary cement scraping noise and moved at him.  Our kitty panicked, like he always does, and tried to run inside.  Sadly, he was too scared to be paying enough attention to the door and ran right into the closed portion of the screen!  Nearly did it a second time, and then finally found the open part we had left for him for just this sort of emergency.  He was so mortified he didn’t go back outside all day.  Poor embarrassed and scared kitty!

Tomorrow should be great.  The only welcome week thing left is a coffee and bagels social, which sounds pretty tasty, and has flexible attendance hours.  After that, it’s major garden tackling time – I think we’re going to prep the rest of the beds in the back yard for planting, and if I’m still feeling frisky after that, maybe even move some of the herbs into their plot!  And with any luck, the Boo won’t be terrifying himself into any more silly predicaments.  All I could do was watch and go, “Aww.. oh no!”

September 18th, 2008 | Tags: garden, kitty, lappy, library, linux, mortification, research | Category: home, school | Comments Off