The Laursonian Institute

Blurg.  Too tired to post, per usual.

It’s Tuesday.  It’s our first day back from San Diego.  The trip was wonderful, the train trip back home was fantastic, and I’m exhausted.   Tomorrow’s my first of my worst days – Wednesdays I teach section at 9 am, and then I have to jet myself over to the CMB for my CogNeuro class, which inconventiently starts at 9:30.  I’m really not looking forward to missing the first 45 or so minutes of class every week, but it’s only one day a week, and I’m trying not to stress about it.

I’ve been good about the stress level lately.  Went to the gym this morning and worked out for a while, which seems to leave me feeling more able to cope than days when I don’t work out.  I have no idea why that is, but I’ll take what I can get.  I also skipped my only class today (Ling 1 lecture) so I could get some sleep, cause 9 am was feeling way too early after getting in so late last night.  I also got my first trip to the Imaging Center to shadow an fMRI run-through.  It was neat, and useful, but not quite as exciting as I was anticipating.  Maybe I’m just tired.  I did get some good advice from the girl running the study, who also has worked in our lab for the last few years.

There’s a lot more I’ve missed out on blogging… but right now I’m just nervous and ready for bed so I can get through my big day (morning?) tomorrow.  I’m sure it’ll all work out fine – I’ve got a million things planned.  Fingers crossed.

April 7th, 2009 | Tags: family, fmri, lab, section, taing, tired, train, trip | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Today seems sort of like a wash, though I did have a lovely evening with Lewis’ mom who came over for dinner.  Treated her to pasta and avegolemono and my faked symposium salad.  Yum!

I’m a little annoyed with TAing stuff, but I supoose that’s sort of status quo for this administrative business.  Got a feel for my first day of Lin 1 class, and then met with the teacher and co-TAs for some business chat.  I shouldn’t be bothered about what’s going on, I guess.  TAing is just stressful, and I’m not really looking forward to starting this again.  I’ll feel better after the first few classes are past when I have a feel for my students and the lay of things.  Just gotta get to that point.

Had a meeting with the department chair today too about funding stuff, which I had been fairly worried about since his cryptic email yesterday.  Anyway, the funding issue wasn’t anything notable, and really worked out a bit in my (and Lewis’) favor.  The chair just wanted to swing this sort of team-teaching thing for two of the upper-division intro classes such that Lewis and I split up 6 sections over two quarters in some crafty manner and cleverly get us both covered for tuition.  The chair is a very strange man… nice, but a very obtuse talker, and difficult to really comprehend in most interactions.  At any rate, all is well.  I’m looking forward to hearing about the real funding plan soon.

March 31st, 2009 | Tags: dinner, funding, taing | Category: school | Comments Off

…by which I mean eternally droning on and on until the rocks of your attention break into tiny granuals and I wash away the continent of your comprehension.

I wrote essay (singular) and replied to emails (numerous) all day.  Emails were odd – some really downputting, like telling my professor I protested to some of the questions on our final, and telling some of the kids I TA for that they can’t do anything about their grades.  Some good though, since a few kids were studying today and needed help with some questions.  Those are uplifting.  All I can do is shake my head at the final though.  I really protest having questions on there we haven’t talked about in class.  It turns into a reading quiz where none of the material is discussed, tested, or mentioned, and you had several hundred pages of new technical material to get through in the last 5 weeks.  Then again, this is probably why we curve the tests.  Sigh.

Essay went pretty well.  I got the portions I wanted to get done written, and I’m well set up for tomorrow’s big push to get the first one finished.  From there onward it’s one big day of final administering, and one more big paper, and then I’m free!  Hopefully we can get a few other things done between here and there – like getting a christmas tree.  And maybe even a puppy!  Saw one online today that’s at the Yolo County shelter that we could potentially pick up Tuesday or Wednesday if it turns out that’s what we want to do.  I think Lewis and I are both waffling now that the time is getting near.  I just don’t know about these things.  And it’s so hard to make a clear decision while you’re exhausting yourself with school work and other responsibilities.

Which reminds me.  When my eyes unfocus and my sentences creep on, it’s time to go to bed.  It’s definitely that time.

December 6th, 2008 | Tags: icky, metaphor, papers, puppies, taing | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Last day of classes!

I don’t have too much to say about it, actually, other than both Friday sections went really much better than I was anticipating.  The reviews went over well, and hopefully they know what to study up on and will do well on the final.  I had one group tell me that they learned more from section than from lecture, so that made me feel really nice.  My section section was more full than usual, and I got a couple good nods of confidence there too.  One girl brought me fudge and cookies she had made, and another student emailed me after class to thank me for being their TA.  It’s a lot more than I had even hoped the kids would say, so I’m really curious how the reviews are going to come back.  I do hope they have suggestions for stuff I could do better, since I don’t feel like I really nailed this TA thing right off the bat, but I do at least feel like they’re not going to be awful marks.

Watched “The Meaning of Life” this evening and had tasty soup I had put in the slow cooker and chilled out.  I was pretty pooped by the time I got home, and really needed the cathartic not-doing-anything evening I took.  It’s been great knowing there’s nothing more pressing this weekend than my own work, and even more so that the *only* work I have to do this weekend is to write one of my essays.  It’s crazy that a 15 page essay seems like a break, but given that I’ve been working all quarter getting the research done for it, preparing presentations on it, and doing background research for it… it’s really just like frosting a cake at this point.  I know what to say, and how to structure it, and I just need to make it sound nice.  Phew!  Not that it’s not going to be a fair amount of work.. but it’s so nice to be doing all this work for myself, for my own benefit.

And with that in mind, it’s time to go to bed before it gets too late.  I want to get up and get crackin’ tomorrow, so I can start putting away this stuff and moving ever closer towards doneness!   And a real, work-free vacation!!

December 5th, 2008 | Tags: essays, finality, fudge, taing | Category: school | Comments Off

Hi, blog.  It’s me.  I’m sorry I’m too dumb or surly or tired to write every day like I’m supposed to.  I do think about you when I’m off doing other more restful things.  And besides, you know I’ll always come back.

It’s the last week of the quarter.  More specifically, tomorrow is the last day of classes.  This is the one time I sincerely wish I didn’t have sections on Friday nights.  I’m not sure how many folks will actually come, though I have a hunch it should be about normal.  I’ll get a small bump from pre-finals freakouts, but a negative effect for being late on the last day, so all in all, no net change.  I’m hoping it goes alright… my lesson plan this week didn’t go off too well yesterday (good greif, was that only yesterday?) and I haven’t thought of what I should do to make it more fun.  Reviewing just isn’t that exciting.  And the other alternative is to talk about historical linguistics, which is also rather unexciting and I don’t want to bother the students too much with the specifics since they won’t need to know most of it.

As far as my own classes go, it really doesn’t feel like they’re over, though all I have left is to turn in the papers.  They’ve been consuming so much of my time, it’s incredible to me to think that I won’t be seeing any of those familiar faces or places, or be obsessing over any of those topics for the foreseeable future.  Not that I won’t run into people around the department.  I just have really cherished my theory class, and grown accustomed to needing to be constantly working on my 260 project.  Seems like certainly this must only be a temporary reprieve from work and when the holidays pass we’ll be back to the same-old.  Except instead, I’ll be learning about brain scans and semantics and Quechua.  Oh Linguistics, you’re a charmingly broad field.

I finished my book (Flaubert’s Sentimental Education) and I’m at that point in my reading cycle where I need to detox from my old book before I can dive into a new one.  This is awkward around now (bedtime) when I’m ready to turn off and go curl up in bed, but have no motivation to do so since I’ve not go anything to entertain myself to sleep with.  I’m also not sure what the next book should be.  I’ve got strong candidate in a new Louise Erdrich (new to me, anyway), and the newest W. S. Maugham we bought (Moon and SIxpence) as well as a Vietnam-era war book I picked up on the recommendation of my favorite old English teacher.   It’s nice to try and balance out the reading regime.  I’m rather fond of those naturalist/victorian-type writers (Zola, Trollope, Flaubert) but their writing is so absorbing and thourough I can’t just read them back-to-back.  I require something more modern, or at least with lighter prose to offset them with.

Last night I tried picking up a book someone gave us (The Time Traveller’s Wife).  I had been hesitant about this one (as about most books people give us) since my tastes aren’t very Oprahs-book-club-y and I do tend to prefer classics and my small set of more modern writers to the wider wilds of modern literature, but I wasn’t quite ready to commit to anything else.  I got through the prologue and first section, and I think I’m ready to put it back on the dust gathering shelf it came from.  There’s something which I’m sure is a natural direction for our modern novels to move in (and I’m certainly no Lit or English major, so what do I know?) but it really doesn’t satisfy my novelust to read books that sound like screenplays.  The overly chatty, dialogue-driven, sparingly (or conventionally) described just starts getting on my nerves.  Dan Brown’s novel was like that, and so is The Time Traveller’s Wife. Why did we go from 0-to-sexy-romp in just a few pages?  Did I need to be titilated to convince me this book is worth reading?  The premise sounds interesting, albeit somewhat cheesy-scifi-y, but the tone of the novel has completely thrown me off.  I understand that it’s supposed to be realistic and people have sex in real life, I just get annoyed at having to sexualize all the characters in a novel when I’d rather be reading something else.  Though this really does probably point out more than I’m some kind of moral conservative who wants people to keep their sexy stuff to themselves than it says about modern prose.  But why read something that doesn’t please you?

Alright, enough epistolating about literature.

December 4th, 2008 | Tags: books, class, reading, stuff, taing | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Did my 200a presentation today, and it went so much better than I could have anticipated.   I had practiced it twice last night, and spend a long time talking to Lewis about some of the finer theoretical points, and got up at 6 this morning to run through it once more.  I had been worried that it was going to be really dry because it’s a pure theory talk without any real-world-type application, which is what most the other students are doing, but I think I had overlooked the fact that no one would have taken this class if they weren’t at least a little interesting in theory, since it is the “Foundations of Linguistic Theory”.  Doy.

Anyway, the class got off to a good start, and everyone seemed chatty and awake, which is great.  I went second (there were three of us total) and presentation didn’t really go as planned.  Instead, the professor had questions for me as I went along and kept asking me to clarify points and repeat certain things.  Though this wasn’t out of my lack of clarity, I think, but rather asking me to go into information I was going to skip over because I thought it would be needlessly complicating.  Turns out the complicating factors were illustrative, and I was able to explain all the parts I had been struggling through last night.  Professor seemed impressed (and it’s one I’m rather keen on impressing) and the presentation left me feeling quite pleased with both my topic and my performance.  What more could I ask!

Spent the rest of my day revelling in a sense of having gotten past the hardest part of what’s left of my quarter, and finished up a buch of other somewhat less-pressing stuff.  Got the last of my papers graded, and all of the homeworks that were turned in yesterday.  I’ve only got one section to teach this week, which I got a chance to prepare a bit for, and then all that’s left in TA-ville this quarter is one more homework to grade, and the final review sessions to do!  Yay!  I’m so glad I’m not TAing next quarter… I’m definitely ready for a breather and I’ll be thankful (or at least, I’d better be!) for the chance to take some extra neat classes.

But right now, all I can think about is how I have an extra long weekend coming up!  I don’t even care what happens in these four days.. four days off to work on my papers and get ready for my last presentation seems fantastic.  Very fantastic indeed.  Phew.

November 25th, 2008 | Tags: presentation, pride, taing | Category: school | Comments Off

Tuckered out, that’s what I am.

Went home tonight after dinner with Lewis and his madre, though we were supposed to go to the high school jazz band concert.  I just came home and vegged out, and watched some TV, and generally chilled out.  I’ll profess to doing some linguistics reading in the middle of watching a documentary on Prince Charles, but that’s life!

Spent the afternoon TAing and talking about dirty words in my sections (our reading this week includes euphemism and taboo) and it sort of creeped me out.  I think maybe I shouldn’t have gone into that topic with them, but in all three of my sections the kids were very engaged and hopefully we had a fruitful discussion about hurtful words and turns of phrase.  I think it’s just scary to swear in class, especially when we’re talking racial epithets.  I guess we’ll see about that one.

Anyway… I think it’s an early-to-bed sort of night.  I’ve got a date with an awful lot of essays to grade tomorrow.  Woot.

November 21st, 2008 | Tags: nerves, slurs, swearing, taing, tired | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Wednesdays.  You’re often good, but always stressful.

Today went well, but I’m definitely reaching a state of overwhelmedness.   We talked about taboo and euphemism and such things that everyone has experience with and thus a lot of folks get talking.  Good.  Next week is sort of a non-issue for TAing, I think, cause I only have one section and it’s right before Thanksgiving (ie, no one will come if we even hold it at all) and then we only have one week left — so it must be review for the final!  Phew.

I can’t believe we’re winding down our first quarter… it’s so exciting to be working on my final projects already, and also incredible to think that at some point in the nearish future, I’ll be done with them.  I’ve been coding like mad lately, and reading such interesting theory… it doesn’t feel finite.  But I sure am looking forward to that three-week break!  I don’t even know what I’m going to do with myself.   Oh, school… you fickle mistress.

November 19th, 2008 | Tags: coding, projects, taing | Category: school | Comments Off

I solved my one-unit problem today (as in, I had signed up for one fewer units than were required) by commiting to something fantastic.  I’m going to learn Quechua!  What have I gotten myself in to!  I do hope you expect a whole blog full of “Arggg semantics!” and “Arrggg Quechua!” next quarter, cause that’s all I’ll really have left to say.  At least I won’t be TAing that quarter.  Wooooot.

TAing actually went really well today, despite the sort of boring subject matter that is phonetics.  I think I got some kids to play with their mouths and discover their articulators and all that good stuff.  Phonology next week, which should be most righteous.  We just did contrastive and complimentary distribution in class today, so I think the next few lectures ought to be on phonological problems or processes.  Yaaay.

Also had a nice hang-out in the TA office (as always!) and secured the plan that I’m going to find a home for my big silly red rug!  Just gotta get the office swept up and vacuumed (and maybe have the floors washed?  We can apparently request this) and then the rug will be in action!  I’m so excited to finally have something to do with that thing.  Anyway, I got some good teaching tips from fellow-TA Heather, and we agreed to meet tomorrow evening for drinks and non-linguistic chatter at Sudwerk, a tasty brewpub nearby.  Lets give that a double yay for making friends and social events!

Only other piece of fantastic news today… I got some cleaning done!  I spent the morning not doing any (school) work and actually getting some much needed house tidying and cleaning done.  I got all the dishes washed, and swept and mopped the kitchen and entry way and bathrooms.  It’s still not very tidy in here, but it’s certainly a good start.  Those floors were looking pretty shoddy.  But Lewis did laundry yesterday, and the rest of the house isn’t actually that dirty, so maybe this weekend in between transcribing my interview, I can finish that up.  And finally plant our bulbs!  Egad we’ve been busy.

Life is so good!

November 7th, 2008 | Tags: decorating, drinking, friends, quechua, rug, socializing, taing | Category: home, life, school | Comments Off