My Mom
Saturday, November 15, 2008 @ 3:37am
Update on her condition coming soon (good news and bad). Right now, I'm exhausted.
Non Sequiturs
Wednesday, November 5, 2008 @ 12:44am
I have a bunch of things I want to write about, and I felt like it was more important to get them all down before I forget one than to try to take the time to come up with a cute, unifying title. So you get the cop-out :)
I'm not a political blogger, so I'm not even going to bother talking about the election. I didn't vote for Obama or McCain. I'm a devout economic and social libertarian whose views are entirely unrepresented in Washington. I'm done.
As is usually my pattern, I've gotten less productive (and have updated less frequently) as my amount of work has gone down. The two weeks before Halloween were utterly ridiculous in terms of the work load, and saw me doing homework until 1am on consecutive Saturdays. But I got everything done and performed up to my standards and still managed to update here, confirming that I really do work best under pressure. Contrast that with the time from Halloween until now, where I've had very little work to do and yet still haven't updated until now and just barely squeezed out what little work I did have to do. The same thing happened to me during the second semester of my senior undergraduate year, where I had 12 hours worth of classes (the minimum to be a full time student) and yet somehow managed to make a B in English 102 =/ I get bored if I'm not busy, and when I'm bored I go to lolcats, and when I go to lolcats I stay at lolcats for ridiculous amounts of time. So, while I'm glad that the work load appears to be on the downward slope, I do miss the heightened efficiency that came with the ridiculousness of the first part of the semester.
I found out Friday night that at least some professors in my department read my blog, and I still haven't quite worked out how I feel about that. Part of me is surprised because I was still under the impression that only Eddie and my aunt and uncle read this; at the same time, the logical part of me points out (yes to myself) that I link to here every chance I get (email signatures, Facebook, Epernicus, etc.), so it shouldn't come as a surprise. Similarly, part of me is thrilled to know that people are actually reading what I'm writing (that's the whole reason I link to it, right?), but part of me can't shake the twinge of fear that a professor is going to read something and have his/her opinion of me negatively impacted. This fear is largely irrational because this site is mostly a highly-screened, ego-boost-oriented collection of my better writings, so I feel like it may be a consequence of the fact that I'm still getting used to being much closer to the personal/friend line with professors than I was in undergrad (I still have trouble calling some professors by their first names!). So, all of that to basically say: I know you're out there, I'm glad you're out there, and yes I realize that the majority of this site is self-aggrandizing.
The first assignment in the teaching certificate program I'm taking was to write a draft of our personal teaching philosophy statement, and of course I've posted the result here. It was rather hastily written (I procrastinated until the day of and then had a party to get ready for, so I was on a stringent time scale) and is much more disjointed than I like my writing to be, but I justified these shortcomings as acceptable for a first draft. I'll probably revise it after getting feedback, and if so I'll be sure to post the updated version as well. Even with its flaws, I believe it accurately reflects my general approach to teaching, and does a reasonable job of conveying the level of enthusiasm I had TA'ing organic. By reasonable I mean the highest level I felt I could phrase in a professional manner. I couldn't think of a way to relay the time I spent 10 consecutive hours in the same chair tutoring, or the time I led an 80-person study session from 7pm to 3am (fueled by the chicken strips, Red Bull, and peanut butter pie that various students brought me as gifts). Looking back on some of the things I did while a TA truly makes me go "wow", and I still have trouble parsing out how much of it was my love of organic (probably the main motivation for writing a 12 page annotated answer key to the practice test) vs. how much of it was my love of teaching/seeing students learn (probably the main motivation for the marathon sessions).
Speaking of teaching (holy crap a semi-coherent transition!), I feel like I'm starting to get a sense for the things that make classes and my education here at MIT different from that at Ole Miss. Surprisingly (to me at least), it is definitely not the teachers. Now please don't misunderstand me. This is not meant as a slight to my professors here because every one of them has been utterly amazing. Instead, it's meant as a profound compliment to the professors I had at Ole Miss. Sure, I had my fair share of TAs who couldn't push the mechanism for acid-catalyzed alkyne hydration, or of professors who last published around the time mouth pipetting was all the rage. But I also had my share of professors who were every bit as knowledgable, insightful, passionate, motivated, and helpful as those I've had here. So what is the big difference? I've identified three: the quality of the students, the volume/pace of the work, and the expectations of the professors. This is fascinating to me because all three of those are easily modulated through things like smaller class sizes or special recitation sections. Sound familiar? That's precisely what the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at Ole Miss is doing. It's so encouraging to me that the things I've personally identified as separating an Ole Miss education from an MIT one are the same things that the faculty of the SMBHC have identified and are addressing.
Speaking of the honors college (another transition!), I just realized that I never put up my closing speech from the 2008 SMBHC Graduation Ceremony, or posted the link to the YouTube video of me delivering the speech. But now I have =)