Documentation Styles

I am leaving for Easter and a teacher's conference in San Antonio next week, so I'll be gone for a while. Don't know whether or not I'll have internet access, or whether or not I'll have had too many margaritas to render the question moot, so I leave you with the following fascinating paper on the reasons behind the differences in MLA and APA documentation styles. (I didn't write it, but it's still really good :-) http://www.ku.edu/~mwca/conference/proceedings/DocumentationStyles.pdf

Politics, Education, and Philosophy

So... back to education literature. I'm reading more "up with collaboration", "down with competition" stuff (for examples of this issue discussed in the literature and as it relates to public policy, see http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/jte-v7n1/gokhale.jte-v7n1.html, http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/collaborative.html, http://www.highereducation.org/reports/calcomp/callen2.shtml, http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=36384), and I'm wondering why education literature in a capitalistic society has such socialist/communist themes.

I understand that human survival can depend on both collaboration (alliances formed during times of war - World War I and II, for example) and on competition (only one sperm makes it to the egg), but I don't understand why competition has suddenly become "bad". Even those who denounce competition admit that competition is a powerful motivation for increased performance (healthcare, education, sports, space technology, etc.), although collaboration is thought to encourage more learning and to provide a better quality of experience. It seems to me that we need both.

It also seems to me that an educational system cannot depart entirely from the rest of the culture in which it exists and still succeed. If our society as a whole is driven by competition, can we reasonably expect people to suddenly switch to a cooperative mindset when they are within the educational system? People need to live unified lives. If the philosophy underlying politics diverges greatly from the philosophy underlying the educational system, one of them is probably not going to work very well.

CIA Agents and Desk Calendars

It has often been said that the desk calendar is the window to the soul. I can look at my old calendars and instantly relive periods of my life. I can look at my boyfriend's desk calendar and tell you exactly what he's been doing and thinking over the last month. Work meetings, volleyball, basketball picks, my phone number, and the name "Heidi Klum" scrawled in the margin. I can follow entire trains of thought, expecially from the margin scribblings.

If I were a spy ("Rabbit. Jessica Rabbit"), all I'd need is 5 minutes with your desk calendar and your trash can, and I'd know exactly what you were up to. It's downright spooky. Throw in the history on your computer, and you have no secrets. It's more revealing and true than a journal; you censor a journal, but do you remember to censor your desk calendar?

Peace, Purpose, and Hope

So, I went to church on Sunday, as is my custom when I'm visiting my parents in Dallas. I don't mind going, partly because it makes my mom happy, and partly because I like to see what the church is up to these days.

Listening to the sermon, I heard a familiar theme repeated - one I heard often while I was growing up... and I realized that it was a lie. Not a deliberate lie, but an untruth told by people who honestly believe it is true. According to the sermon, without Jesus, there is no peace, purpose, or hope in life. Can people possibly believe this? Is it that only desperately unhappy people convert to Christianity, become happier, and then believe that everyone without Christ is unhappy, anxious, aimless, and despairing?

An Overly Optimistic View of Teaching and Learning?

As you may or may not know, education trends these days emphasize collaboration (yes, the dreaded group project, students planning what they want to learn, etc.) and de-emphasize competition. Humanistic educators believe that people are naturally good; if we are free of barriers, we will try to reach our full potential, and will be naturally driven to learn.

Here's a quote from Ron Iannone. It's part of an article published in an education journal: "As far as learning and teaching were concerned, we wanted people to be able to learn only what they were eager to learn, what they set out to learn on their own initiative, what they insisted on learning and what they were ready to work hard at. We wanted them to be entirely free to choose their own materials and books and teachers."

Is it just me, or is this overly optimistic? If I had been able to learn only what I wanted to learn in junior high and high school... and most of college, I would have mainly learned a lot about sex. With some sci-fi thrown in. And some sci-fi sex. I would then have been qualified to work at the Moonlight Bunny Ranch on a world orbiting Alpha Centauri.

On the other hand, I suppose it could have been fun. Did you know that the human male is the only primate who doesn't have a bone in his penis? From time to time I toy with the idea of getting a PhD in psychology with a concentration in human sexuality. I could work for the Kinsey Institutute...

As for collaboration, I can't say that I've ever met a group project that I liked. Personally, I like grades, because I get high ones (unless I'm working on a damn group project).

Thoughts on Chaos Theory and the Color Orange

Yesterday I made progress on my projects: I finished preparing my three-hour presentation on gender and language differences and got about half of my rough draft on chaos theory and education banged out. Part of chaos theory is that in a chaotic system, certain patterns keep repeating themselves. This is called "self-similarity". So, I got to thinking about a recent commonly repeated pattern (or attractor?) in my life - the color orange. Seriously. It's been stalking me ever since I graduated college.

Just out of college, I worked in the environmental field for a couple of years. We did a lot of drilling and surveying at various construction sites. Surveying equipment? Orange. Construction vests and cones? Orange. Waitressed briefly at Hooters. Uniforms? Orange (except on Formal Tuesdays, of course). When I arrived at grad school, you can imagine my dismay at discovering the school color. Orange. Not a subtle orange, either, but bright, almost fluorescent orange. As a grad student, I have an assistantship, and on Fridays all staff/faculty are supposed to wear...orange. I don't own a single piece of orange clothing (aside from the old Hooter's uniforms); nor do I ever intend to.

Considering my aversion to the color, you may well ask why I chose an orange template for this blog. It seemed fitting somehow, and the ironic concession to fate may appease the gods of chaos. Perhaps the next time I choose a grad school, its colors will turn out to be blue and white.

A Glitch in the Matrix

Does anyone else ever experience anything that can only be explained as a glitch in the Matrix? Things that strengthen your belief in black holes and the Bermuda Triangle and plotlines like the ones in Vanilla Sky? I have had two such experiences in my life - one I can't remember anything about, other than that it was really, really weird (maybe I was flashy-thinged), and the other has to do with a sweater.

I had this deep purple, clingy, v-neck sweater once. One day when I was at my boyfriend's house, I was wearing the sweater over another shirt. We went out to his car, and it was warm outside, so I took the sweater off and put it in the back seat. Now, at this point, I was already in the car, so we had a closed system. We drove about 2 miles to a gas station; I got out of the car, and I decided that it was not as warm outside as I had thought, so I reached for the sweater. When I went to put the sweater on, I saw that the right sleeve was entirely gone. No unraveling, no thread or yarn anywhere in the backseat. The entire sleeve was just missing, as if it had never been attached in the first place. Now, when I was wearing the sweater earlier that morning, it had had both sleeves. So, where did the sleeve go? I should add here also that not only was I completely sober; I wasn't even hungover. And that I have never used recreational drugs. And that I had a witness. And I have never found that sleeve...

How a linguist parties on spring break

I haven't kept a long-term journal since high school, when my little sister found my journal hidden (where else?) under my mattress and read embarrassing stuff about my first kiss and my lesbian friend and my adolescent, tormented soul. Naturally, I found hers, read it in retaliation, and told her who she had crushes on. She ratted me out to our parents. After that, I kept a journal in brief fits and starts my first couple years of college. I was too busy doing stuff to write for a while. Now that I'm not doing much of anything, I can keep a journal again. The irony, of course, is that there may not be much to write about.

I'm in my second semester of graduate school getting my M.A. TESOL degree. I'll be finished this December, and it's the most fun I've ever had in my life :) What, you ask, is TESOL? Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. I've been taking classes related to linguistics, psychology, sociology, general education, grammar, and adult ed, and they're all fascinating. I've long known that I was addicted to school, but tried to fight the addiction in the four years between college and grad school. It's much nicer now that I've given in. In fact, I'm currently lusting over the idea of getting a PhD. Of course, it would be much easier to get serial master's degrees...

Anyway, this is my spring break. I was supposed to be in Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, but my boyfriend's job requires him to work 13 hour night shifts for all seven days of my spring break. He was supposed to be free, but they rescheduled him two weeks ago, the bastards. That means that this week, I will be productive. I have three presentations to plan and two 15-page papers to write (which is why I started this blog - to procrastinate). Actually, my presentations are fairly interesting: gender differences in language and proposed explanations for those differences (examines research and possible solutions for change); chaos theory and its implications for adult education (links to easy-to-understand discussion of chaos theory by Manus Donahue: http://www.duke.edu/~mjd/chaos/chaosh.html, http://www.duke.edu/~mjd/chaos/Ch3.htm) ; and adult participation in, success in, and satisfaction with online learning programs.

The highlights of my week will be 50 cent night at the dollar theatre, evening yoga class, and half-price sushi. I also may go down to Dallas, since my brother recently returned from 18 months in Iraq.