The Questioning Beast

Silence

2010-09-04T15:44:00.002-04:00

After I watch a movie, I always notice noises more readily. Especially small noises. In a movie, every noise becomes important, from the sounds of boot heels clicking on pavement, to the swishing of a pair of pants, to the noises of breathing.

Say what you want about Twilight, but that movie does at least one thing excellently. Bella's breathing becomes almost a character in itself. The first few times I saw any part of that movie, it drove me crazy how loudly she breathed. It took me a while to figure out the significance of that. Bella's breathing is symbolic of her humanity; it is what separates her from Edward. Suddenly, the emphasis made sense. Occasionally, when I think about that, I catch myself listening more closely to the sounds of breathing in real life.

I watched The American last night, and this time it was footsteps. I won't spoil anything here, but every time there were footsteps in that movie, they almost seemed like they were amplified, emphasized for the audience. As I was walking home, I found myself noticing footsteps more than I usually do.

Maybe it's just that I spend a lot of time listening (to music, as well as to other sounds), but I find myself fascinated by simple sounds. From the clicking a watch makes when its clasp is opened and closed, to the satisfying snap of a closed flip-top cell phone, everyday noises just tend to intrigue me.

I'm becoming convinced that this is part of the reason that living in the city bugs me. I can't hear little noises because there are too many big noises around. I love the sound of a pencil scratching across a piece of paper, but it's dwarfed and dominated each time a car drives down my street. The clicking my computer keys make when I type is soothing, but it's interrupted by sirens and drunk college kids going past my window.

Worst of all, I can't find silence. No matter where I go, it seems that something manages to intrude. My headphones can't block out a siren, and there are always cars driving past. My fan is nearly always on, especially during the summer, and I can't hear the wind, or hear the sound my door makes as it swings back and forth when that wind blows. I want to notice when my chair creaks, be woken up by birds in the morning, and from time to time, I want to be able to sit and revel in the absence of noise.

I guess I'll just have to wait for vacations for that one.

In the meantime, anyone have a house in the country and want a visitor some weekend?

Alone-ness vs. Loneliness

2010-08-11T19:52:00.004-04:00

I have a hypothesis. It's a new one, so it hasn't had much time to marinate, but I figured I'd share it anyway. I mean, what the heck, it's not like all that many people read this blog anyway.

First, the back story.

I spent last weekend at my cousin's wedding in Vancouver. It was a lot of fun some of the time (like when I was playing with my other cousin's three-year-old son), and some fun some of the time (like when I was sitting around the reception not really knowing anyone other than my family and not really wanting to talk about my job). Overall, though, it was lovely.

In Boston before I got on my first plane on the way to the wedding, I met a British fellow named Edward, and we got to chatting. It turned out he was going to Vancouver too (which is why we initially started talking), and we spent most of the security line in Boston talking about weather and America and how long the security line was. We spent part of the layover in Houston discussing why he was on this continent (chemistry conference), and then spent most of the customs line in Vancouver discussing family, weddings, and random trivia (Did you know there's only one country whose current and former capitals are anagrams of each other? The country and its capitals are at the bottom of the entry if you want the answer.).

Being at a wedding got me thinking, then, about my romantic life (or, in my case, lack thereof). What I realized at some point on Saturday night was that none of my cousins were my age when they met their partners. My dad's nieces were in their late twenties and mid thirties, respectively, when they got married, the cousin with the three-year-old was around thirty when she met her partner, and the cousin who just got married met his partner relatively recently; certainly since he turned thirty. So why am I so fixated on this whole finding a partner thing? Clearly it's not necessary to get it out of the way early; my cousins are all quite happy, after all.

So here's my hypothesis. See, most of the time, it doesn't really bother me that I'm single. Yeah, I miss cuddling, but I can live without that. The only times I get panicky about it are the times when I feel like I'm never going to find/meet/catch/keep a partner. At its root, that's an insecurity issue. I'm well aware that there are plenty of potential partners out there. The panic comes when I'm not sure I'll run into (or converse with, or connect with) them. This past weekend, I was not panicky. I was a little cuddle-deprived, and vaguely wishing I had a significant other, but I was not upset about it. I'm pretty sure it's because I'd just met Edward.

Now, I'm not in touch with him, and I doubt I ever will be. He studies in Oxford, and that's just not conducive to hanging out any time soon. What matters is that I met him, conversed with him, and connected with him. Had the opportunity existed, I could have pursued it. That proved to me that I still have "it," whatever "it" is. I'm still capable of interacting with cute guys, still capable of connecting with them, enjoying their company, and allowing them to enjoy mine. And that knowledge is what prevented me from panicking.

It's the same knowledge that prevented me from getting panicky following the first date I had a few weeks ago. He didn't call me afterward, but I walked away from it feeling more confident than I had in a while. Not because it had worked out, but because it could have.

I guess my point is, whenever I get panicky, all I really need to do is go out, meet some guy, and talk with him for a while. Just to prove to myself that I can still do so. Because it's that fact that appears to give me the confidence and the reassurance I need.

** The country in question is Japan. Previous capital: Kyoto. Current capital: Tokyo. Isn't that cool?!

Reason # 289 That MATCH is Special

2010-08-01T09:50:00.002-04:00

Not that I necessarily have 288 other reasons to talk about, but 289 seemed like a good number. Bonus points if you know me well enough to know why I like the number 289.

Anyway. When I was in high school, my parents were very involved in my school experience. They came to concerts, drove me to math competitions, met my teachers, and so on. They got to know many of my teachers quite well, as a matter of fact. One of my favorite parts of being home for the holidays is the night when my parents invite over the Muhlys, one of whom taught me Algebra II, and the other of whom is the professor who taught me Linear Algebra. It's always wonderful to see them, and it's great to know that they're friends with my parents. And no, I'm not being sarcastic.

However, I can hardly imagine that my experience in this regard is similar to that of many students in Boston Public Schools. First of all, BPS is a very different district from the Iowa City Community Schools. ICCSD serves a very different population, featuring a large quantity of university faculty members' children, and faculty members tend to be very involved (and very vocal) about their children's education. BPS, on the other hand, has a large quantity of inner city, disadvantaged students, many of whom have parents who work multiple jobs, do not speak English, or are simply disillusioned with the system that is not really working for many of their children. As a result, BPS parents, on the whole, are not as involved in their children's educations as my parents were.

Before I go any farther, let me make it clear: I'm not blaming this on anyone. It is neither solely BPS's fault, nor the solely parents' faults, that this is the case. It's a systemic issue that exists throughout the country. It's bad, we should change it, but that's not the point of this post.

At MATCH, we make a huge effort to improve parental involvement. There's a huge push to contact the parent/guardian of each student at least once a week. Some parents are harder to reach than others, but according to the latest statistics from the middle school, last year the tutors and teachers there logged 12,293 calls home. Those are actual connections with parents, not attempted calls, and inevitably that leaves out a few calls that people made but forgot to log. Furthermore, we spend a lot of time getting parents to come to school and meet teachers, tutors and administrators. The high school holds two Whole School Celebrations, where students present some of the work they've been doing for an audience of their families and peers. The middle school requires parents to come to school for conferences multiple times per year. Point being, we get to know our kids' parents.

Which brings me to the story I meant to tell in this post in the first place. I was on my way home from the middle school a couple of weeks ago. I was waiting for the #39 bus at the Forest Hills train station, smack in the middle of Jamaica Plain. As I'm waiting, a #39 bus from the other direction arrives and unloads. As I'm watching people walk toward the station, one woman catches my eye, and we recognize each other. It's Mrs. B, the mother of two students I've known at the high school, as well as two others who were there before my time. We hug, and chat for a little while about how her kids are doing (the two I know have both graduated now), and then she moves on and I keep waiting for my bus.

I was thinking about this later on, and I realized the extent to which that's abnormal. There's a wonderful family relationship at MATCH where we take care of the students, and get to know the parents, who in turn become our friends and mentors. The mother of one of my students two years ago spent many of her phone calls with me sharing her parenting strategies and telling me about how she'd raised her son. She sat next to me at basketball games and showed me pictures of her nieces and nephews on her phone. Our relationship with those parents starts off as one based on our professional relationship with their children, but in many cases ends up becoming a much closer bond.

When Mrs. B stops and says hello and hugs me, she's doing more than greeting someone who's worked with her students. She's acknowledging the MATCH family to which we both belong. And every time I think about that family, it makes me smile. We don't get everything right at MATCH, not by a long shot, but we sure do know how to build community. And the results are wonderful.

Why I Like Video Games ...

2010-07-28T18:03:00.002-04:00

... Or at least why I like Super Mario Galaxy.

This is going to sound obvious to some people, but it was a realization for me this afternoon.

See, my roommate has recently put a Wii in our living room, replete with Super Mario Galaxy. Having seen Brett play this game back in college, I figured it'd be a good game to start with, since I sort of knew how it worked. A few minutes in, I was addicted.

I've been taking a while after work most days to play, and it's extremely relaxing, even when it's stressful, and for a while I couldn't figure that out. I tend to get very stressed out about video games. It's hard for me to remember that dying in the video game really doesn't matter all that much. So I do get stressed out while I'm playing. Somehow, though, it never really bothered me.

Today, I figured out why. To explain this, I need to tell a quick story about work.

Yesterday, my job expanded. The way jobs go at MATCH is that you start with a nice, finite job description. It tells you exactly what you're responsible for, you decide on it with your superiors, and everybody's happy. For a while. At some point later on, however, someone realizes that there's something tangentially related to your job that really should be taken care of, and since it's close to what you're supposed to do, surely you wouldn't mind if we just added this one small thing, right? And, being conscientious and caring about the children, you figure, sure, why not. And then it happens a few more times, all in the middle of the year, and suddenly by November your job is about twice as large, if not more, as it was originally.

This happened to me last year. Starting in September, my job slowly expanded until about November, when (thankfully) it stopped, but by then it was quite overwhelming. So this year, I'm trying to anticipate this expansion and absorb as much of it as possible during the summer. I'd much rather start September knowing my job is going to be bigger than expected, than end up with a huge job halfway through the month.

So yesterday, in recognition of the fact that I'd end up taking them on anyway, I took on some new responsibilities. As a result, I've been stressed out and slightly cranky for the past day or so. I'll get over it soon, but at the moment it's a bit obnoxious.

Back to video games. Video games are finite. There's a goal, it's measurable and attainable, and you always have the means to accomplish it, even if it takes you a while and a few deaths. The goals themselves don't expand (although new ones appear), and you get as many do-overs as you want.

Super Mario Galaxy, in other words, is in many ways the antithesis to my job. It's comfortingly predictable, finite, and, most importantly, possible.

Especially the parts I've already played, when I'm just going back to beat my high score ... I may be slightly addicted ... But that's beside the point. : )

The Founding Fathers Were Loonies.

2010-07-08T20:57:00.002-04:00

For just a second, think about exactly what the Founding Fathers were proposing, and when they were proposing it. The idea of a democratic society like ours is commonplace these days, but back then, freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, were philosophical buzzwords and rarely much more. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and their social contracts were ideas that hadn't really been put into action, at least not on a grand scale.

So these dudes in America (which was just a bunch of colonies, keep in mind) sat down and said, "wait a second, what if we can do better?" And then Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and there were a lot of arguments about federalism, and then we were a country.

Okay, so a lot more happened in there, and it's not nearly that random, but in some senses, it is. I mean, we take our country for granted a lot of the time, especially when we disagree with its governing institutions (and the people occupying them). But, as Jon Stewart pointed out in the first broadcast of The Daily Show after 9/11/2001, it's a privilege "to sit in the back of the country and throw spitballs." I'm not saying we shouldn't, and I do it as much as anyone else. I'm just saying, from time to time it's worth thinking about it as a privilege. Or at least, a right that we are privileged to have protected.

I went to DC for the 4th of July, as a bit of context here. If you've never watched fireworks go off next to the Washington Monument, I really do highly recommend it. It puts things into perspective.

As we walked around the FDR Memorial and then the Jefferson Memorial (we viewed fireworks from the steps of the latter), I was reminded of exactly how remarkable this country really is. We started off the insane brainchild of a bunch of insane colonists, and somehow managed to expand and grow and become somewhat of a role model. We've still got places to go, and we always will, but think for a second about where we started.

Anyway, I have a few more posts I'm going to write soon, but I wanted to write this one first, 'cause it's been on my mind for a while. I hope you can take a moment and think, if not about how lucky we are for this country, at least about how absolutely bonkers the Founding Fathers really were. If nothing else, we can be proud that this all started out with a bunch of loonies.

Once Upon a Time ...

2010-06-28T09:59:00.004-04:00

... when I was in eighth grade, one of the projects we did in Language Arts class was to write a life list. You know, one of those lists of things you want to do before you die. I recently had my mom send me a scan of my list, because I wanted to see how different my list would be now, and how much of that stuff I'd gotten done.

So here, for the benefit of all of you, is my eighth grade life list, divided into two pieces: Things I've Done, and Things I Have Not Yet Done.

Things I've Done:

Visit the Galapagos Islands. (Got this one in tenth grade when I went on the high school trip to the Galapagos)
Visit Venice. (Got this one the summer after writing the list, when my orchestra went to Italy)
Go to the Wailing Wall and visit Jerusalem.
Surf in Hawaii. (I'm counting windsurfing for this one.)
Go to Spain. (Didn't just go there; spent an entire summer working there. Not bad, huh, eighth-grade-me?)
See Stonehenge.
Play Rachmaninov Prelude No. 5 in g minor on piano. (This was my pride and joy on my senior recital)
Play Brahms Suite Op. 118 on piano (Haven't played all of it, but I've played No. 6, the Intermezzo, which is why this ended up on the list. That was also on my senior recital.)
Go to a music camp. (I miss Interlochen sometimes.)
Play the violin part to Millionaire's Hoedown on viola. (And annoyed everyone with it the entire time we were in Italy.)
Play the Bach Double with a violinist.
Take college courses in high school.
Have someone depend on me. (Note to my eighth grade self: Becoming an educator made this one kind of a sure thing ...)
Become familiar with the works of Shakespeare.
Learn to drive. (You have to have some short-term attainable goals, right?)
Go to the state competition for high school math club. (And regionals, for that matter.)
Teach people stuff at math competitions.
Memorize pi to at least twenty places. (Thanks, Jason!)
Be able to use C++ and HTML code. (Okay, I don't know those particular languages, I'll admit, but I did learn Java and I sort of know Python, and I think my point was to learn to program, so I'm chalking this one up in the "win" column.)
Not hate d=rt problems and be good at them.
Have a knowledge of quotes to use in any situation. (Not technically any situation, but close enough.)

Things I Haven't Done:

Hike the John Muir Trail. (Still really want to do this at some point.)
Visit the Grand Canyon.
Go mountain biking in Colorado. (I'm not sure I care where, but I would like to go mountain biking at some point.)
Snorkel the Great Barrier Reef. (Given that I hate snorkeling these days, this one's probably not on my list anymore ...)
Visit Russia.
See the Leaning Tower of Pisa. (See, this was an option while we were in Italy ... I'm not sure why I passed up the opportunity.)
Visit the Sphinx.
Visit the Great Wall of China.
See the sun rise and set from the moon. (Not sure that one's ever going to happen, but I hear it's really cool to watch.)
Go to Germany and visit the concentration camps.
Play Rachmaninov piano concertos with an orchestra.
Play Tchaikovsky piano concertos with an orchestra.
Play viola with the New York Philharmonic. (I think these last three were out when I decided to go to Mudd instead of Oberlin ...)
Go to the math institute at the Hampshire Institute some summer. (I think this was a high school camp thing that I wanted to go to for about two months, right when I was writing this list.)
Graduate from graduate school. (And you wonder why I had trouble coming to terms with the idea that I didn't want to be a professor ...)
Own a chocolate labrador.
Read Dickens, Salinger, Asimov, Steinbeck, and other classics. (I've gotten to all but Steinbeck of that limited list ... But certainly haven't read a lot of Dickens or Salinger. And I don't know what I meant by "other classics," but I doubt I've read them.)
Keep a clean room for six weeks. (Still have a messy room. Probably always will. Oh well.)
Save all the dying languages. (And we've arrived at the hopelessly ambitious parts of the list ...)
Write an autobiography.
Stop all war.
Swim with dolphins. (Okay, back to the world of the possible for a while.)
Watch the World Cup. (I think I meant in person, but I've seen it on TV, so maybe that counts ...)
See a bull fight. (Pretty sure I don't really want to see a bull fight.)
Discover a cure for AIDS. (Ah, the impossible reappears.)
See all Seven Wonders of the World.
Get out of The Cave. (And I didn't take AP Euro and learn about The Cave 'till the following year ...)
Learn Latin and Ancient Greek. (I'd still like to accomplish that one some day ...)
Go to the USAMO. (Never happened ... never will. Oh well.)

Anyway. I hope you've enjoyed this view into my eighth grade mind. If you're still reading. This got kind of long at some point. I find it interesting to look back at what I thought I wanted to be back then ... And compare it to who I am now.

The Argument I Keep Having With Myself

2010-06-11T12:45:00.002-04:00

< disclaimer > This post is not going to end with a conclusion. It is going to end with the same confusion I feel right now. If you read this, and have input, please, by all means, comment, or email me, or contact me in whatever manner you prefer. Just don't expect me to have too many answers. < /disclaimer >

I don't remember when I first heard of the Peace Corps, but I certainly remember sitting at the computer as a 16-year-old, feeling incredibly frustrated that, when I graduated from high school the following year, I still wouldn't be old enough to sign up.

I spent two different summers volunteering for Amigos de las Americas, which tends to think of itself as Peace Corps Lite. It has a point. Like in the Peace Corps, it takes volunteers and throws them headlong into a community. They have a main project, and guidelines for it, but are also expected to plan and execute secondary projects according to the needs of the community and their own personal skills. It may not have been as intense, or lasted as long, but the general idea (and the insane culture shock) were pretty much maintained.

Since then, I think part of me has always planned on enrolling in the Peace Corps at some point in my life. I've just never been sure when. I considered it after college. I considered it last year. And here I am again, considering it this year.

Being a mathematician, I make some of the most intense pro-con lists in the world. Generally they're attached to weights and then become an insane system of weighted averages. For example, one big pro of the Peace Corps would be the ability to spend two whole years diving into a community, engaging with it, and hopefully helping somehow. The question is, do I weight that more or less heavily than I weight the con of being away from my family and friends for two years?

When I think about next year, I'm balancing more things than I like to think about.

First and foremost, I want to do something that I find fulfilling. I spent enough time in college feeling like I wasn't accomplishing anything, and I'm tired of that feeling. I may work more than I should, and I may not have much of a life, but at the moment I love my job, and I love how it makes me feel to do it right. I don't want to go backward in that sense, and end up in a job that pays bills but feels rotten.

I'd also really like to be somewhere that I have friends. I think about moving out to San Francisco and get really excited about the prospects of reconnecting with people for whom I care very deeply, living near them, and seeing them regularly. The idea of being around people who went to Mudd makes me grin a little bit every time I think about it.

If I were just choosing among options on this continent, my decision-making process would be rather easy at this point. I would decide on moving out to San Francisco next year. I'd spend this year making the most out of Boston (I've already looked into auditioning for an orchestra, so that's progress) and learning as much as I could from my job. I'd use my connections from the past two years to land a fulfilling (if not quite so awesome) job somewhere in the Bay Area, and I'd be set.

Maybe it's just because I've been reading too many Peace Corps blogs these days, but part of me is just not satisfied with San Francisco. It feels like the easy way out, ironically enough. It feels like it's not a risk, like it's safe ... And part of me almost feels guilty about that. Shouldn't I be going where I'm most needed? Shouldn't I be using whatever talents I've managed to acquire to effect the most change I possibly can?

And just think of the adventure.

Kids on a Plane

2010-06-08T13:38:00.002-04:00

When I travel, I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about things. Generally, I'm either on my way to or from something out of the ordinary, and I relish the time I spend traveling as an opportunity to process information. Of course, I also relish plane flights as time for napping, but when I'm not asleep, thinking happens.

For those of you who don't know, I sleep on planes. Consistently. It's rare for me to remember anything about a flight other than the fact that I was on it. Sleeping on planes is Pavlovian for me, and generally I fall asleep before take-off and wake up right around when the plane parks at the gate. It all started when I was a kid and used to get sick on planes, but at this point it's just a very well ingrained habit.

Now, call it my biological clock if you want, or just the fact that I'm getting older and work in a school, but the past couple of times I've traveled, it's occurred to me that, if I had children to take care of, the whole instantly-and-unintentionally-falling-asleep thing might be a negative. I hear you're supposed to, you know, pay attention to small children. Or something.

Anyway, last night I was on my way back to Boston from a wedding (congrats to Andy and Ben, not that either of you reads this). I'll say more about the weekend itself another time. The last leg of the trip was a flight from Dulles to Boston, and the flight was delayed considerably to accommodate a number of passengers arriving in Dulles from Beijing on a delayed flight.

After the rest of us spent a while sitting on the airplane, those passengers began to arrive. A family of four sat near me, including two young boys, Austin and Dylan. Austin was six, and he was very energetic. And very interested in getting to know me. So, for the majority of the flight, I talked with Austin. He quizzed me on state capitals (which, it turns out, I no longer know as well as I should), we talked about his favorite part of school, we did multiplication problems (impressive for a kindergartner, I should add), and we generally got to know each other. Dylan was three, and less talkative, but when he wanted attention he wasn't ashamed to demand it. The two boys ended up sitting next to me while their parents sat across the aisle and periodically tried to tell me I didn't need to keep entertaining their sons.

The point of this story is that I was able to stay awake for the vast majority of the flight (with the exception of about ten minutes in the middle of the hour-long trip). I had a bit more of a motion-headache than I do when I sleep straight through flights, but I did alright. Not only that, but two other passengers on the flight ended up walking near me after deplaning, and randomly commented that I was very good with kids. I suppose, since I work with middle schoolers, this makes sense, but it was good to hear nonetheless.

Besides, I figure if I can stay alert for most of a flight to entertain somebody else's kids, then if/when I end up with my own, it won't be much of an issue.

Glowing

2010-04-04T20:38:00.003-04:00

In the inevitable insanity that is my job, I've been teaching calculus for the past week.

This was always the plan, due to the new review groups we split the calc kids into, so it wasn't a huge surprise. What was a surprise was that the normal Calculus teacher managed to break himself playing volleyball a couple weekends ago, so we (the calculus TAs and I) have been flying solo for the past week.

Apart from the normal excitement, then, we have the added thrill of unsupervised teacher-dom. In other words, I got a tacit promotion for a couple of weeks, except without a pay hike.

Not that I really mind. I love teaching, I love planning, and apart from the insecurity and associated terror, I really enjoy the whole process. I have periodic panic moments where I worry that I'm doing things horribly wrong and screwing kids over, but most of the time I just run with it all and have a blast.

I was reminded of this on Thursday in a particularly potent way. I'd just finished teaching two periods of calculus in a row. The first went rather well (if I do say so myself); the kids learned, participated, and got quite a bit done. The second, however, was somewhat less than perfect. By the time I got upstairs afterward, I was dead set on berating myself for my poor planning and marginal idiocy.

Then, one of my coworkers came over to where I'd just plopped into a chair. He'd stepped into the room during the first period of calculus to get something from the room, but I hadn't really noticed him. Teaching is a bit of a zone thing for me. The world tends to fade away.

His comments on the matter: "You know, I've never seen you more in your element than you were in front of those kids." I've never been good at accepting compliments, and I'm pretty sure I was staring at him like a deer in the headlights of an alien spaceship at this point. "Yeah ... You were glowing, and the kids were glowing. It was awesome."

We proceeded to have a conversation that centered primarily on my own insecurity and perceived inadequacy, but those first comments are the ones that stuck with me. They were a reminder that, even when I end up feeling like I've done nothing right, generally speaking, I'm wrong. Not to mention a reminder of how much I love teaching, and how much it makes me light up to stand in front of groups of kids and be enthusiastic about math.

He asked, of course, if I was going to think about teaching some day. Am I? I don't really know, honestly. I've certainly never thought about it more than I do these days, working with teachers at a charter school.

Paintball

2010-03-28T19:57:00.002-04:00

Today was the annual paintball trip. I went somewhat hesitantly, mostly because I didn't enjoy myself all that much last year.

Partially due to a much more paranoid playing strategy, however, I had a ton of fun. I only got hit a few times the entire day, and spent most of my time hiding behind things and shooting at people from relative safety. Not the most aggressive strategy, admittedly, and I didn't accomplish too terribly much, but I did have fun, which is worth something.

I also managed to get more sore than I expected, and to get a bit sunburned.

In other news, tomorrow is Day Two of my second foray into teaching. I'm currently trying to process some data to figure out what my kids need to work on in the next few weeks. I probably should have gotten started on this earlier this weekend. I spent yesterday sitting around in my PJs and watching videos and reading. Honestly, it's been exactly the sort of weekend I needed.

I've been re-reading The Hobbit, because the last time I read it was back when I was about 10 and my mother was reading it aloud to me and my brother before bedtime. I'm going to go through the Lord of the Rings books next, because I haven't read those since junior high. I hate that, at this point, I know the movies better than the books. So I'm changing that issue.

Anyway, I don't have much else to say. I'm trying to write more frequently, even if I don't have much to say, so we'll see how this goes.

Pi Contest

2010-03-26T22:55:00.002-04:00

This morning, it was snowing. In late March. By the time I'd walked the fifteen minutes up to school from the T stop, I was more than a little cold, my hat was soaked through, and I was just a bit cranky.

As I was walking through the Great Hall (where many tutorials are held), I suddenly heard someone saying my name. I turned, and saw a sixth grader whom I'll call Adam looking up at me, his tutor also looking at me expectantly.

"Adam would like to challenge you to a pi contest," his tutor said, and I smiled.

I asked Adam if he was sure he wouldn't be upset at me if I beat him. I don't like creaming sixth graders at competitions, but I also don't like letting them win. That's not how things work in real life, after all.

Once he'd promised me he wouldn't get upset, I sat down next to his tutor, and his tutorial partner supplied me with a piece of paper and a pencil.

I wasn't terribly surprised that I'd won. He messed up somewhere around "8979" by changing the "79" into just an "8" and then making some stuff up afterward. Admittedly, the rest of his digits had patterns that belonged there (I distinctly remember a "384" somewhere), but he only got the first 13 or so fully correct.

I left him with my piece of paper and promised him that if he learned more than that, he'd certainly beat me. It's not like I'm putting concerted effort into learning more digits of Pi these days.

I hope he asks me back and beats me ... I like getting creamed by sixth graders, especially when it's in a fair fight.

Owning Your Class

2010-03-25T16:04:00.002-04:00

There's a lot of talk in the teaching world about "owning" your class. Especially when it comes to difficult kids, you have to walk into the room knowing that the class, and the time, are yours. It's your class, not theirs, and you're the one who's in charge.

This is not always easy. Sometimes, it's very difficult.

Last year, it took me a good half-year or so to start believing that the calculus tutorial I ran was, in fact, MY calculus tutorial. My class, my rules, my way, every time.

This year, I haven't had to teach a whole lot of classes. Starting today, however, we split the calculus kids into four different groups. The purposes of this are multi-fold, but the bottom line is that we need to review for the AP exam, and some kids need tons of review, while others really just need someone to help guide their discussions of exam-level problems.

I have the middle group, and the goal we've set for them is for every single kid to get a 3 or higher on the AP exam. At the moment, this seems to them to be an insurmountable goal. I asked them their "realistic goals" for the exam, and my responses were: 5, 5, 3-4, 3, 3, 3, 1-2, 1. It's good to know some of them are confident, but it's also not good that some of them are lacking in confidence.

Now, I haven't really interacted with these kids so far this year. I know them all from chem lab last year, but they've only seen me around a few times a week this year, and not much at all in calculus. I've been freaking out about taking this group since last week (when we decided on everything).

And then I walked into class today, and as I was walking in, I realized that I know this exam. I know this exam like the back of my hand. I've spent more hours analyzing this exam than almost anyone else in this school. Last year, I predicted the topics of 4 out of 6 free response questions on the exam.

So I stood in front of the kids and told them I know this exam. I told them I predicted 4 out of 6 free response questions. I told them that I can help them know this exam. And I believed it. And I owned that class.

This is the first time I've ever owned a class cold, without having had them before. It reminds me of the extent to which confidence and expertise can make or break a teacher.

... That's most of what I wanted to say ... But while I'm here, let me just mention ... Nearly 30% of middle school and high school math teachers in 1999 neither majored nor minored in mathematics while in college [http://www.nctm.org/resources/content.aspx?id=536].

Untapped Potential

2010-03-16T15:32:00.001-04:00

I've decided that my main problem with writing in this blog has been my unexplainable compulsion to write extremely long entries.

From now on, I write whatever length I want, without feeling guilty about how long or short an entry is.

Ideally, this also means I'll write more frequently, but that remains to be seen.

For the past week or so, I've caught myself drifting into meta-land and big-picture-land rather frequently. I checked out a number of big-picture-inducing videos from the library (one about Amistad Academy, one about Rafe Esquith, and one about five first-year teachers) to supplement my normal fluffy-movie fare. I've been slowly watching these videos during breaks in work (and when my brain decides that no, it simply can't focus any longer).

I think the most striking thing about watching these videos has been my hyper-critical attitude while watching them. A year and a half ago, back when I was about to start working at MATCH, we were assigned a number of big-picture-inducing books to read, including one by Rafe Esquith. I read them all with an overwhelming sense of awe; something approaching, "oh-my-goodness-I-could-never-do-something-so-impressive." These days, I watch these videos and read similar books, and find myself criticizing bits and pieces of techniques and philosophies.

Not, mind you, that I think Rafe Esquith is a bad teacher, or that Amistad Academy is anything less than a phenomenal school. I just seem to have acquired a slightly more realistic, nobody's-perfect, perspective through which to view such all-stars of the teaching world.

In another odd big-picture moment, a friend (we'll call him Joe) mentioned a number of conversations he'd had with others about the pros and cons of working in schools with kids like ours. Joe had been of the opinion that such work was worth it, and the individuals with whom he'd conversed appeared to disagree. The summary of their arguments, to the extent I understood them, was that it's not worth it to work with at-risk populations (like the kids we work with at MATCH) because (a) it's extremely exhausting and burn-out-inducing for educators, and (b) "those kids won't amount to much anyway."

Disregarding for a moment exactly how angry I got when I heard that argument, I'd like to share a story.

Last Friday, I took two of the high school students over to the Middle School with me. The seventh graders had just started a unit on spoken word poetry, and the High School has a recently-begun spoken word poetry club. I took the president and vice president of the club over to the MS to share poetry, and to answer some of the middle schoolers' questions about high school, college, and poetry. Let's call the high school kids Jack and Jill*.

Jack read two poems, both love poems. He's a love poem kind of kid. Both poems went extremely well, and the seventh graders were attentive and excited while he was reading. Jill also read two poems. Hers were more along the inspirational line, and didn't focus on love at all. Nonetheless, again, the seventh graders were absolutely enthralled by her work. After both of them had read, the seventh graders started asking questions.

Some of the questions were uninteresting and, well, seventh-grade. Students asked where Jill got her ideas for her poems, and asked Jack when he'd started writing and why. Their answers were interesting and eloquent, and it was great to see them interacting so well with the seventh grade class. That, however, is not the point of this story.

At some point, one of the seventh graders asked if the two wanted to major in poetry in college.

Jack answered that he didn't, and then explained why. He wants to be a music producer, so he wants to major in music production in college. He's already started composing, recording, and producing music. Even as a high school student, he gets paid for his beats.

Jill, on the other hand, wants to be a lawyer. She wants to major in English in college to help her attain that goal. Her writing and speaking are strong, and she's one of the most assertive, eloquent students I know at the high school, although she's only a junior.

I watched these two speaking to our seventh grade class, and I couldn't help but be incredibly proud of everyone involved. The seventh graders were respectful and attentive, and Jill and Jack were enthusiastic and well-spoken. These are not kids who "won't amount to much." These are driven, motivated young people who have been shown a world beyond the one in which they live. They've been given a taste of college through field trips and endless discussions at school, and they recognize the value and importance of higher education. They've been given the space and prompting to imagine incredible futures for themselves, and that's exactly what they're doing.

Next time someone tries to tell you that it's "not worth it," and that "those kids won't amount to much anyway" ... Just keep in mind the acres and acres of untapped potential each one of those kids represents.

* Today's fake names brought to you by the letter "J" ...

Confidence, Calculus, and Cooperation

2009-08-16T21:48:00.007-04:00

I've had a list of "Stuff To Write In My Blog" sitting in a sticky on my desktop for months now and just haven't gotten around to checking any of it off. I think there are certain moods in which I'm more likely to write for myself rather than wanting to share that with others, and I've been in those moods more frequently these days. Nonetheless, here we are, and I'm going to publish this blog post tonight if it kills me.

As far as I can tell from a cursory glance over my previous blog entries, I haven't spent a whole lot of time talking about what I'll be doing this coming year. Given that my last post was at the end of June, that's probably because I didn't know much about what I'd be doing this coming year. For the past month, and for the next year, I have been and will be working on math curriculum at MATCH. This sounds rather broad, and that's partially intentional. This summer I've done everything from write calculus standards to create sixth and seventh grade tutorial materials to advise teachers on what exactly it is they should be teaching their students, math-wise. It's an insanely intense job, and frequently stressful, but that's not incredibly surprising.

What is surprising is the extent to which, even in just the past month, this job has pushed me out of my comfort zone, beyond my previous professional experience, and into whole new realms of interaction with adults. Through these interactions, I've figured out what it is about interacting with adults that makes me feel so awkward. With adults, I have no well-defined authority dynamic on which to fall back as a safety net. I spent most of last year interacting with high school students. It was wonderful. I was the authority figure, they did what I said, and when they didn't, there were clearly defined consequences for their actions. Everything made sense, because it fell within this explicit framework in which our interactions took place. In my interactions with adults, most of the time I was interacting with people who were, in some sense, "above me" on the work hierarchy, and that made those interactions easy as well. The only truly difficult interactions were with my peers, and they were just as awkward as I suppose I should have expected them to be.

Of course, this year, my primary interactions are with adults. Suddenly I'm forced into a world of ill-defined power dynamics and terms like "consultant" that tell me nothing whatsoever about how to interact with anyone else. My title, incidentally, is "math and science curriculum consultant for MATCH middle and high schools." Talk about a mouthful that looks good on resumes and is too much of a bother to use anywhere else. But I digress. My point here is that suddenly I'm in a situation where I'm running meetings, where I'm the authority on things, even if I'm (technically speaking) less experienced than the other people in a meeting. I'm having to find ways to engage adults in conversations about work that they're doing, provide criticism and feedback, and somehow make my voice heard and get my suggestions across. I'm offering advice, pointing out errors, and discussing what needs to get done, and somehow I'm supposed to do all this tactfully. I suck at it. Not that I'm objecting to the experience. It's very good for me. That doesn't make it any easier, however.

I had a meeting with Alan Safran, the executive director of the MATCH schools, to discuss management, cooperation, and working with adults. In the course of our discussion, he mentioned to me that due to my confidence and drive, I often come across as arrogant. My first reaction was similar to the reaction I had in high school when people told me I was arrogant. Something akin to, "Nobody understands me, I'm incredibly insecure, and they're all wrong," followed by a bit of unconstructive pouting. After a while, though (and possibly due to the fact that one doesn't ignore Alan Safran's advice, no matter how distasteful it may appear at first glance), I realized he was right, although he didn't know how right he was. Since I was a kid, my insecurity has manifested as a desire to impress people, a desire for people to think I'm cool and knowledgeable and talented and all those things one wants to appear to others. Unfortunately, because I'm insecure, I tend to think people think I'm stupid, shy, or lacking in value somehow, so I spend time trying to prove to people that I know what I'm talking about, that I'm qualified to do my job, or that I'm not stupid. It makes complete sense that this would come across as arrogance, showing off, and general jackassery. For some reason, however, I had never quite connected all this in my mind.

So, for the past week or so, my inner professional development framework has revolved primarily around letting go of my need to impress, reminding myself that people do have confidence in me, and letting what I say stand on its own two feet. This allows me to be human and vulnerable in all those awkward meetings, which, while nervewracking, certainly seems to be helping with the interpersonal bits of life. It's difficult to let go of the urgency sometimes, I must admit. Working in a school where everything is urgent, where kids are the top priority, and where everything we do feels important, it's so easy to get caught up in what needs to get done and lose track of how people feel about it. I catch myself using the language of necessity in obnoxious ways, telling people what they "need" to do and somehow getting surprised when they react negatively to my tone. So many of my interpersonal issues could be ameliorated if I could force myself to calm down, breathe, and let go of necessity. That remains my primary goal in an inner and interpersonal sense these days, as it defines so much of how I interact with my coworkers.

Meanwhile, there's one coworker with whom this is not an issue at all. Some of you may remember my rhapsodizing about Chris, the calculus teacher, last fall. I'm going to be working closely with him this coming year, and for all of July, we were essentially attached at the hip. He drove me into work in the morning, home in the evening, and in between we'd sit across the table from each other nearly constantly. We made To Do lists together, crossed things off together, teased each other incessantly, acted alternately like seven-year-old siblings and an old married couple, and occasionally threw balled-up paper across the room at each other. I've never worked so closely with someone else in my life, and it's a phenomenal experience. It was so nice to be able to blow off steam with Chris, whether by bantering, throwing paper, or rolling down the windows, blasting Good Morning Baltimore, and singing along together on the way into work. Chris has been gone for all of August, and it's become even more clear to me the extent to which he improved my work life. He facilitated all those interpersonal interactions I've been struggling with, he helped me prioritize my work, and most importantly, he helped me step back and de-stress at the end of the day. Anyway, I guess my point in all this is that I'm glad I'll be working with him this coming year. It's going to be awesome.

I promised a mention of calculus in the title of this blog post, so I suppose I should get around to that. Now, I spent most of last year thinking (and occasionally mentioning to people) that I loved my job, but wished I could have a wider impact. I loved working with my kids, and with my school, but part of me was antsy and wanted to do something that would, as I tended to put it, "change the face of American mathematics education." At the beginning of this summer, Chris gave me the task of creating standards language surrounding our calculus course. Basically, going through and enumerating all the different skills and concepts our kids needed to learn in order to find success on the AP Calculus exam. I spent about a month, off and on, creating standards language. It was the first time I'd created standards from scratch on my own, so it was a little rough at first, but I found my stride eventually, and created the calculus standards we'll be using from here on out. This was a great moment for me, and probably my first big accomplishment in my new job. If that were all to this story, however, it wouldn't have had much to do with that "larger impact" I kept angsting about last year.

At the end of July, MATCH held a No Excuses AP Calculus conference. The "No Excuses" line refers to schools that, like MATCH, have high expectations for their students, have college-success-driven missions, generally have strict behavior codes, and are primarily charter schools. At any rate, we held this conference to exchange ideas, but it turns out most of the schools were there to ask what we do, and to get materials from us so they could implement similar curricula at their schools. And so came my first experience with that "wider impact" I keep hankering after. Let me tell you ... Wider impact is scary. Suddenly, those calculus standards I wrote were being disseminated to teachers and principals of schools in Boston and around the country, to be used to improve their own curricula. I found myself wishing I'd at least used spellcheck on the stupid things. It was terrifying, frankly, to think that these imperfect brainchildren of mine were going out into the world to make their way into the lives of countless real-life children, for better or for worse. So much for wanting to have a larger impact. Then again, that hankering hasn't gone away. I've just realized that, like so many other important things in life, larger impacts are scary. Very scary.

I've been typing for a while now, and I'm running out of things to say, but I do have one other small, unrelated note I'd like to add. I've tried to meditate a number of times over the years. It's never worked for me. Quieting my brain isn't something that comes naturally to me at all, and each time I tried to devote myself to practicing, it fell by the wayside and I returned to my insomnia and worry. This year was no exception; I tried to start meditating at least twice, and it fell through both times. This may sound unexceptional, given that two is a rather small number, but given the other things that were going on, the fact that I found the time to try at all says at least something. In any case, I've discovered a new way of meditating that's actually working a bit better for me. Each time I've tried before, I've tried focusing on my breathing, or on visualizing a flame, or something like that. Always, what distracted me was music. The incessant soundtrack running through my head refused to stop so I could calm my thoughts and mind. I realized recently, therefore, that what I need to focus on is sound. In order to quiet sound, I need to focus on a calming, thought-less sound that could then fade away. So instead of trying to visualize darkness or flames or nothingness, I've begun focusing on a single tone, pulling my soundtrack into a single note rather than entire songs. Finally my brain is quieting down. It'll take a while for this to work, and I'm not sure it ever will completely, but for once I'm feeling like I'm making progress in meditation. Anyway, any input on this is more than welcome ... I mostly just wanted to ramble about it to hold myself accountable to continuing to put time into it.

At any rate, I hope you are all having wonderful summers. I will attempt to update more frequently, but we all know that means I'll neglect this blog just as much as I always have. Let's pretend I'm serious, though. :)

Cheers!

Timed Ten-Mile Runs, Fireworks, and Growing Up

2009-06-21T22:36:00.006-04:00

This post was originally going to just be about the ten-mile run, and I was originally going to post it about a week ago. Clearly, the latter didn't happen, and at this point it seemed a bit silly to stick with the former. As a result, this post is going to be a random mix of thoughts I've been meaning to type up for a while, some of which I'm sure will be more coherent than others.

First, on the topic of the run ...
Important information first: I finished all ten miles. I did not stop or walk at all.
Slightly less important, but still condensed, information: It took me 2 hrs and 18 minutes, for an average per-mile time of 13:35. Around the 4-mile mark, my per-mile time was around 12:30.

There were two low points in terms of morale. The first was around mile 7, when there happened to be a bit of an uphill climb. It wasn't terribly steep, but it was rather long and I was quite tired already. I was cranky and unhappy the whole way up. The other low point was around 9.5 miles. For those of you who know Boston, I was in the middle of Jamaica Plain, and I didn't want to run anymore. I actually was running with tears streaming down my cheeks because I wanted to stop, but at that point I'd made it so far that I simply couldn't stop. So there I was, running through Jamaica Plain, surrounded by crowds of people, tears streaming down my cheeks, just focusing on putting one foot in front of another, and thinking the longest string of obscenities I think I've ever put together. I kept going, though, notwithstanding the pain and misery, and managed to make it to the end.

I have to say, I've never felt anything that quite equals the end of a ten-mile run. I was simultaneously abjectly miserable, and phenomenally elated. It was a very odd mix of emotions, and I was probably more emotionally exhausted than I was physically so. I'm not sure what else to say about it, because I'm pretty sure it's impossible to understand unless you've done something similar yourself. I guess I'll just leave off there and open the metaphorical floor for questions, if anyone wants follow-up.

Today was Independence Day, and so I went to see the fireworks. I love fireworks. In the words of the six-year-old girl sitting next to me, "A lot of people say fireworks are pretty, but I say they're SOOOOOOOOOO pretty." I really can't convey the true effect of that statement without an adorable small-child voice, but you get the idea. Anyway, let me tell you, Boston really knows what it's doing when it comes to fireworks. I saw the fireworks last year as well, and I don't think I'll ever get over the effect of fireworks at the end of the 1812 Overture, nor the glow over the Charles during the grand finale.

I'll also never get over how addicted Boston is to the song "Sweet Caroline." Everyone was walking off the Mass Ave bridge, one long snaking throng of people blocking the entirety of Mass Ave for blocks on end. Suddenly, someone started playing Sweet Caroline on a radio, and before I knew it, a vast majority of the people around me had joined in. It really is an interesting experience, being pushed along with a massive number of people, all of whom are spontaneously singing a song together. It made me very happy, but that's just because I'm a big fan of spontaneous group music-making, even if it's more akin to yelling than music. It makes me smile anyway.

I mentioned "growing up" in the title of this post. I mean "growing up" in two different senses, one of which is relatively simple. There are things I enjoyed as a kid that I still enjoy as an adult, but which take on an interesting flavor as I get older. Specifically, there are things I loved as a kid, which I still love now, but which also remind me of my lack of significant other. It's not that they're spoiled by said lack ... Merely that they take on a slightly wistful flavor as a result. Anyway, I've made a preliminary list of those things: fireworks, amusement parks, the zoo, stargazing, walks in the park, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles, most Disney movies, beaches, sunsets, pleasant forms of precipitation (i.e. warm rains, light fluffy snows, etc.), and warm fuzzy blankets.

My other note about growing up is a bit less well-defined, or at least more difficult to explain. Back on November 1, I wrote a bit about maturity and its non-linearity at the end of a blog post. It's occurred to me that people's perceptions of maturity are largely based on the assumption of its linearity, and the more I think about that the more it strikes me as skewed. This may seem blatantly obvious, but it seems that perception of maturity is based nearly entirely on the forms of maturity reflected visibly in group interactions. As a result, actions that would otherwise be identical can be thought of as goofy in someone viewed as "mature," but as obnoxious in someone viewed as "immature." For a while I was trying to figure out which people could pull these things off without being called immature, or which actions counted as "mature" or "immature," but as far as I can tell, that's not the issue at hand. The issue is that introspective maturity isn't visible to the majority of the world, rendering it somewhat moot in people's minds when they judge "maturity."

I guess all of this just goes to say that what we think of as "maturity" is more of a slippery concept than I think many people give it credit for. I've touched on the introspective vs. extrospective dimension here, but there are many other dimensions in which a person can be mature or immature. I'm not claiming "maturity" as a concept is null and void or anything ... I'm just saying that maybe we (as a society) need to rethink our perceptions a bit before calling someone "immature."

In any case. I still owe you all a few blog posts I've been meaning to write. I'll get around to them eventually, but in the meantime, I hope you've all had a delightful and rewarding Independence Day.

Cheers!

Countries That End In -Stan

2009-06-19T01:49:00.002-04:00

My freshmen have to learn all the countries in the world (with the exception of all the islands in Oceania) as part of their Non-Fiction class. Now, I learned some of the countries last year while procrastinating on my thesis. It's always easy to motivate myself to be productive when there's something more important I'm actually supposed to be doing. Anyway, I could never quite get the hang of all the -stan countries in Asia. Well, I took an Asia map quiz with my boys today as practice for their finals, and I got every single country right. I got all of Africa a few days ago, too. I still have some minor issues with islands in the Caribbean, but that's not bad. I'm rather proud of myself ... At least now I can identify all the major conflict sites around the world. As a matter of fact, were it not for the Russia-Georgia conflict, the Armenian genocide, Iraq's thing with Kuwait, and India's tension with Pakistan, I'd never have learned all the Asian countries properly.

I know, it's been quite a while since I last wrote. I've been meaning to write, but I've been unable to properly articulate the one thing I most want to express. I can't guarantee I'll get it right this time around, but I'm promising myself I'll post tonight, so I don't really care if I get it perfect or not.

That one thing I most want to discuss is running. Now, for those of you slightly less familiar with my personal habits, I tried to pick up running a few times in college, and failed miserably. Each time I tried to run, I would make it about a mile and be miserable the entire time. It didn't provide a lot of incentive for me to continue to run. The closest I got to establishing a habit was back in the middle of sophomore year, when I used to run late enough at night that the sprinklers were on in Linde Field. Running with the sprinklers on was fun enough that I actually did so for a couple of weeks before yet again giving up. Suffice it to say, I've not really been in shape for most of my life, and running has never been fun, nor easy, for me.

About a month ago, I decided to start running. Call me silly, but the big impetus was watching the last few episodes of Biggest Loser: Couples, in which the last four contestants ran and walked a marathon. On top of that, I'd been meaning to get in shape. So I decided to start running. My first run was on May 23, it was exactly two miles, and it was miserable. I was dragging the whole time, and it wasn't fun at all. Three days later, I went on a run intending to run 2.5 miles and then walk home, but ended up running all five miles. Were it not for that unintentional 5-mile run, I imagine I'd have kept running relatively short distances and have left it at that. Instead, I've been working up my mileage to an 8-mile run this past Saturday, and I'll be running 10 miles in a race (of sorts) tomorrow evening (or this evening, depending on whether you follow the strict midnight day-rollover rule).

Running long distances (starting with that first 5-mile run) has been an interesting journey for me. Everyone says running is an interesting psychological experience, but I never really bought it for some reason. I mean, sure it's intense, but I never thought it'd be all that different from any other situation I've been in that required perseverance. I was wrong. It turns out I can't run without positive memories, and I have plenty of less-than-positive memories lying around. In that first five-mile run, I worked through more of those memories than I have in months, dealt with them, and managed to see the good in them. It wasn't a conscious decision; part of me just knew I had to do so in order to keep running, so I did. On my other long runs, it was a slightly less overt process, but I had the same fight to remain positive, and it was just as much of a requirement each time. Those long runs are slowly doing a complete overhaul of my brain and perspectives, and it's amazing.

I'll probably write again after the race tomorrow, but for now it's getting late and I should stop typing anyway. I promise my next post will have more stories, and I owe the world a reflection on the Holocaust shooting. I'll get around to those eventually.

For now, I hope you're all well.
Cheers!

Sing-alongs, Anime, and Mathematics

2009-05-25T22:07:00.003-04:00

Why is it that it's so much easier to title things with three random topics? For some reason, three things just seem to ring better than one, two, or four. See, I just did it again! That one wasn't even intentional. Oh well.

I've been getting the distinct impression that my weeks are only going to get more random and exciting for the rest of the year. I have a bit more time on my hands than I used to, and as a result, I've been doing more things that seem worthy of bloggage. In other news, "bloggage" is a horrible non-word, and I hope I never have to use it again.

This past Wednesday, I went over to the MATCH Middle School for the day. For those less familiar with MATCH, the high school was founded in 2000, and the middle school is just finishing up its first year. This year, they just have sixth graders, and they'll be growing by one grade per year until they have all three grades in attendance and begin funneling kids to the high school for ninth grade. This year, I've spent essentially no time at the middle school --- my job is entirely contained in the high school, so there's been no reason for me to go elsewhere. This past Wednesday, however, I went to the middle school for the day to work on some curriculum development stuff. This was basically a start on the sort of things I'll be working on next year when I'm doing curriculum stuff full-time. I sat in a room at a table and wrote mini-assessments for sixth grade math standards for about six hours. To many of you, this may sound like torture. I loved it. There are a lot of times in this job when I feel like I'm in over my head. Whether it's because I have too much work, or because the work feels like it's beyond my capacity, I spend a lot of time feeling overwhelmed. Last Wednesday, the opposite was true. I was completely in my element. Sure, I wish I'd gotten more done, and there's always more work to do, but I never once felt like I couldn't do the work. It was fun, it was stimulating, and it felt completely natural. All of this makes me feel quite a bit better about next year than I felt before. Instead of feeling incredibly nervous and apprehensive, wondering whether or not I can do a good job, I'm feeling confident, excited, and challenged. It's not going to be easy, but I know I can do this job. Knowing that has made me feel quite a bit better than I did before.

On Friday, I co-chaperoned a trip to the Boston Anime convention. No, I don't really watch anime, and no, I don't really play video games, so no, I didn't really have any real reason to go ... But the gaming club from MATCH wanted to go, and needed a second chaperone. I figured of all the tutors, I was probably the least averse to such things, so I stepped up. Having never been to such a convention before, the whole thing was quite the experience. There was a ton of cosplay there, ranging from Darkwing Duck through a bunch of anime characters I didn't recognize, and into a number of video game characters, including one particularly well-done Link. Now, granted, part of the reason I felt Link was so well-done was that I recognized him, but his shield, sword, scabbard and pointy ears didn't hurt. My attitude toward the whole thing changed as time wore on. At the beginning, it felt a whole lot like walking in on the geekiest parts of East Dorm, all distilled into one place and multiplied by a very large positive number. I've had a dearth of that type of geekiness in my life recently, so at least initially, it was a very welcome feeling. Unfortunately, the longer I was there, the more I felt like I was being checked out and borderline leered at by at least half the guys who walked past me. There were a lot of guys there. It wasn't a great feeling. It was made worse by the fact that the entire convention consisted of a huge amount of sensory overload. There was too much going on for me to process it all slowly enough, and I ended up getting a huge headache.

All that being said, I think the most awkward part of the anime convention was the huge booth set up in the shopping-booth area that was clearly devoted to hentai. You know, it said "Hentai" in big letters, and had tons of leather in the booth, and that's just what I could see from halfway across the room. And I was there chaperoning a trip with a bunch of high school kids. And at least two of them went over and looked at stuff in that booth.

I also saw more people wearing tails (of the furry, bushy sort, not the tuxedo sort) than I think I ever have in my life before. All in one place.

Friday night, I went to a Monty Python and the Holy Grail quote-along at a nearby independent theatre. Tonight, they had a Labyrinth sing-along. Both were amazing. It's a lot of fun to watch a movie with tons of other people who also know over half the words to the film, and sing along and say the lines along with not just the movie, but also everyone else in the theatre. It was also the dose of nerdiness I've been missing in my life. The crowd at these events consisted of a greater concentration of nerds per capita than I've been around in quite a long time. Possibly since visiting Mudders back in February. While waiting in line for Labyrinth, I had a conversation with the people behind me about Joss Whedon's development from moral absoluteness to moral ambiguity, both in the overall arc of Buffy, and in his movement through his different shows. I'll abstain from repeating myself here, since I figure any of you who care are already aware of that trend, but suffice it to say it was nice to have that sort of conversation with random people in a line.

I attended a small party last night. It reminded me quite a bit of the smaller parties we used to have back at Mudd, except that there was less of a range of alcoholic options, and there was no music. It was "Gatsby-themed," which evidently meant we were all to wear white. Having never read Gatsby, I just went along with the white thing and hoped that was good enough. Luckily, there were many people there not wearing white, so I figured I fit in better than they did. Now, I have a newly developed policy of not imbibing any alcohol. I went out drinking a few weeks ago and didn't enjoy myself at all. Nothing bad happened, I just wasn't happy. So I decided that, for the foreseeable future, alcohol is not for me. So, as I was about to say, I didn't drink anything at this party, and I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I usually enjoy such things. Being a good mathematician, the moment I thought that, I immediately countered with, "but correlation does not imply causation." It's true ... It may have been the different group of people, or the different atmosphere, or the lack of music, or the mere fact that I'm older and more confident than I used to be. The real test of my not-drinking-is-more-fun-for-me theory will come when I decide to go to a bar with friends and then don't imbibe. My guess is that I'll have more fun than I do when I drink, but that remains to be seen.

It's gotten quite late since I began typing this (I've taken a number of breaks to be more productive), so I suppose I should stop writing at this point. I hope you've all had a good weekend, and that your Memorial Day has been full of gratitude and hopefulness.

It's MCAS time again ...

2009-05-19T12:38:00.003-04:00

For those of you who didn't grow up in Massachusetts, the MCAS is a huge standardized test that each Massachusetts high school student must pass in order to graduate from the twelfth grade. Students (at least at MATCH) take these tests during the tenth grade, and can re-take them if necessary until they pass. Our kids generally pass the first time around. Anyway, as a combined consequence of the math MCAS taking place this week, and calculus being over, I have time today to relax and reflect a bit. And to update my blog. Because heaven knows I don't update as often as I wish I did. (If that sounded sarcastic ... It wasn't.)

Here at MATCH, the MCAS is a big deal. The school buys all the sophomores breakfast from Dunkin Donuts, makes sure they're well fed and well rested, and gives them tons of love and support. A lot of our success (and the recognition we get for it) comes for our gains in MCAS scores (kids' scores in tenth grade compared to their scores from the eighth grade), so these tests matter not only for our students' graduations, but also for our reputation (and therefore our funding). Part of this insane love-fest is the support each tutor gives to his or her kid(s) on the day of the test. Last month for the ELA MCAS, every single sophomore's locker was decorated by his or her tutor, and many tutors (including me) gave students goody bags during the test. This time around, the efforts were a bit more subdued, but many tutors made signs or bags of treats for their students.

At this point I should mention something many of you probably know about me. I'm a very affectionate person. I love telling people I care about them, and showing them it's true, and would do it rather more frequently were it not for time constraints and social awkwardness. Luckily, I work in a very affectionate school, where it is practically expected that I will shower my kids with all the love and affection I have to offer. I have to admit; it's glorious. So last night, I yet again decorated K's locker for the MCAS, this time with the nickname I gave him that never ceases to make him giggle (KKizzle). I threw a paper bag with a Butterfingers bar and a pencil in it, with a note stapled to the outside, into his locker for good measure. And I loved every second of it.

It's funny how my perfectionism manifests itself, although I'm guessing this is the same for most people. Until about midnight, I hadn't really decided to decorate K's locker. I was going to just write him a note and blow the rest off. Once I decided I was going to do it, though, I had to do it "right." It's the same thing I did with the senior posters last week. Once I decide to do something right, it has to be perfect, and it's that fact that keeps me up so late night after night, doing things that aren't exactly necessary. I could have just left a note in K's locker and it would have been fine. He would have loved it, and he would still have done fine on the MCAS today (math is his strong suit, after all). I couldn't let that go, though, and once I decided to do more, I suddenly had to go all the way. I suppose in some ways this (obsessively perfectionistic) quality is good; however, I'm not a huge fan of the lack of sleep that always seems to result.

While I'm mentioning K, I do have another short story I'd like to share about him. I know I've mentioned K before on this blog, but as a quick refresher ... K is my sophomore, and he's a brilliant kid and a wonderful student. He's very self-motivated, and does his work very diligently. Generally speaking, he's a pleasure to have in tutorial, and I try to tell him so. In any case, over April vacation, he and his mother went on a cruise to Cozumel. She took him as a treat for being his own awesome self, and he was really excited about it. When he got back, he told me tons of hilarious stories, including how he'd made friends with about twelve kids from the boat and they were going to keep hanging out now that they were all back in Boston. Then, a couple of days later, he dropped off a t-shirt in my mailbox when I wasn't there. I was so happy and gratified when I got it, and it made me very happy to know he'd been thinking of me. Here's the best part: He got me a size XL. It comes down almost to my knees. This, to me, is proof that he got this t-shirt without once consulting his mother. It just makes the whole thing that much better.

On a completely unrelated note ... I mentioned in my last entry that I've been practicing piano a lot more lately than I was before. I always get my best thinking done when I'm sitting at a piano, and the past couple of weeks have been no exception. Last night, I was thinking about how confident, comfortable, and graceful I always feel when I'm playing piano. I was trying to figure out why it is that I don't feel that way all the time, or at least more of the time. It took me a while, but eventually I realized something. I've spent more time intentionally practicing piano than I've spent intentionally practicing anything else. Now wait, you might argue. Surely I've spent more time socializing (for example) than I've spent playing piano. And that's true. But my socializing isn't (usually) an intentional practice session, replete with repetition and reflection. Usually socializing is a haphazard attempt to be "better than last time," without any real sense of how to get there. So of course I feel more graceful and confident at a piano. My piano practicing is intentional and reflective. It reminds me of the conversations we have with kids after a disciplinary issue occurs. It's not the punishment that causes them to change their behavior; it's the reflection and conversation that occurs before and after the punishment that force them to reflect and process their actions. So now I just need to figure out how to intentionally practice everything else in my life as much as I intentionally practice piano.

I was going to put a bit in here about religion, but bits about religion inevitably take a while, and this entry is already rather long, so I'll save that for another day. For now, take care, and enjoy the lovely spring weather wherever you are. :)

Off Days, Pipe Cleaners, and Rudin

2009-05-17T22:18:00.004-04:00

Life always seems to move more quickly exactly when you wish you had more time. The past couple of weeks have disappeared in seemingly no time at all. So here I am, on a Sunday night, feeling generally unmotivated and restless, and consequently updating my blog.

I've been practicing piano a bit more lately than I was earlier in the year. I pulled out my Rachmaninov book a week or two ago on a bit of a whim, and ended up deciding to relearn his Prelude in g minor (op. 23 no. 5 for those keeping score at home). Now, at risk of spending another paragraph extolling the virtues of Sergei Rachmaninov, let me just say this ... This piece is phenomenal. Find it on youtube (go to 2:47 in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX9_VpwyE84) and listen to it and you'll see what I mean. It's also one of the first piano pieces with which I feel completely and utterly in love. I played it on my senior recital in high school, and I never stopped loving it. Anyway, I've picked it back up in the past week or so, and have now re-learned the first four pages (out of six) fairly well.

With piano practice, however, come the inevitable difficulties of piano practice. Namely, they can't all be good days. Those of you who play a musical instrument, or who have ever practiced an instrument seriously (I'm including vocalists here, of course), will understand this. Sometimes you just have an off day. I compare this to the days when I go to the gym (which are few and far between, recently) and start working out and it doesn't feel good, and doesn't make me happy. It's no fun, but you work out for a while anyway just to stay in the habit, and hope you'll have another on-day soon. It's horribly obnoxious, because it takes an activity that is usually a joy and turns it into a chore. It happens with me and piano from time to time. Today was an off day. Usually playing piano feels natural to me, as though I were born playing. Today the keys felt alien, and disconnected from my fingers. I kept stumbling over phrases I know well and losing track of where I was in more difficult passages. So I played for a while and then gave up. It all makes me very tempted to go back down tonight and try again. The on-days are an addiction. No matter how many off-days I have, I keep going back, hoping for another day when it all just clicks.

The seniors have finished school now. Calculus has been over since Tuesday, when they all took their final exam, and my schedule has been preposterously empty since then. It's nice to have time to do mindless work, and to prepare for my other tutorials. Ironically enough, I'm pretty sure I've gotten more done in the past week since calculus ended, than I did back when calculus was still in session. This past Friday, however, was the senior assembly, when we recognized all the work the seniors have done, and how far they've come to get through this school. The senior tutors all made posters, one for each senior, to express our appreciation for them and to celebrate their achievement. One of the posters I made was for a boy, S, who is a rapper and has a fairly complicated tag he puts on all his schoolwork. For his poster, I took his tag, drew it larger on a poster, and then created the tag out of pipe cleaners and hot glued it onto the poster board. Let me just tell you ... This poster took me forever. I'm not artistically inclined, so blowing up that tag took me long enough in itself. Then the pipe cleaners and the hot glue ... Suffice it to say that for a while, I never wanted to see a pipe cleaner again in my life. He loved the poster, though, and it came out really well. I was very proud of how gorgeous it was, and it was gratifying to see how excited he was when he saw it.

It's taken me a while to get to this point, but I really miss math. I miss grappling with problems and writing proofs and typing in LaTeX. Call me insane, but it's been a long time, and calculus, wonderful though it is, just doesn't float my boat the way it did back when I took it for the first time. In order to prevent myself from missing college too much, I've pulled out my old copy of Rudin and started working through the problems again. For those unacquainted with college mathematics, Rudin is the canonical Real Analysis textbook, and it's full of challenging (and obnoxious) problems [log/exponent problems from Chapter 1, anyone?]. I'm starting with chapter 1, and I've been just taking the problems to tutorial and working on them when my kids are busy with their own work. It's been lovely to struggle with math again, although at the moment I'm stuck procrastinating on the exponent problem until I read through the chapter again. I don't remember this stuff well enough to do it without. Either that or I'm just insanely intimidated. I'm not going to lie; the exponent problem scares me even now.

This past Friday, I was working with G on some math stuff in preparation for the SAT test he'll take in early June. I had pulled out my computer and was typing up problem 1 from Rudin [Given r rational and x irrational, show that rx and r+x are irrational] when he looked up from his work and asked what I was doing. This, of course, led to a long discussion about proof techniques, centering primarily on proofs by contradiction and induction. It was a lot of fun to show him how to construct these arguments in a logically tight fashion, and to show him how concise mathematical writing can and should be. I don't think I could really explain math properly until I became proficient at writing proofs, and it was fun to see him coming to the realization that his own math writing could be improved substantially by studying proof-writing. He's one of the brightest kids here at MATCH, and it's always fun to talk about math with him. We've gotten into some very interesting discussions about everything from the Monty Hall problem to the benefits of using LaTeX to the definition of a fractal (replete with a discussion of geometric series and finding areas of Sierpinski's Triangle, of course). It never fails to remind me of how much I miss being part of a community full of mathematicians and scientists.

It occurs to me that I haven't yet told the world (as seen through the lens of blog readership, of course) what I'm doing next year. I'm going to continue working at MATCH, but I'll be doing some very different work from what I've been doing this year. I've spent this year tutoring kids and working with them directly, imparting knowledge to whatever extent I can and providing both academic and emotional support. Next year, I'll be stepping away from students a bit and instead doing curriculum development with the (primarily) math and (secondarily) science departments. I'll still be working with Chris, the AP Calculus teacher, which will be awesome. He and I get along really well, and he's a lot of fun to work with. I'll be working on developing a coherent scope and sequence for the math curricula across grades 6 through 12 here at MATCH, ensuring that our students are prepared for AP Calculus by the time they get to their senior year of high school. It's an exciting job, and I can't wait to get a bit more behind the scenes and see a bit more of the planning that goes on here. I'm also looking forward to getting a bit more perspective on mathematics teaching here at MATCH, in the hopes that doing so will give me insight into mathematics teaching in general.

Anyway, I've rambled for long enough, so I think I'll go for now ... It's hard to believe it's been a year since graduation ... I think I'll just try to avoid thinking about that ...

Peace One Day

2009-05-03T13:06:00.002-04:00

It's going to be difficult to write this entry without turning it into a bit of a sales pitch, but I think that's okay in this case.

Being a successful, fairly well-known charter school has its benefits. One of them is that we have the opportunity to bring in some impressive speakers to talk to our kids. As an example, when the ninth graders were studying the Holocaust, we had a Holocaust survivor here to speak to them, to tell them his story. We also show our kids some pretty powerful movies; they watched Schindler's List as part of the same Holocaust unit, and it made quite an impression both on them, and on those of us who watched them reacting to it. Last week, however, we had a speaker here who, in my opinion, topped all the other speakers and movies we've shown our kids. He certainly made a bigger emotional impact on me than just about any single event this year has.

The speaker's name was Jeremy Gilley, and he is the founder of an organization called Peace One Day. Before I launch into my own personal reactions to his talk, let me tell you something about him and his organization. He is a documentary filmmaker who was appalled by the things he saw as he traveled the world to make his documentaries. The images of war, refugee camps, and the devastating lack of resources available in such camps astonished him, and he decided he had to do something about it. His solution? To create an international Peace Day, recognized by the United Nations, on which there is a global ceasefire. Now, I didn't watch the full-length video with the kids, so I don't know all the details here, but the Day was adopted by the general assembly of the UN in September of 2001, creating September 21 as an international "day of global ceasefire and nonviolence."

Here's the incredible thing ... It's working. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has called a ceasefire each 21 September, allowing doctors and volunteers to go into the country to vaccinate millions of children. In the Congo, there was a child soldier repatriation project on the day. Around the world, communities are joining together to create their own projects to commemorate the day, from soccer games to cultural celebrations. Now, I'm going to stop rattling on about things you can just as well (and probably better) read on his website [which, incidentally, is www.peaceoneday.org if you're interested]. But before I stop giving my sales pitch for this organization, let me just mention ... They're now going around to schools around the world, getting young people involved and asking questions, troubleshooting the organization with the concerns of youth even as they spread information and get more people involved in the Day. And, as Jeremy said, if we can have peace for one day, what's to stop us from having peace for two days?

So. To move away from a sales pitch and into the reason I'm writing this post ... I should first mention that I was watching this talk with my freshmen. I was sitting with them, because I'd forced them to sit near me so I could manage their behavior. Jeremy showed a short video at the beginning of his talk that summarized some of the successes of the project, as well as showing some powerful images of the vaccinations that took place in Afghanistan, and some of the talks he's had with youth around the world. Now, I know I'm an emotional sap, but I should tell you that around my kids, I'm really not. That video, however, pushed past that barrier and made me cry. Sure, I hid it from my kids by pretending my eyes were just itchy, but it was incredible. That feeling of inspiration and impact continued as he spoke, and as our kids asked him questions about himself and his organization. Their questions were insightful and probing, and I was so proud of them.

Possibly the most powerful moment, however, was probably not one a lot of kids noticed. One of our students had asked Jeremy what people had influenced him most in his life. After talking about his parents and his family for a while, he pointed to the back of the room and said something to the effect of, "And that's Tom, my best friend, who's supported me since I first got this idea." In that moment, I really realized something I've known for a while. I want to be the guy in the back of the room. I don't want to be the guy in the front of the room, talking to people ... I want to be the guy in the back of the room. I want to be on the sidelines, fleshing out ideas, driving change, but doing so from behind the scenes. I've known for so long now that being famous, being in front, isn't my cup of tea, but I'd never articulated it to myself to this extent before.

In the back of my head, however, is the little voice Steinberg put there during Public Speaking. The one that says that maybe that isn't something I get to choose. All the way through Public Speaking, I wanted Steinberg to tell me that I was bad at it, that I was a horrible public speaker. If he did that, then I could give up on public speaking and relegate it to the dustbin of Skills I Don't Have. He never did that, though. He did the opposite. He told me that I was good at public speaking. And he kept asking me how I was going to use my skills (he meant writing and speaking) to make a difference. So I can't help but think that his point here was, maybe I want to be the guy in the back of the room, but sometimes that guy has to step forward and lead. Maybe, in order to accomplish the things I need to accomplish, I need to step forward and be in the front of the room.

The idea terrifies me.

Online Dating Sites ... And a Rhapsody on Rachmaninov

2009-05-01T09:19:00.003-04:00

I know I promised more regular updates, and here it is over a month after my last entry. The past month has been a bit insane at school. The AP Calculus exam is this coming Wednesday, so we've been spending the past month and a half preparing for the exam. Needless to say, this is both stressful and time consuming. However, it's the Friday before the exam, and I'm sitting in Room 202 proctoring a four-hour practice MCAS exam, so I figured I could at least use this time marginally productively.

The next item on my list of Blog Topics (yes, it's an actual list) is online dating sites. Now, I don't know how you all view the idea of online dating, but I'm going to do my best to explain not just how I feel about it now, but how my current attitudes have developed over the past months.

My excursion into the brave new world of online dating websites came on a lonely evening back in early February when I got bored. Under pressure from a friend who (I can only assume) was similarly bored and wanted some amusement, I ended up on craigslist, viewing personals around Boston. At that point, my position on the matter of online dating was unambiguously negative. The idea of finding a meaningful relationship over the internet struck me as bordering on ridiculous, and that of meeting someone I knew only through the internet terrified me. I'm not generally paranoid, but I'll admit that when I look through craigslist personals, all I can think to this day is that they all might be serial killers. I also couldn't get out of my head the idea of talking to my potential children one day and telling them, "We met on a dating website." That has never quite been on my list of places to meet ... You know, "the man I'm going to spend the rest of my life with." So for all of these reasons, when I began perusing the personals, I had no intention of responding to any of them. Unfortunately, I really was bored and lonely, so by the end of that evening I had sent an email to a poster.

The post I responded to seemed nice and interesting. It was entitled something like, "My cat needs new friends," and had a remarkable dearth of spelling and grammar errors, especially compared to the average craigslist posting. I received a fairly speedy response from a man named Dave, and we exchanged a few more lovely, long emails about everything from favorite books to the prudence of mixing broccoli with chocolate. The beginning of the end with Dave was the moment I found out he'd not gone to college. I sat on that email for about a week while he sent a couple more asking if I was okay. I couldn't reconcile the fact that I was teaching kids that college is important with the idea of being involved (in any meaningful way) with a guy who had chosen the opposite path. I also couldn't imagine being with someone who couldn't enjoy the intricacies of abstract, college-level mathematics. So, although I did respond at the end of the week, I must admit that I was glad when he didn't reply anymore. And thus, I developed my first rule for Guys I Meet Online. I needed to find a guy who was at least college-educated, preferably nerdy, who would at least listen and appreciate when I talked about math, if not join in.

My next foray into online dating was much more extensive. I created a profile at OKCupid and began taking their wonderful procrastilicious quizzes. I received an abundance of messages while I was on the site, and ended up responding to quite a few of them. I had some lovely conversations with guys who were interesting and ranged from intensely nerdy to only mildly so. There were two guys in particular with whom I had long interactions. One of them was named Jake, and even his first message to me was long and genuine. We exchanged a number of multiple-page messages, and got to know each other fairly well. In the end, though, he asked if I was a workaholic, saying he couldn't handle workaholics. By that point I'd begun to realize that he was insecure, frequently came off as arrogant, and was quite a workaholic himself, so it was a bit of a relief to have a way out of the whole thing. As I explained to him, in my job, if I'm not a workaholic, I'm not doing it right. We pretty much stopped talking after that.

The other important connection I made on OKC was with a fellow named Justin who was a graduate student at MIT. We emailed back and forth a few times, getting to know each other a bit, and then one day he emailed me to say that Boston Symphony tickets were half-off the following week. Now, the concerts were on weeknights, so I was going to say I could attend, but then I looked at the program. The BSO, in conjunction with Stephen Hough, was playing my all-time favorite piano piece of all time, Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Well, I was hardly going to pass that up, especially at such a discounted price, so I agreed to go with him. Now, before I describe the music, I should describe the date. Put bluntly, it sucked. He hardly talked all evening, barely reacted to the music, and was entirely uninteresting. I remained as animated as I could, attempting to induce him to conversation, but to no avail. I don't know if he was nervous or just not as interesting as he'd seemed over email, but whatever it was, the date sucked.

The music, on the other hand, was phenomenal. I titled this entry to include a rhapsody on Rachmaninov, and this paragraph is it. That particular piece of music is gorgeous and soul-shaking in a glorious way. For those of you who haven't heard it, I highly suggest going on youtube and listening to Stephen Hough's performance with the BBC symphony orchestra (part 1 at this address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G0YvPgrYrg ). This piece is phenomenal. The build-up is slow and steady, and the energy and suspense levels get higher and higher throughout the beginning of the piece, up until the (most famous) climactic eighteenth variation, when, after another build-up, the entire orchestra seems to take flight. There was a moment in this variation (during a slower, quieter section) when the entire audience at the BSO literally sighed together. The entire time, I sat there grinning my head off, and during that middle variation, I nearly started crying. To put all of this a different way, that piece makes every single part of me want to laugh, cry, and sing, all at the same time. To finally see it performed ... Let's just say I couldn't stop talking about it for days.

In any case, I suppose I should come back to the real world and stop gushing about the Rhapsody. Like I said, that date didn't go very well, and after that my participation in the online dating world slowly wound down to nothing. In retrospect, I must say that online dating really was not for me. It centers around an ability to be judgmental without feeling guilty afterward, to pick and choose between messages, between guys, and that's not something with which I've ever been comfortable. I always ended up feeling bad about not responding to messages, so I ended up feeling inundated most of the time. Online dating was clearly not my cup of tea, as I came to realize upon reflection. That being said, my opinion on it did change considerably over the past months. I can certainly see the benefits and attractions of online dating in general. For people like me with hefty jobs and little time to devote to hobbies, it's a very viable way of meeting new people and getting to know them. Although still a bit unconventional, it's gaining both popularity and credibility, and although there are certainly sketchballs out there, I was only messaged by one in my month at OKC, out of the tens of guys who messaged me. I guess my point is that, although I didn't find it to be a good fit for me, I see no problem with online dating for others. My problems with it were my own, and were based on my own values and perspectives, and for those with different perspectives, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend online dating. I certainly miss the feeling of being connected with people, even if some of those connections were trivial or fleeting. Online dating definitely has its perks.

Ben Folds, and the Fiasco that was Lupe

2009-03-28T15:02:00.003-04:00

I know, I haven't updated this blog in ages. If my calculations are correct, it's been almost three full months. I'm sorry about that. I wish I could say that nothing has been happening, and that's why I've not been writing, but that would just be a bald-faced lie. If I manage to get my act together, you can expect at least a couple of entries about everything from Rachmaninov to online dating to at least a paragraph extolling the virtues of Crayola twistable colored pencils.

For now, however, I want to write about last night. Last night was full of a new experience, and unfortunately it wasn't all good. In order to understand this story, you must first know that, until last night, I had never been to a rock concert. I'd been to classical concerts, and a couple of concerts that were vaguely rock-y, but in classical settings (Jason Robert Brown from last year comes to mind, as an example). I'd never been to a big rock concert before, and a large part of me was ashamed of that fact. I often justified it by saying that I didn't really get into music other than classical until I was in high school, and didn't really start listening to other stuff regularly until college. The bottom line, however, is that I'm sheltered and I know it.

With all that as a preface, last night I went to my first rock concert. It was a joint concert with both Ben Folds and Lupe Fiasco. I'm a huge Ben Folds fan, and a lot of the kids at school love Lupe. From what I've heard of Lupe's stuff, I've enjoyed him in the past, so I figured I'd have a great time. For the first half or so, that was mostly true. I was a bit overwhelmed by the huge number of people in the arena, by the lights that periodically shone in my eyes, by the loud volume of everything, by the screaming, and by the atmosphere as a whole. Nonetheless, the music was incredible and I loved watching Ben's hands as he played piano. I was a bit alarmed when he threw his bench at the piano at the end of his portion, but was reassured that this was par for the course as rock concerts go. I was a bit unsettled, but decided it was just a part of the culture that I wouldn't understand.

Then the Lupe portion of the concert began. Even before he came on stage, I got the feeling that this piece wouldn't be as enjoyable for me. Now, you must understand, I have no issues with Lupe's rap or the music in general; however, although I hadn't thought it possible, everything was about to get even more overwhelming. The volume was suddenly about twice as loud as Ben Folds' portion of the concert. It was loud enough that on the bass notes and bass drum hits, it felt like wind was blowing on my pants. There were suddenly strobe lights going nearly the entire time, flashing directly in my eyes. The audience was screaming constantly, and somehow over all of this Lupe was shouting lyrics I couldn't understand into a microphone that was loud enough to dominate everything else.

For those of you who think this sounds like heaven, let me explain something. I honestly felt like I was being attacked. I felt like something was literally trying to attack me. The lights kept flashing in my eyes, and my head began to ache from all the noise. The bass and throbbing drums made it impossible for me to breathe regularly. Every time it all paused for a second, I'd realize my heart was beating faster and faster, and that I'd been breathing irregularly. I got progressively more and more panicked. I kept thinking it would get easier, that I would get used to it and it would become fun. Instead, I felt more and more overwhelmed and panicked, completely overloaded by all the lights and noise and people and everything around me. I couldn't leave because I couldn't take the T back home by myself that late at night, so I had to wait until someone I was with decided to leave early. Before that happened, I endured at least thirty minutes of what I could only describe as pure agony.

The moral of this story is that rock concerts are simply not a good idea for me. The Ben Folds concert was manageable, but I'm not sure I'd call it enjoyable, really. It was very difficult to remain focused on the music some of the time. When he did my favorite songs, I was fine, but there were times even in his portion of the concert when I felt myself being panicking. As for Lupe's concert ... I never want to feel like that ever again. After I got home, I spent half an hour sitting in a dark, silent room, just shaking and crying. I was completely panicked and overloaded in a way I've never been before, and it was miserable. It took me about five hours to calm down enough to go to bed. I honestly don't understand how anyone could enjoy something like that. All it felt like for me was a whole bunch of pain. So no more rock concerts for me.

In good news, I can listen to drums again, now, fifteen hours later. It took me about an hour to get comfortable with music today, honestly. It's going to take a while to recover from all of last night, but as long as I stay away from such things in the future, I figure I'll be fine ...

Tradition ...

2009-01-03T23:48:00.004-05:00

In the first blog I ever used, I wrote an epic New Year's entry. Since then, I've begun to see it as a bit of a tradition to recap the previous year. Usually I write the entry on New Year's or New Year's Eve, but I never quite got around to it. If I recall correctly, I thought of it between Pride and Prejudice and whatever other chick flick I watched that night. It just never quite happened. So here I am, a couple of days late, to write my traditional end-of-year entry.

Last year at this time, I was at home between semesters at Mudd, for the last time in my life. Of course, at this point last year I also had another two weeks of winter break ahead of me, whereas this year I have to go back to work in two days. Then again, a lot has changed since last year.

After an eventful trip to the Joint Math Meetings in San Diego, I started off my spring semester ready to finish up a thesis and a college degree. I was taking two phenomenal classes, one in Constitutional law, and one called Policymaking in International Organizations. I was also taking a course on human rights, and of course working on my thesis. It wasn't until the spring that my thesis finally started taking form, and following the Joint Meetings, I was on a bit of a mathematics high for a while. As a result, I got a strong start out of the gate that kept me going throughout the rest of the semester. Writing a thesis in mathematics, for those of you who haven't experienced this unique joy, is very difficult. It turns out you spend most of your time barking up empty trees and chasing down dead end trails. You also get a lot of chalk dust and whiteboard ink on your hands. By the end of the year, although I hadn't quite finished the proof I'd set out to complete, I'd experienced the life of a mathematician, in all its glories and defeats.

As for my politics classes, I couldn't get enough of them. Constitutional Law involved tons of reading and tons of work, but the process of analyzing judicial arguments was fascinating. It all reminded me of the phase I went through in my early middle school years when I wanted to be a lawyer. I became enraptured with the analytical process involved in discussing legal idiosyncracies. It was also nice to take a class in which philosophical arguments over abortion, or gay marriage, had very little place. The question wasn't whether or not you believed something was right, but rather whether or not you could justify it using the Constitution, and prior jurisprudence. We had some incredibly scintillating discussions, and I always left class feeling stimulated and excited to continue the discussion later.

Policymaking in International Organizations was just as exciting, although in different ways. Learning about the inner workings of the World Bank, the UN, and other international organizations, and discussing the ways they could be improved, was enlightening. There's something very encouraging and confidence-inspiring about writing a memo about how an international organization could improve itself, and having your professor comment that your suggestions are so good that the organization itself has used them in the past. I also got to write an incredibly fun paper on conditional cash transfers and education. It was far from being the best paper I've written, but I got to read governmental reports, some of them in Spanish, so I felt pretty hardcore anyway.

I'm not sure my course on human rights deserves much more than a passing mention, but I'll write a bit about it anyway. It turns out that the way to inspire and encourage proper debate as a professor is not to agree with anything your students say. The contrast between this class and my ConLaw course was pronounced and impressive. My ConLaw professor knew how to use the Socratic method, and knew how to use it properly. My Human Rights professor did not. It made it very difficult to care about the course as a whole.

During all this, I was trying (and failing) to come up with ideas of what to do after graduation. I poked around the internet, mostly, and found a few job ideas. I even went into LA for a day for an interview with PIRG. They never got back to me after that interview, but I realized at some point that I didn't really want to work for them anyway. By the time May rolled around, I was no closer to having a plan for life after graduation than I'd been in December. I was, however, feeling nostalgic about my entire Mudd experience.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about my Mudd experience, these days. I miss Mudd terribly, and I miss everyone there. I wish I could go back, and it'd certainly be easier than the real world, and more understandable. Unfortunately, going back isn't really an option. I could spend a long time talking about all the things I wish I'd done differently while I was there. I wish I'd spent more time maintaining friendships, and I wish I'd done a better job of finding friendships in the first place. I wish I'd taken more classes, other classes, or taken my classes more seriously. The list is endless, really. However, it's rather pointless to sit around wishing I'd done things differently. What's done is done, and all I can do at this point is try to do better in the future. Regardless of those regrets, my four years in college were, despite their pains and difficulties, the best of my life so far. I was in a comfortable, wonderful, welcoming place, experiencing things that challenged me and my worldviews. I met many amazing people, and can only hope I stay in touch with at least some of them for the rest of my life. I've been trying to avoid looking back, and wishing I could stay in that place, with those people, forever. Suffice it to say that, with memories like these, it's hard to turn and look forward.

After graduation, I bummed around my house in Iowa for about a month before deciding to go to Boston for the summer and attend Harvard summer school. I took a course in economics, which is about where this blog picked up in the first place. I've never liked economics before, and that I did in spite of an uninteresting course and a less-than-inspiring professor makes me want to pursue the subject in other circumstances. After all, calculus makes everything better. At some point during that summer, I got this job at MATCH, and now here we are. It seems rather silly to recap the bits of the year I've written about in this blog at such length, so I won't. I'll just reiterate that I love my job, and although some things (social and living situations, and amount of sleep, for example) are less than ideal, it's all worth it for the fact that I get to go downstairs and interact with these kids every day of the week.

As for next year ... Well, I find myself in an ironically similar position to where I was a year ago. I have no idea what I'm going to be doing a year from now. I have plenty of ideas, but they're all rather half-baked and unfinished. Goodness knows when I'll figure that out. At least for now, I have a job and a place to live, so at the moment I'm not complaining. The future will get figured out at some point. I won't believe this a few moments after I write it, but here it goes anyway ... I'm young, and I've got quite a bit of life ahead of me. It may be haphazard to live off the cuff like this, with no plans beyond mid-June, but it's more exciting this way, and some part of me really enjoys it. Most of the time, it bothers me, but every once in a while, I'm reminded of how exhilarating it is to wing it and see what happens, so to speak.

So there we go. One epic entry recapping my year. Or at least, recapping the first half of the year and mentioning the latter half. That's what I get for being so verbose.

At any rate, happy New Year to all. I hope you each find the energy and courage to make this year better than the last, and to live your dreams with conviction and integrity.

Cheers!

"I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."

2008-12-14T13:36:00.002-05:00

Name that quote for nerdy respect points.

It's occurred to me recently that I haven't been updating nearly as much as I used to be. For those of you actually keeping track of my blog, I apologize. It's been an interesting few weeks. I try to avoid updating when I'm in certain (generally bad) moods, for a couple of reasons. First off, I try to avoid inflicting my bad moods on the public at large in any sense of the phrase. Second, my bad moods are generally short-lived, and blogging about them would both make it appear that they were longer and more serious than they are, and make me more prone to remain in them longer. Unfortunately, I generally only have time to blog on the weekends, so when I have a bad weekend, chances are I'll just skip blogging that week. Hence the long silence.

Since I've brought up my bad weekends, I figure I owe at least a general explanation as to why they were bad. Broadly speaking, when my weekends are unpleasant, it's because of some sort of social problem. My weeks have their ups and downs, but those are primarily based on work. Weekends are really the only time that I have the opportunity to really think about (and, therefore, have issues with) my social life. The frustration there is usually based in the fact that people here are not like people at Mudd. At Mudd, everyone was awkward all the time, and it meant that people understood me pretty well, and my awkwardness made me fit in, not stick out. Here, I'm one of the most socially awkward people around, and as a result, socialization is an uphill battle for me. I have to force myself to socialize at all, and it's always difficult.

I've also been very frustrated with the fact that nearly all socialization here takes place over alcohol. Our work parties are at bars, people go to bars on weekend evenings, and basically the entire social scene revolves around bars and alcohol. Personally, I think that's stupid. If you're already friends with people, going to a bar with them makes sense from time to time ... I mean, you can't really hear each other talk all that well, but I can understand the draw of the atmosphere, at least on an intermittent basis. People don't go to bars for that reason, however, or at least it seems secondary to the chance to meet people. This is where I really don't understand the culture. Why would you go to a bar to meet people you won't be able to hear, over a mind-altering chemical that makes you both act differently than you do normally? This hardly seems like a basis for any sort of lasting or meaningful relationship. It seems like so much of our culture revolves around this idea, and personally I think it's neither wise nor fun.

So those are my rants about my social life. As I said, this is really only an issue on the weekends, so it's not the end of the world or anything. I just need to find other ways of socializing, and other people with whom to do so. Don't worry, it's on my list of things to work on.

As for work itself, things are going great. I still absolutely love my job. There have been times in the past couple of weeks when I've wished I didn't live here, or that I didn't have to deal with the adults I work with, but all of that is secondary to the kids. Even on the days when I felt like hiding under my bed all day, I never considered skipping tutorial to do so. It was always that I'd hide under my bed whenever I wasn't working with my kids. As usual, the easiest way for me to conceptualize these entries is by telling a number of random anecdotes. I haven't yet thought of a more coherent way of writing about this job in more overarching story arcs. If I ever do, you'll notice.

The first MATCH basketball game was yesterday afternoon. There were actually two games; a girls' game and a boys' game. We lost both of them. Nonetheless, for first games, they didn't go terribly. We lost the boys' game by only about seven points, and although the split on the girls' game was a bit worse, our score wasn't entirely unrespectable. I have to say, this was the most exciting sporting event I've been to since my brother played indoor soccer at the armory back home. This was also one of the first sporting events I've been to since those indoor soccer games, so I suppose that doesn't say much. I've never been invested in a basketball game before, so this was very exciting. I'm finally starting to learn some of the rules of basketball as a result, so that I, too, can be incensed with the officials when they call fouls against our team.

The most striking thing about the basketball game, however, wasn't the game itself. It was the moment when I walked into the gym, a few minutes late to the game (I'd been eating a sandwich outside), and looked at the stands. The other team had a few people there, certainly nothing to be ashamed of. Our side of the stands, however, was full of people. There were students, tutors, and a few other staff members, all sitting and cheering and supporting our team. It was hard to find seats in those stands because they were so densely packed with spectators. The sheer volume of support behind our teams is what impressed me. This school really cares. We say all the time that we're a family, and it gets all corny and whatnot, but when it comes down to it, that's true. We really are a family, and it shows in our interactions on the basketball court as well as in our hallways and classrooms.

A week ago, I began my journey into real teacher land. I've started a BC calculus program for some of the students in the calculus class here. It was supposed to happen this weekend, as well, but that fell through because many of them were taking the ACT yesterday. A week ago, however, I planned and taught my first lesson for BC calculus. It didn't go perfectly. As a matter of fact, I wasn't at all impressed with the extent to which I conveyed the information in an understandable way. I was teaching the basics of polar coordinates and polar functions, starting with graphing complex numbers in the complex plane, and I think I lost them somewhere around DeMoivre's Theorem. After that, when I started trying to define polar coordinates, they were already lost enough that I didn't really have much of a chance. On the positive side, though, I took the last half hour of class to show them the polar graphing capabilities of their graphing calculators, and then gave them time to play around with that and find cool-looking graphs. Even if they didn't understand what their calculators were doing, they loved this. As a result, they're all very excited about BC calculus and want to continue taking the extra classes on Saturdays to prepare for the BC exam. If I can continue this kind of high morale, I have a chance of having a bunch of kids learn to really love mathematics. It's exhilarating.

Calculus tutorial itself has been going slightly less well. I've been having trouble managing my classroom, primarily because I keep forgetting that it's my classroom. The number one barrier to effective classroom management is forgetting that it's my classroom, my lesson, and my tutorial. I can't let them commandeer any of those things, and once I do, everything else begins to fall apart. My other big issue with this is that I go into calculus tutorial focused on teaching calculus. Managing the classroom has become far too much of a secondary concern for me at this point, and I need to make it more of a focus. Unfortunately, this means that, at least initially, I'll need to take some of my focus away from calculus, which is a pity. Nonetheless, it's better to have a well-managed, slightly less mathematically awesome tutorial, than it is to have a tutorial that can't be awesome because it's falling apart at the seams. So my goal for next week is to improve my classroom management in calculus tutorial. We'll see how that goes.

My freshman tutorial has been going rather well lately. I brought my computer down to tutorial a couple of weeks ago (right before a big grammar test) and let each of my guys take a turn playing the grammar game on freerice.com. They loved the chance to use a computer during tutorial, and the grammar questions were perfect for what I needed. Since then, we've used computers during tutorial one other time, on a day when they'd just had three big tests and had less homework than usual. We all went into the computer lab that day and spent about thirty-five minutes using sheppardsoftware.com to learn the names and locations of African countries (on which they were quizzed the following day). I've been trying to come up with other gimmicky ways of getting them excited about tutorial. Using computer time as an incentive did wonders for their behavior on the days we had it, so I'd love to come up with other methods of tricking them into behaving and learning efficiently. Until I find other ideas, though, computer quizzes seem to work fairly well.

I've realized lately that I don't reward my guys nearly enough. I've never been a huge fan of positive incentives for my guys, because they remove the opportunity to perform or behave without the incentive. I want them to get good grades because they want to, and behave well because they know they should, not because I'm offering them food or a prize at the end. The problem with this theory is that I've been neglecting to actually reward them when they do impress me. The biggest case study of this is K, my sophomore. He consistently impresses me, and yet I've done a total of virtually nothing to reward him for doing so. I've promised him I'll show him an episode of The Simpsons (A Streetcar Named Marge, which is about Streetcar Named Desire, which we just finished reading), but I haven't managed to get ahold of the DVD yet. I really should take him out to dinner or a movie or something at this point, because he really does deserve it. As for my freshmen ... I need to find positive things to fixate on, and then reward those behaviors. My guys aren't consistently impressing me, but they're improving, and I don't pay attention to or reward that often enough.

Anyway, I've written quite a bit, and I still need to get laundry done today, so I should wrap up this entry. I'll try to update a bit more regularly, but then, I've been saying that since June, so I can't guarantee anything. I hope you're all having a wonderful December, and not spending as much time as I am wondering where in hell October and November went. I swear it was September a few days ago. Time does strange things these days.

Cheers!

"For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset ...

2008-11-22T23:40:00.002-05:00

... And the baths of all the western stars." To those who recognize the quote, go read it again. It's worth it. To those who don't, google it. And then read it. It's worth it.

It's been, as usual, quite an eventful week. As evidenced by my brief midweek entry, a lot has been going on in my meta-life, not just my life itself. A lot is changing, which makes sense given how much of my actual life is changing these days. My current project is much the same as it's been for the past few years; to make myself more confident and responsible, and to stop taking responsibility for things that are not mine. For a number of diverse (and somewhat ironic) reasons, I've made a large amount of progress on these fronts lately. I find this very encouraging, and I can't help but be publicly proud of myself from time to time. It's rather infrequent that I can see such appreciable change in myself in such a short span of time, and I'm positively revelling in it. As for my actual life, the past week has been full of fun stories and good days, so I'll share some of them here.

There's a freshman girl here whom I will call A. Like most freshmen, A is far from being mature, and (like fewer freshmen) A has quite an attitude. She tends to be difficult, and although I don't interact with her regularly, I know her reputation rather well. Every morning after first period, I see A on her way to math class. I try to say hello to as many students as I can, preferably by name, but for some reason A has been on my radar since Day 1. Every morning, I say either "Hi" or "Good Morning," followed by her name. Every morning since Day 1, A has returned my (somewhat obnoxiously) cheerful greeting with a bit of a grunt and, some days, a little bit of eye contact. It's been clear that my greetings are unwelcome, but she's not being outright disrespectful, so I'm okay with the grunts. This week, on Wednesday, however, something changed. Maybe she was having a good morning, or maybe she's just getting sick of me saying hi to her every day, but on Wednesday, A said "Hi" back.

On a somewhat similar note, there's a senior in my calculus class whom I will call H. I've had some trouble dealing with H in the past. She blows hot and cold, never quite seeming to believe that I care about her, never quite seeming to believe she can do well at calculus, and never really buying into the class as a whole. Some days she seemed to love me, other days she clearly despised me, and I never really knew how to interact with her. As a result, I maintained a cheerful, supportive demeanor no matter what she said to me. It seemed the best reaction to her mutability. Nonetheless, I kept hoping that she'd give me some sign that calculus was going well for her, or that she cared about it at all. It seems like so much of how this job goes is defined by whether or not any given kid is having a good day. This past Thursday, H had a good day. In calculus tutorial, she offered enthusiastically to write on the board for me, and proceeded to do so impeccably. She didn't get too far ahead of me, kept track of her classmates' concerns, and wrote neatly and legibly. She was happy to be there, so I let her stay for nearly the entire period. It was incredible. Not only was she engaged, but her writing meant that I had the time and attention to focus on the rest of the class. As a result, tutorial ran more smoothly than it has in a very long time. We got tons of work done, and H remained happy and engaged. I need to figure out how to tap into her enthusiasm more often, clearly. : )

On Tuesday, my sophomore (K) and I were reviewing vocabulary. The packet we were using suggested playing charades. So we did. It became the most epic game of charades ever. It was incredible. From me miming backstabbing another tutor (duplicitous) to his pretending to draw a box on the floor and then stepping out of it (excursion), we were really getting into it. Meanwhile, another two tutorial groups got involved. One student, T, was acting out everything by going around hunched over, pretending to bite things. This applied to "hyena," "locust," "ravage," and at least four or five other words that looked essentially identical. I ran around waving my arms in people's faces (hysterical), put chairs around myself and pretended to be a rabbit coming out of a hat (conjure), and walked around the room moving objects from one place to another (epic, although K thought it was more peculiar than anything else). K pretended to have road rage (incensed), shook his finger at another student (rant), and put his foot down emphatically (resolute). The whole day was hilarious and enjoyable, and our tutorial room was a little bit insane. Nonetheless, we were all getting a lot of vocab review done, so the chaos was justified. It was amazing. Clearly we should play charades more often.

On Thursday at lunch, I checked my mail and found my beautiful bound copy of my senior thesis sitting there waiting for me. The math department had finally gotten it sent out, and it is gorgeous. It has a red cover, and the title is imprinted on it in gold printing. I especially got a kick out of the copyright page. Seeing "Copyright 2008 Sara Gussin" was really a thrill. Anyway, because I was so excited about it, I showed it to a lot of people that day. Sophomore tutorial was right after lunch, so I had my thesis with me there. K was supposed to be getting started on a quiz first thing, but that wasn't supposed to take the entire period, so I let him look at my thesis as his Do Now, instead. We ended up spending about five minutes looking through it together, whispering to avoid disrupting other tutorials. I showed him the math that was my original work, and the pretty pictures I made with Matlab. He was very excited about it. I must admit, I loved hearing him tell me I was awesome over and over again. There's something about open admiration from my students that makes me incredibly proud of who I am. Overall, it was just amazing to see him get so excited about math, even math he didn't understand at all.

On Thursday afternoon, I met with a calculus student, C, after school. He'd missed a few days of class, and I needed to get him caught up on all of the derivative rules, as well as logarithms and exponentials. Quite the line-up, especially since C isn't the strongest student. He's dedicated and works hard, but calculus does not come easily to him. Anyway, we sat down to do calculus right after school, at about 5:15. There were other students around, so I didn't spend all my time working with him. I'd go over a derivative rule with him, we'd do one problem together, and then I'd give him three practice problems. While he did them, I'd help other students, and then I'd come back to check how he'd done and either go over his mistakes and give him more practice, or move on to the next derivative rule. By about 6:15, all the other students were gone, and still C was there, learning derivative rules without complaint. He ended up staying until almost 7:20, only asking once when he'd be able to leave. The rest of the time, he diligently learned and practiced derivative rules, asking for help when he didn't understand something and working efficiently and well. I was astonished at his diligence. It was a true joy to see him working for two solid hours without complaining or asking for a break. We'd joke around from time to time, but by and large he just worked. It made helping him immensely rewarding. I could see him making progress, and more importantly, I could see him putting forth effort. He understood that I was staying later than I needed to in order to get him caught up, and he valued both my time and his own. He didn't waste a moment, and instead worked urgently until he was sure he understood the material. It was honestly inspirational. And, as a result, I have quite a bit of confidence, now, in his ability to pass our next calculus exam. Those two hours were well-spent.

As for life outside of school, suffice it to say that I don't really have one. To give an example, I was at the laundromat this afternoon (for the first time in two weeks), and I was trying to get some grading done. About half an hour before my laundry was dry, I got a phone call from a student asking me to meet him at school. As soon as my laundry was done, I raced back to school to help him for about half an hour before sending him home. My Saturdays, just like my other days, are not my own unless I leave town. Tomorrow evening is the annual MATCH Corps Thanksgiving dinner, which means I will have real food in large quantities. It's a very exciting concept. It'll also be nice to get together with a lot of Corps members and just hang out and eat and enjoy each other's company. As for the actual holiday, I'm staying here and looking forward to an empty building and the opportunity to be majorly reclusive. I need some recharge time.

In any case, I'm out of thoughts for the moment. I hope you are all having a good week. In case I don't write again before Thanksgiving, I just want to engage in a bit of sappiness here. I'm thankful for so much this year, and I want to express gratitude to each one of the people who read this blog. You've all touched my life in some important way, and I care about each and every one of you very deeply. I'd like to encourage you to drop a comment on this entry and let me know that you're reading so I can thank you individually, as well as collectively. I wish each of you a very happy and joyful Thanksgiving.

Cheers!

Wow ...

2008-11-18T00:19:00.002-05:00

It's amazing the things I say when I'm giving advice to someone else. Sometimes they illuminate personal growth I wasn't even aware of before. Here's the latest example (all quotes by me, edited appropriately to protect privacy):

"Well ... And this isn't easy to hear or to say, but for what it's worth ... If there's anything I've learned from the past few months, it's that at some point you have to trust other people with themselves as well as with you. And it's harder, 'cause you want to protect them and not let them get hurt. But at some point you have to step back and just believe that they'll be true to their word and let you know if things go wrong. Or ask if they need anything. Or tell you if they're uncomfortable. Or stop you if you say too much."

"... I've spent far too much time second-guessing people's evaluation of their own happiness and their own desires, and in looking back on it I feel rather arrogant and silly. And since I've really put effort into not doing that, my ability to communicate with people has improved a lot."

"Maybe think about it this way ... Even if there's a reason for you to be worried about other people, there's nothing you'd be able to do about it unless they let you. And they won't let you unless they're willing to tell you about it."

"So there's really no point worrying, 'cause it won't accomplish anything."

"Worry about yourself. That's something you can do something about. If there's something wrong in your life, you can change it. That's worth worrying about."

Anyway. I share this for the simple reason that I'm really proud of myself for that. This is a reflection of growth in the area I've been working on the most over the past few months, and I love that I can see that type of growth already. Clearly I should give advice more often. It's a good way to unintentionally give advice to myself. Hope you're all well! Cheers!

"Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! ...

2008-11-14T23:28:00.004-05:00

... Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!" Comment if you know the reference, if only because it's a reference to one of my favorite characters in literature and I want to know who else cares. :-)

This is going to turn into a series of disconnected ideas. I've decided that I'm okay with that fact. So here goes ...

I really love roller blading. I've realized this in the past few days. Or rather, I've rediscovered my love for roller blades in the past few days. Unfortunately, the roller blades I currently own chafe on my legs so badly that they scrape up my calf. It's rather painful, and has been all day. Clearly I need to get new roller blades, because I want to be roller blading more often, not less so. In the meantime, it's almost winter, which means that there will be ice skating! Much though I'm a fan of roller blading, I'm more of a fan of ice skating.

Today, I was helping out with physics tutorial for all the freshmen. While I was standing there, waiting for the teacher to finish a mini-lesson, I started thinking about the normal force. I love the normal force. I mean, for one thing, it prevents me from falling through the chair, floor, ground, and so on, which is pretty nice. But what really blows my mind is that really, the normal force is just composed of a whole lot of electron-electron repulsion. When you think about how much space there is in an atom, and how tiny electrons are, it's really quite incredible that we don't fall through the Earth. Every time I start thinking about this, it blows my mind. It reminds me of delta-epsilon proofs, actually. Something about circles, neighborhoods, and getting infinitesimally close to things. But that's not my point. My point is, be thankful for your electrons!

I've been thinking lately about why people go meta during conversations. We all do it, and many of us do it rather frequently. I spend a lot of time launching into meta-conversations, I know, and I wanted to figure out why I do so. A bit of cogitation and an awesome conversation later, I think I've figured it out. As far as I can tell, we go meta when we are uncomfortable saying what we need to say within the context of the conversation itself. Whether it's something that's socially unacceptable, doesn't follow the "rules" of the "game," or just slightly awkward, we rarely come out and say things that make us feel uncomfortable. Instead, we shroud them somehow. One of the ways to make such things less awkward is to envelop them in meta-ness, so to speak. It may be awkward for me to say, "I don't know whether or not you like me," but it's slightly less awkward for me to say, "I'm feeling awkward because I don't know whether or not you like me." It's even less awkward for me to say, "If I knew you better, I'd tell you that I don't know whether or not you like me." Either way, going meta is a way for me to avoid the fact that, in polite conversation, one doesn't generally say, "I don't know if you like me or not."

On a related note, I think our society is very hypocritical when it comes to honesty. We claim we value it, we claim it's good, and we try to instill it as a virtue in children. When we grow older, however, suddenly there are certain things about which we aren't supposed to be honest, and situations in which adults do not, in fact, value honesty. I'm not talking about little white lies here, or about tact and discretion. I'm talking about the times when we aren't supposed to be honest because our honesty makes others uncomfortable. As a very open and honest person, I speak with experience when I say that true and open honesty makes people very uncomfortable. They don't understand the point of all that vulnerability, and they don't see why it is that I expect (and deserve for) everyone else to be honest with me when I'm honest with them. I understand their discomfort, and I'm not going to get angry or judgmental if they aren't honest. However, I refuse to compromise my own standards just because they make others feel awkward.

On a lighter note, work is going very well. I still absolutely love my job, and my kids are great. This past Thursday, I actually had five amazing tutorials. I'm not sure how I pulled it all off, because I wasn't really prepared for four out of five of them, and the fifth was thrown together rather haphazardly. Experiences like this hardly give me incentive to prepare more for my tutorials, I must say. My calculus tutorial (the one that was haphazardly thrown together) was tighter behaviorally and productivity-wise than it's been in quite a while. My sophomore tutorials were engaging, fun, and entertaining for everyone involved. I had kids teaching each other during math tutorial, and during English tutorial we had time for a game of competition Pictionary (the kids beat me by one point) and a series of rapid-fire review questions. My freshman tutorial was interesting, since they didn't have much homework assigned, but we did some logic puzzles and math games, and it was tons of fun. Overall, it was really a great day, tutorial-wise.

I'm probably going to start running an AP Calc BC prep class for a few of the kids in the AB Calc class here. I need to figure out exactly how and when to run it, and I need to plan out the curriculum. This is really exciting for me, since it's basically a chance to really play teacher, not just in terms of lesson planning, but in terms of long-term curriculum planning as well. I'm not sure how well it'll go, or how many kids I'll get interested in it, but no matter what happens it'll be quite an adventure. You know, in case I weren't getting enough of those already.

We had school off on Tuesday for Veteran's Day, and it was amazing. I spent much of the day catching up on my grading, and then spent the evening going over to Coolidge Corner. I went to the used bookstore there, and spent over an hour and a half browsing. It's been so long since I went to a really good independent bookstore, and it was tons of fun to be there and experience the vibe. After that, I went to Panera and sat and ate a bagel and wrote in my journal. I wrote a glorious two and a half pages. I love writing. I need to spend more time just sitting places and writing. I suppose I have a weekend now and should use it for stuff like that.

In any case, I'm sure I have other stories to share, but I'm not sure what they are at the moment. I really should commit to writing more often so that I don't blank out on what's happened since the last time I wrote. Anyway, I hope you're all doing well and having awesome years. Cheers!

Whales ...

2008-11-01T23:18:00.003-04:00

... They're in the Bible. Check out Genesis 1:21 in the KJV. I got this from Jeopardy last night. It asked what great mammal was mentioned in the fifth day of creation. I guessed whales. I was right.

It's been an interesting week. It's been exhausting and draining, and I've been skimping on sleep, which is never good. And yet, it's Saturday and I suddenly have more energy than I've had in a while. So I figure something must have gone right. Then again, that may just be because I'm outside of MATCH for the evening. I'm staying with some friends of my mother's outside of Boston, and the combination of relaxation, non-MATCH-ness, and real food has done wonders for my mood.

We got evaluated by our students this week, and yesterday we got those evaluations in our mailboxes. It's always interesting to get evaluations, and as usual, some were more helpful than others. I certainly have things to work on. It's never a good sign when nearly everyone in my calculus class says I don't explain things well. I'm not sure what to do about that, but clearly I need to do something. Then again, there are also kids in my calculus class who claim I don't care enough about how they're doing academically. Given the number of times I've offered to work with them after school (and the number of times they've refused), it's a bit difficult to take them seriously.

My favorite evaluation was relatively short. It was from G, the junior I have in calculus during the week, and in SAT tutorial on Fridays. All he said in the comments section was, "Ms. Gussin pushes me to exceed my own expectations. I can't think of anything she could do better." Now, don't get me wrong, that second sentence made me happy too, but the real kicker on that one was the first sentence. I've been trying to push G all year. He's a truly brilliant kid, with huge amounts of potential. Unfortunately, like so many truly brilliant kids, he's lacking in motivation, primarily due to the fact that he spends most of school being bored. That I've managed to push him past that, and past his own expectations, is downright amazing. This is why I need to do my job. This is what teachers should do for their students. Teaching is all about expanding kids' ideas of their own capabilities, forcing them to move beyond their comfort zones and into the realm of possibility. That one sentence encapsulates the entire point of why I'm here, and I love that G put it into words for me. That one's going on my wall, next to my bed.

I have to say, as a side note, the most awkward moment this past week was when I had to walk back into calculus tutorial after the calculus kids evaluated me. I had to leave the room for seven minutes, and then I had to go back in and attempt to restore order for the last five minutes of class. It didn't really work very well. It was also somewhat upsetting that evaluations happened to fall on one of my worst calculus tutorials of all time. I was disorganized and lacking in energy, and the kids knew it. So that was a bit of a downer; however, there will be other evaluations and other tutorials.

My sophomore tutorial had an interesting moment this week as well. The sophomores are currently reading The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien. K, my sophomore, has been having trouble connecting with this book. He finds it confusing, and justifiably so. In true Vietnam war style, it's a very confusing book, reflecting the confusion of the soldiers. I've been trying to get him to care about it, and connect with it, and it hasn't been going well. So on Thursday, I brought in a blog entry from a soldier in Iraq. In retrospect, this was a poorly-executed brilliant idea. It was brilliant in that it did, in fact, help him connect. It was poorly-executed in that the entry I chose was a bit more disturbing and unsettling than I intended. K was sitting in his seat, shocked, for at least a minute after reading the entry. I spent the next five minutes running damage control, trying desperately to help him deal with what he'd read. He had connected with the entry, alright, and I felt guilty about how much.

I called his mother that evening, to let her know what had happened. First of all, I really must mention how much less uncomfortable that phone call was than it could have been. Spending six hours in emergency rooms with her last week really helped me connect with K's mother, and made me feel much more comfortable calling her about such a touchy subject. She knows I care deeply about her son, and that defuses conflict incredibly well. Luckily, he also seemed to be fine by the time I called. He was laughing and happy, and no longer unsettled in any way. I was very relieved to hear that. It will be interesting to see how he does when we talk about his reading on Monday. I can't wait to see whether or not he's connected more with the book since reading that blog entry. I hope he has. It's really a phenomenal book, and I'd love to see him caring about it.

At this point, I'd like to digress into some musings on life in general. I've had an interesting couple of weeks, and they've caused me to spend a lot of time thinking about life, maturity, and so on and so forth.

It's occurred to me that maturity is not as linear as we make it out to be. We talk about one person being "more mature," or "less mature," than another. This doesn't make sense to me. Different people are mature in different ways. Comparing one person's maturity to another's is like trying to compare one person to another in terms of their talents. Yes, I may be better at math or playing piano than someone else, but inevitably that person can draw, or sing, or run quickly, none of which I can count among my skills. It's the same way with maturity. The linear image we have of maturity when we're children dissolves when we become adults. Suddenly, different people are mature in different ways. They've developed different parts of themselves in different ways and at different rates. It strikes me that, rather than reflecting a person's maturity, these variances merely reflect their priorities and choices. After all, what could tell you more about a person than their priorities in self-improvement?

So there are my random thoughts for the week. I hope that this week has been a good one.

Cheers!

A Long-Expected Update

2008-10-24T23:53:00.005-04:00

I did this a couple of summers ago with my Spain blog ... Extra credit points go to the first few people who manage to identify the references in my post titles. I'll try to keep them (a) nerdy, (b) not terribly obscure, and (c) not too easy to get either. In return, no fair cheating and looking on Google!

Anyway, it's been a while since I last updated this blog. I keep meaning to get around to it, but the past few weekends have been, well, rather eventful. And as for the weekdays, those are always eventful.

I'm running out of things to say about MATCH, mostly because each one of the stories I tell seems rather mundane to me these days. Every day here is different, and every day is eventful and exciting in its own way. So I attempt to tell stories that will be amusing and interesting, but it's hard to tell on what I should focus. Nonetheless, here I am, trying yet again to be eloquent, even when that just never goes well.

Today was particularly interesting in that I spent about six hours in emergency rooms with one of my students and his mother. In the end, it turned out that he probably just had a really bad migraine. Nonetheless, the emotional toll is very real. I'm completely drained tonight. He was really out of it for a few hours, and we were all really worried that something was seriously wrong. It was such a relief when it turned out he was alright.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a very exciting moment in calculus tutorial. Or, more accurately, I had a very exciting calculus tutorial. I designed an entire lesson about average and instantaneous slope in the real world. I spent an evening printing out graphs from Google Trends, as well as rate-of-change graphs from random places on the internet. I created a packet to walk them through the entire exercise, and had planned the whole thing. The next day, I ran the entire idea past the calculus teacher, and he thought it was brilliant enough that he wanted the entire class to do it. So we kept the two tutorial groups together for tutorial period, and I ran the exercise with the whole class.

There were a number of things that concerned me about this idea. For one thing, I wasn't all that confident in the exercise itself. I was pretty sure it was a good idea, but I wasn't all that confident about the packet I had put together. One of the most important considerations in teaching is whether or not directions are explicit. If your directions aren't explicit enough, you'll have a class full of chaos, rather than a class full of students who are ready and able to complete the work. Anyway, I was far from confident about all of this, and therefore far from confident about my ability to manage the classroom. Half of classroom management, after all, is about being prepared and having a good lesson. If kids are involved in the lesson, they won't have time to misbehave.

Anyway, after all this lack of confidence, I'm happy to say that the lesson was amazing. The kids were nearly all engaged and willing to take the lesson in stride. There were a couple of moments that I could have clarified a bit better, in terms of directions, but most of it was very clear. I even had one kid tell me he really enjoyed the lesson, and that it helped him clarify average slope. The classroom was under control the entire time, too, which was kind of a big deal for me. It was the first time I'd really taught a full class (24 students), and I was a bit nervous about that going in. As it turned out, though, I was able to get everyone's attention whenever I needed it. There are lines that you never think will work, like "I need everyone's eyes up here," and you use them just 'cause everybody does. The great thing is when they do work, and you end up with literally 48 eyes trained on you. It's an incredible feeling. By the end of the class, I was 100% confident that I could get their attention whenever I needed it, which was awesome.

That's really the best calculus tutorial story I have. My only other calculus story is about the incredibly extensive (and shiny) data analysis I did on the Unit 2 Exam. I stayed up until 2:30 a couple of nights in a row to get it all done, but it was great. There were three different topical breakdowns of the exam problems, with a pie graph for each one showing what portion of the exam was composed of each type of problem. Each student received a table stating his or her percentages on each of the categories, as well as three bar graphs (one per breakdown) visualizing those percentages. In case you needed a translation of the last paragraph, let me spell this out for you. I'M A TOOL.

As for my other tutorials, there are some things going well, and others going not-as-well. One of my biggest frustrations is still (and probably will always be) freshman tutorial. Not only are my kids difficult to deal with, but the format for freshman tutorial is difficult in itself. At the beginning of the year, there was no structure---we were simply instructed to do homework with our students and get as much of it done as possible. Now, with freshmen, this just isn't enough structure. There may be a few who are mature enough to handle that type of vagueness, but the vast majority of them (including my guys) really require more structure. So I structured tutorial. Instead of two hours of homework time, we have one hour of math and science time, and one hour of English time (they take two English classes, Fiction and Non-Fiction). I created my own set of Do-Nows for each hour (word problems for math, and ten-minute free-writes for English).

This is all well and good. Unfortunately, the teachers realized about a week or two after I did that freshman tutorials required more structure. So now they've begun giving us more Do-Nows and more activities. I've spoken with the TAs about this, and they've specified that these are more for tutors who need structure provided for them. Well, that's all fine except that I start feeling guilty about the fact that I'm not doing "what I'm told." It's hard to come to this out of college, where all rules are made to be followed. Here, some rules are meant to be always followed by all people. Others are meant to be mostly followed, but individuals may make their own judgments regarding their students. Still other rules aren't really requirements at all, but merely suggestions for those who need them. Sadly enough, it's terribly difficult to distinguish and categorize these rules. As a result, one of my biggest frustrations has been figuring all of this out. This frustration merely happens to be most obnoxious in the context of freshman tutorial. At this point, I've decided to keep my own structure, if only because it'd be disastrous to break the routines I've finally managed to establish after weeks of painful effort.

As a follow up note on a student I mentioned previously, I'd like to add that D, my repeating freshman, has continued his pattern of improvement. He still has good days and bad days, but his newfound desire to be a role model is serving him well. It's clearly still a consideration in his decision-making process, which is awesome. If he keeps this up, he'll do really well for the rest of the year. I've been so proud of him a few times, when he's stopped my other freshmen from being inattentive or disrespectful. He's really beginning to care about the environment in tutorial as a whole, not just his own issues. My other freshmen are continuing to cause issues on a fairly regular basis, but they're getting better about some things as well. It's becoming easier to have conversations with them about the things that aren't going well, even when we have a bad day. This is vital to my ability to do my job. If I can engage them in reflective conversations about their behavior, then we have a chance of changing it and improving it. When those conversations aren't possible, it's much more difficult to keep students invested in their own personal growth.

This problem has actually come up quite a bit with my sophomore. His behavior is generally very good. He's a great kid, very respectful and very motivated in school. The one problem I tend to have with him is with his responses to any sort of discipline. Any implication that he's done something wrong sets him off and puts him on edge. Any serious statement about his behavior, especially if he's earned a demerit, makes him shut down for the rest of tutorial. He keeps doing work, but does so without communicating with me, preferring to pout and sulk. One of my biggest challenges right now is to figure out how I can work with him to have more productive discussions about his behavior. He needs to learn how to engages in reflective, critical discussions without shutting down, and until he does it's going to be difficult for me to help him learn while simultaneously addressing his (admittedly minor) behavioral issues. I have one freshman with a similar problem, and I've been spending a lot of time brainstorming ideas of ways to assist them in moving beyond their immature responses and toward a productive conversation about behavior and learning. Part of it is just a matter of time and practice, but I need to come up with intermediary solutions that will facilitate the growth process itself.

I hope you're all doing marvelously well, and enjoying the fact that it is not yet November. It still shocks me that it's October. I'm not sure how it got this late in the year. But I hope all of your years are going marvelously.

Cheers!

Another Week, Another Set of Stories

2008-10-04T19:09:00.004-04:00

I really like the fact that I've decided to write every week. The issue is that by the time I get to the end of the week, so much has happened that I'm never quite sure how to distill it all down into one blog entry. I mean, I work in a high school. How in the world am I supposed to describe all the adventures and excitement of a week in high school in one blog entry? Nonetheless, I'm going to tell a few stories and hope that manages to convey the crazy, hectic, amazing world in which I find myself these days.

This week has been a very good one in terms of my connections with kids here. I've been connecting with a lot of kids in general, but this week really cemented in a few connections I'd been having a little bit of trouble with. The first one was with one of my freshmen, named D. Now, D has not been the easiest student to deal with. He's a repeating freshman here, and had a lot of both disciplinary and academic issues last year on his first time around. Turning that into a successful, productive year was never going to be an easy task, and I knew it. We'd been somewhat connecting before, but he was very distracted during tutorials, and was unfortunately distracting nearly everyone else in the room at the same time. I spoke with him once a week and a half ago, in an attempt to correct some of his behavior. I explained to him that he needed to be more diligent, and that I expected him to be more of a leader, setting good examples for the other two guys in my freshman tutorial. The day after that discussion was a very bad one for us, in that he got sent to the office during tutorial. So after that, I was worried about how this week would go. It started off a little rocky, but not terrible.

And then, on Wednesday, something changed. D was focused, he was getting work done quickly and efficiently, and he was helping out the other students in tutorial. He wasn't complaining at all about work that he was previously unhappy with. At one point he got a bit overbearing, almost raising his voice to tell another one of my guys to get his work done. I stepped in and asked him to be more respectful, and his response was, "But I thought you wanted me to set an example for them." It blew me away. Much though his method of communicating that example may have been inappropriate, I was astonished that he was taking the time and thought to really focus on setting an example in the first place. It was like his entire attitude shifted. It was incredible to see him consciously thinking about whether or not he was setting a good example. If he continues at that rate, he's going to have a much better year, I'm sure.

Another story, slightly less remarkable perhaps, is about a girl in my calculus tutorial, II (I'm using two Is to distinguish II from the first-person nominative pronoun). Like a number of the students in my calculus tutorial, II has taken a little longer to warm to me. Some of them were on my side quickly, or from the outset, but a few have been causing me a bit of trouble and angst. II was one of them. We assigned the entire class rewrites of their first exam as a homework assignment, and no one was fond of that assignment. Everyone complained. No one, however, complained as much or as vociferously, as II. She didn't turn in the assignment on the day it was due, and when I spoke with her about it after school, she told me adamantly and in no uncertain terms that she would not be turning in the assignment. That was on Monday of this week. I told her she had until Friday to turn in the rewrites for half credit, and she yet again told me she would not do them. I gave it a rest, but was worried, especially due to the rest of her grades in the course. During the week, Chris, the teacher I work with spoke with II, telling her we were worried about her grades and her level of (non-)participation in class and tutorial. I don't know if it was that, or if it was the game we played in tutorial on Thursday, but on Friday, II came up to me with a big smile on her face and handed me her exam rewrites.

Since I've just mentioned Chris, I'd like to spend some time talking about him. Chris, as I believe I mentioned in one of my first MATCH entries, is the AP Calculus teacher. He also teaches AP Physics, and as of this year is the curriculum coordinator for the school. He's one of the most experienced teachers on staff here. After sitting in on Chris's classes for a month, I can honestly say that he's one of the best teachers I've ever had. He brings back memories of my favorite teachers from high school, and glimpses of the best professors I had in college. He controls the room with his presence, often managing to grab every kid's attention using just his lesson. The kids laugh with him, love his jokes, and then move back to focusing on content when they need to. His lessons are clear and often insightful, showing the kids tricks I often use in my own work, but had never heard articulated out loud before. As an example, we were recently looking at asymptotes, and trying to figure out whether the limit went to positive or negative infinity. The way to do this is to look at each term, decide if it's positive or negative from whatever direction we're looking at, and then use those positives and negatives to figure out the overall direction of the limit. The tricky part is always the zero in the denominator, since it's neither positive nor negative. So the way most people do this is by looking at a number very close to the limit (i.e. if it's a limit as x approaches 5 from the right, look at 5.1) and see if the zero term is positive or negative. I always just thought of it as being either positive or negative zero, but in an unofficial way, since such things don't exactly exist. This is how Chris articulated the idea to the class, however, and in speaking with kids afterward, I've discovered that they actually understood not only the limits themselves, but exactly why we couldn't refer to positive and negative zero "in real life." It's wonderful to be able to sit in on Chris's classes and see what works and doesn't work for him, and it's helping me become a much better teacher myself.

I'd keep writing, but I need to go get dressed and ready to go apple picking! I'm very excited about this, since I love apples, and I love apple pies and apple cobblers, which is what we'll be doing with some of the apples after we pick them. I'm actually working on another, non-MATCH-related entry to put in this blog, but it's nowhere near ready to be posted. If I don't get around to finishing that earlier, I'll write again next weekend. For now, though, I hope you're all doing well and enjoying the beginnings of fall. Or, in California, being jealous of the fact that the leaves are changing here in New England.

Cheers!

Mud Football and Other Stories

2008-09-27T16:20:00.007-04:00

I have a lot of random stuff to talk about, so I'm not really sure how coherent this entry will be. It may well end up being a number of independent, disconnected rambles. Luckily, I don't really have a problem with that. This is a blog, after all. Coherence isn't really a requirement.

Yesterday it was raining nearly all day. As a matter of fact, it's raining today as well, but that's somewhat less important to the story I'm about to tell. We got to sleep in two hours later than usual, since we didn't have any meetings until 10 AM. Starting at 10, we had a meeting for about an hour, and then had a break until after lunch. From 12:30 until 2:00, we had more training for the writing program they're using here, called EmPOWER. The system's great, and the woman teaching us is somewhat less so, but I digress. Anyway, after EmPOWER, we were done for the day, which was huge. Usually we're working until at least 4:00 on Friday afternoons. So a bunch of us decided to go play football in the rain. And in the mud. It was glorious.

We must have been playing for at least an hour, probably more. It was so exhilarating. There's very little that feels better than running around in the rain. Doing so with a group of friends while playing football, jumping in puddles, and sliding around trying to stop and turn just makes it all that much better. By the time we walked back to MATCH, I was covered in mud and completely soaking wet. I also felt great. As a side note, I have also conclusively proved to myself that fleece does, in fact, stay warm even when it's wet. Anyway, I guess the point I'm trying to make here (if there is one) is that if you have the opportunity to play football, or really anything, in the rain and the mud, I highly recommend it. It was absolutely amazing. Especially after a hard week.

Speaking of this week, it was, in fact, very hard. I had to give my first AV this Thursday. An AV is when you send a student out of the room (and to the principal's office). This particular one came about because I had a student who simply refused to follow my instructions during tutorial. He argued with me a little, so I gave him a demerit for disrespect. When he continued to argue, I asked him if he needed to go talk to the principal. He said he did, and walked out of the room. Overall, the confrontation itself was rather anticlimactic. Nonetheless, I was shaking for the remainder of the period, and it took me until that night at about 1:30 in the morning to become anything less than completely upset over what had happened. The bottom line, though, is that my students are required to follow my instructions. I was as clear as possible with him, I was as reasonable as I could be, and in the end his actions were simply unacceptable. So much though I may see this as a ridiculous reason to give an AV, the bottom line is that he needed to follow my instructions and didn't do so. I'm sure there will be more situations like this in the future, and I need to be able to stand my ground.

Much though I hate AVs, life here isn't all about discipline. I've decided to start doing more writing with my students, since a lot of the kids here have a lot of trouble putting their ideas on paper. With my freshmen, I've planned out exactly how this is going to go. I'm giving them ten-minute writing prompts, and once they're used to the idea of writing for ten minutes without stopping, eventually I'll make them ten-minute free-writes instead. I wasn't planning on doing this with my sophomore, however, since my tutorial time with him is more planned out by the teacher and TA for English 10. On Thursday, we finished all the tutorial materials with about twelve minutes remaining in the period. So I asked him if he'd ever done a free-write before. When he said he had, I suggested that we write until the end of the period. Unlike my freshmen (who pushed back when I gave them a ten-minute writing prompt that day), he was perfectly happy with the idea. It was wonderful. We both sat there and wrote for the rest of the period, and then we traded papers so we could read each other's writing over the weekend. It was wonderful that he was so excited to write with me. I love when stuff like that happens, and reminds me just how willing these kids are to trust me and let me into their lives.

Speaking of my sophomore, he said something hilarious the other day. I assigned him a problem with fractions in it. When he got to it, he mumbled something about fractions and men that I didn't quite hear. So I said, "Come on, real men aren't afraid of fractions." He responded, "No, fractions are just part of a diabolical plan on the part of the Man to keep a brother down!" and immediately broke into the first line of "We Shall Overcome." It was hilarious. Incidentally, once he was done pretending to complain about it, he buckled down and did the problem. And got it right.

Calculus tutorial is finally smoothing itself out as I get to know the kids better and better. There are a few students with whom I've become particularly friendly. One of them, S, is a rapper. We first bonded over his tag, which he claimed at the beginning of the year he'd put on every piece of paper he ever handed in. Early in the first full week of school, I saw him after school and told him about my "Find S's tag game," where I tried to find his tag on each homework assignment. He found this hilarious. Anyway, last week I wrote a rap. My sophomore had an assignment to write a memoir poem (something about his life), and decided to write a rap. I was working on my own poem, and so I decided to write a rap as well. Anyway, I showed mine to S, and a few other students. The first draft wasn't terribly impressive. The third draft, however, has been getting rave reviews. One student called it "hot," and S said it was "sick." He's going to help me practice it so I can perform it better than I did on my first try.

Another student, G, is the junior I also have in SAT tutorial on Friday afternoons. He's a very bright student. He wants to be a heart surgeon when he grows up, and he's very motivated to do whatever it takes to get there. We spent a lot of time last Friday during SAT tutorial connecting over stuff beyond just school and calculus, so by now we've established quite a rapport. On Monday, before we had returned the students' Unit 1 exams in calculus, I pulled him aside after school. He had high scored the exam, and I congratulated him. I also told him I knew he could do much better than he'd been doing, and warned him that I had no intention of being any less hard on him, just because he'd managed to high score an exam. I was impressed when he said he completely understood and was on the same page. He really does want to do as well as he can. So at the moment I'm trying to get him to turn in an English essay he skipped. What really made me happy is how much pull I seemed to have with him when I brought it up. He honestly seemed ashamed of himself for disappointing me.

That's the thing about these kids. If you don't have anything to pull on with them, it's hard to get them to want to do anything. This is why it's so vitally important to create connections with them, not just over school stuff, but in general. If a kid doesn't care what I think, my disappointment won't motivate them to do anything except perhaps get upset with me. If I'm in with the kid, though, and he or she cares about me and what I think, then I can accomplish something. Whether it's to show them exactly how important this is to them personally, or just to express my own disappointment, if I've gotten in with the kid, that kid will listen to me.

The vast majority of my frustration over this job seems to be with myself for not being able to connect with a kid. If I can't connect with these kids, they won't listen to me in tutorial, won't listen to me outside of tutorial ... They won't care. It completely destroys my ability to do my job. I have to figure out each kid individually. How can I connect with this student? What does this student love that I can draw on and refer to in order to get and keep their attention? What did I do wrong with this assignment that caused the kids to misunderstand it, or do poorly, or push back on me for assigning it? What could I have done differently in this situation in order to keep the kids' attention, or avoid that confrontation, or reach five kids instead of four? It's a long series of puzzles, in a way, all centered around understanding these kids and helping them to understand me. It's incredibly challenging, and incredibly intellectually stimulating. I mean, not to reduce my job to a series of brain teasers, but they're certainly important.

In any case, this entry has gotten plenty long. I'm sure if I read back over it, I'd disagree with half of what I just wrote about this job, but that's just life. I'm far too lazy to actually read stuff over again. I hope you're all doing well and enjoying my rambling.

Cheers!

MATCH - My (Semi-)Typical Day

2008-09-20T16:41:00.004-04:00

Well, I haven't written anything in about a month, but my life has settled into at least a bit of a schedule now, so hopefully I'll be able to write a little more often. The past few weeks have been completely insane. I finished training for my job at the beginning of September, and since then have been working as a MATCH Corps tutor. I don't know how to begin to describe everything that I've been doing, but I figure I'll at least give it a shot.

I guess for starters, I'll try to walk through a day in my life here at MATCH. I should warn you, however, that every day here is different for any of a million reasons. How my day goes depends on how my kids are feeling, how the other kids in the school are feeling, how the other tutors are feeling, and any of another million or so tiny things that contribute to my experiences.

I generally wake up at 07.20 to make sure I'm ready to go downstairs and start preparing for tutorial by 08.00. On Mondays, I have to get up earlier for breakfast duty, but that only happens once a week. At 08.20, the first bell rings and the hallways become flooded with students, rushing out of breakfast and to their lockers before first period. During first and fourth periods, I work with a sophomore named K (his first initial - I don't want to use kids' names on the internet). K is an absolutely wonderful student. He's very smart, and he's nearly always willing to work hard in tutorial, which makes it a joy to work with him. During first period, we work on math (algebra II and geometry), and during fourth we work on English. If I started telling stories, I'd be writing pages and pages, so I'll save them for another entry, but suffice it to say that first and fourth hours are very often the highlights of my day.

During second and third hours, I have prep periods. Usually these are taken up by grading for AP Calculus, for which I am a TA. I pick up the kids' homeworks from the office downstairs and then grade them and record their scores so I can return their work during class. I generally do this with the other AP Calculus TA, whose name is Sean. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we also spend time preparing for our Calculus tutorials (which are twice a week). Often, we meet with the AP Calculus teacher, Chris, to discuss how kids are doing, how the course is going, or anything else we might need to talk about.

After third period is lunch. Usually this time just turns into more prep time, since lunch starts at 11.30 and I'm rarely hungry that early. On Tuesdays, I have off-campus lunch duty at a pizza place down the street. I go there and pick up the off-campus lunch cards from any students who choose to eat there, as well as ensuring that they pick up a healthy lunch (this is so the school can get reimbursed by the district for their lunches). My location is relatively unpopular, so I've only had a couple kids there the few times I've done it. It's nice to get out of the school, though, and see kids in a different environment.

Fourth period is right after lunch, and that's when I do English with K. After that is AP Calculus class during fifth period. Sean and I always sit in on Chris's classes so we know what the kids are doing in class and what we need to be covering during tutorials. It's really fun to be in a calculus class again, and I've been taking all the quizzes with the students, if only to have an answer key from which to do my grading. Chris is also an amazing teacher, and it's a great opportunity to be able to sit in on his class and learn from how he teaches.

On Mondays and Wednesdays, I have another prep period during sixth hour, but Tuesday and Thursday, I have calculus tutorial sixth period. This particular tutorial has been a bit of a roller coaster. I have twelve kids in my section (Sean has the other twelve), and they're quite the mix of characters. This time is basically a discussion section, so some of the time we go over material they learned in class, and other times I introduce new material they didn't have time for during class itself. Other times we give them an opportunity to start on the assignment for the night. They tend to prefer this last option. This is generally my most difficult period of the day. It requires the most preparation, since I'm essentially teaching a class, and it's the most difficult in terms of discipline, since I have twelve kids. Slowly but surely, I'm meeting up with kids after school and getting to know them, which helps me keep their attention during class. It's been getting easier, but it'll take a while (if not an eternity) for me to be entirely comfortable teaching them.

Seventh and eighth periods are my freshman tutorial. This one has been very interesting lately, because a new student was added to my group last Tuesday. I now have three students instead of just two, and the dynamic between my kids and me has completely shifted. Nonetheless, all three of my guys are hilarious and awesome. They're all a bit spacey and easily distractable, for different reasons, but they're also all very smart and capable of succeeding when they buckle down and do the work. Freshman tutorial is completely exhausting and stressful. On the bad days, I walk upstairs afterwards completely drained. On the good days, I walk out exhilarated, excited, and ready to work with another student.

Eighth period ends at 17.00, and on Mondays and Wednesdays, I then head over to the AP Calculus room to be a resource for any students who need help with their calculus homework. There are generally very few students there, so Sean and I can usually help students individually. After-school time is more relaxed than in-school tutorials, so I get more of a chance to chat with kids, get to know them as people, and give them a chance to get to know me. Starting this coming week, Tuesdays and Thursdays are going to be club days. I'm starting a math club that's going to meet on Thursday afternoons, and I'm not sure yet what I'll be doing on Tuesdays. Given how exhausted I've been lately, Tuesdays will probably turn into an evening of relaxation and working on my own, away from the intense socialization of my job.

So those are my days. Fridays are very different, and less static, so I'll save those (and all my stories about my kids) for another entry another time. For now, I'd like to add one closing thought.

I love my job. I mean, I really truly and absolutely love my job. It's exhausting and frustrating, and there are days when I come upstairs emotionally dead and half-asleep. Even on those days, however, I've never even considered disliking the job. My frustrations are with specific kids who aren't doing well, or a tutorial that I didn't manage as well as I could have, or students not studying for their calculus exams. Not once have I thought that quitting would be the right idea. My exhaustion and frustration have always motivated me to do better, and to come up with bigger, better ways of dealing with these kids and helping them succeed. It's the most wonderful challenge I've ever faced, and it's infinitely worth it for the connections I'm forming with the students here. Having kids smile at me and say, "Hi, Ms. Gussin" in the hallways always makes me smile, and the times when we get into interesting discussions, or connect over a non-curricular moment, make me positively glow. I love my job.

If you have any questions you'd like me to answer in future posts (or in an individual email), let me know. I'm going to try to update at least once a week from now on, and hopefully it'll become a part of my routine. So let me know if there are specific things you'd like to know. I hope you're all doing marvelously well.

Cheers!

True Story #1

2008-08-19T17:33:00.002-04:00

Throughout my time at MATCH, I'm sure I'll have many stories and anecdotes to share. However, I'm going to be looking out for things that inspire me in some way, and I'll write about them in entries labeled "True Story #N," where N will hopefully be incremented by one with each successive story. Most of them will probably be short (I hope), and I'm hoping to amass a rather large number of them throughout the year. I should add that I will be naming kids by their first initials to protect their privacy (unless otherwise specified).

Today, we spoke with a panel of rising sophomores at MATCH about the freshman experience here. One of the panel members was a young man named D. Now, D was not particularly talkative for the majority of the discussion. He would provide input, but generally after prompting, and not at length. He seemed rather withdrawn, and was borderline sullen at times. At some point I must have subconsciously taken note of that and made some assumptions about his personality, although I didn't make any intentional assumptions.

Near the end of the panel, someone asked the kids to go down the line and say where they wanted to go to college and what they wanted to study. I don't know exactly what, if anything, I was expecting from D, but it certainly wasn't what came out of his mouth. When it was his turn, he said, "I want to go to Michigan and study law." I was blown away. I don't know exactly what it was about that moment that struck me. It may have been the intense reality of him at that moment, the sudden realization that he had dreams and goals. It may have been the extent to which I had misjudged him initially. It may have been how his eyes lit up when he said that one simple sentence. Whatever it was, it struck home exactly how important this job is, and how important these kids are. They're real people now, people I've met who have dreams and needs and desires. They're tangible, three-dimensional human beings, and I want to help them make their dreams come true.

Emotional Rollercoasters and Social Anxiety

2008-08-15T17:42:00.004-04:00

This week has been interesting. It's the end of my first week of training here at MATCH, and it feels like I've been here for a year or so. I'm both exhausted and excited to begin my tutoring and meet my kids.

I have to admit, there have been times this week when I've felt like I couldn't do this. There have been times when I seriously questioned my ability to survive this job. We had to do more memorization in this past week than I've done in years, and we had to do it all in the span of about two days. I was completely and utterly overwhelmed, and I panicked. I was sure I could never remember all the kids' names from looking at their pictures over and over again, let alone the rules of the school or the statistics from the annual report (all three of which we were quizzed over this week). I mostly blew off the annual report quiz, because I felt that learning kids' names and rules were more important. So I ended up getting a not-incredible score on that. But I came back and high-scored both the kids' names quiz and the rules quiz, earning me a $15 gift certificate to ColdStone and free hot chocolate for the next week from one of the teachers here. Between the nights I spent panicking and miserable during hours upon hours of studying, and the times after I started doing well when I was completely elated, I've been on a bit of a roller coaster, emotionally speaking.

To compound all of this, I'm feeling rather isolated lately. I don't really know anyone here very well. I'm getting to know them, and they're all wonderful people. I'm sure that by the end of the year, we'll all be incredibly close, and we're already very good friends. But the bottom line is that they don't know me very well, and so they don't understand me. As a result, I've had a number of misunderstandings with people, and a number of experiences where people were trying to help me and simply weren't doing so effectively because they didn't know how. I don't blame them for this -- I know I'm a strange, idiosyncratic person with very peculiar needs and preferences. Unfortunately, this means that I've been having trouble dealing with my stress.

As an example, a few days ago I was feeling incredibly frustrated about all our memorization. It would have been fine, but I said something that got misinterpreted negatively, and someone called me out about it in front of the entire group. Now, I have a (un)healthy dose of social anxiety, so getting called out in a large group setting is nervewracking for me. It makes me feel like everyone is judging me, and like I'm stupid or foolish and they know it. It makes me feel very isolated as a result. The isolation on top of the stress of memorization made me absolutely miserable, and I didn't really have anyone to talk to about it. As a result, I ended up kind of shutting down. I spent an afternoon closed off, sitting in the back row in training, not being very communicative, and generally pouting. Now, this wasn't the most mature or effective way of dealing with my feelings, and I admit that and take responsibility for my actions. But when I tried to talk to my supervisor about it, the conversation didn't go well. I wanted to express to her that I would never, EVER shut down like that in front of a kid, or while tutoring. I wanted to impress upon her my certainty that once I had kids to work with, everything would be much more in perspective. I wanted to prove to her that the best way for me to deal with my problems is to help others, and that this year would work for me and for my kids. Unfortunately, she doesn't know me well enough for all that to be possible. So what ended up happening is that she didn't really believe me, and our conversation ended with her telling me that if I decided the job wasn't right for me, that was alright.

For anyone who knows me, this was exactly what I did not need to hear. I wasn't feeling confident about the job, especially due to all the memorization. I wasn't feeling happy or included there, and the isolation was making everything negative feel worse. I needed someone to express confidence in my ability to do the job, and to tutor effectively. If she wasn't entirely confident in my ability to deal emotionally with the job, she could have expressed confidence in my tutoring abilities, a form of confidence I know she has. There are any number of positive, affirming things she could have said. She said none of them. Instead, she told me that she would support me if I decided it wasn't the job for me. I was crushed. I spent that entire afternoon wondering if I could really do this, and if I really wanted to. Instead of focusing on the kids, how much I loved them, how much I wanted to help them, and all the ways they would enrich my life this year, I spent that afternoon even more focused on myself and my own problems. In short, the conversation was the opposite of helpful. None of this was her fault. The problem was that I had no way of expressing myself meaningfully to her, because she doesn't know me well enough for that to be possible. It was incredibly frustrating and demoralizing.

In sum, being in a new place with new people kind of sucks. It's frustrating to not know anyone very well, to be in a new group of people trying to find my niche, and to not have anyone who understands me with whom I can talk about these things. I'm going to have to find ways this year to temper my emotional rollercoaster, and one of the ways I can do that is by having friends to talk to who understand the way I think and feel. Unfortunately, I don't yet have that type of support network. Until I can create it for myself, this year is going to be very difficult and often painful.

... I was going to stop the entry there, but that's such a depressing place to leave off that I feel obliged to write something else positive. So here it is. There are about eighty-eight freshmen this year at MATCH. Last week, we were supposed to learn their names. When we took the quiz, I got all eighty-eight right, with the exception of three. For each of those three, my spelling was off by one letter. So no matter how much I think I can't memorize, I managed to learn every single freshman's name. I put the quiz on my wall as proof that I can do this. I just have to keep reminding myself that I'm here for the kids, because they're incredible and awesome. If I remember them, I can do anything.

Good Intentions

2008-08-11T18:08:00.003-04:00

Despite my best intentions, I have not been updating this very often at all. Unfortunately, that probably won't change. Fortunately, however, as far as I can tell, very few people actually read this on a regular basis. So I'm assuming there won't be a huge outcry among my "readership." : )

I finished up Harvard Summer School last week. I took the final for my economics course on Saturday afternoon, and had an orchestra concert Saturday night. Sunday, I moved into my new home, and today I began training for my new job.

I'm living on the third floor of the MATCH Charter High School, where I'll be working as a tutor for the next year. I live here with about forty other tutors in a dorm-style space. I have a triple with two other female tutors, both of whom seem to be wonderful people. I don't really know them all that well yet, but I'm sure I will get to know them soon. Possibly the best part of this living space is the ping pong table that is nearly constantly in use after training hours. I played a bit yesterday and realized I've forgotten a lot of what my dad taught me in elementary school.

Today was our first day of MATCH Corps training. We spent quite a bit of time on paperwork and other important preliminary activities, but we also had a few discussions about education policy. It was a lot of fun to be in those conversations with so many other people who cared about education as much as I do. Furthermore, these discussions weren't the usual rants I go on about everything that's wrong with public education. They also entered into the dialogue about solutions to those problems. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to learn more about education policy, and to discuss it with so many amazing people.

Speaking of amazing people, the MATCH Corps really are awesome. It's marvelous to be part of such a large community of like-minded, dedicated individuals, all passionate about what they're doing to improve education in America. I've been connecting with nearly everyone I meet here, and those connections will make living in a triple feasible this year. Nonetheless, it will be a challenge to deal with not having my own space, especially since I've gotten used to having a single over the past couple of years.

In any case, I'll write more some other time. I hope you're all doing well.

Cheers!

Music

2008-07-30T20:02:00.002-04:00

I wanted to write an entry about music, what it means to me, and how it makes me feel. Unfortunately, this is not something about which I'm very eloquent, for fairly obvious reasons. I've tried to explain this on multiple occasions, with rather infrequent success. So instead of just going at this normally, I'm going to describe what I did this afternoon.

After lunch, I practiced piano, but I didn't get a good piano. For those who don't play, pianos have incredible variation. They have different key depths, key weights, overall sounds, and brightnesses, to mention only a few varying qualities. Each pianist has a personal preference regarding how a piano should feel and sound, and each instrument is different from every other one. Accordingly, in a facility such as, say, the Harvard music department, there are approximately twenty grand pianos, and they vary widely in all possible characteristics. When I start using a new practice facility, I tend to go through a number of pianos before finding the one I prefer. Here, it took me about two weeks. This is quite a long time, owing to the fact that the piano I now prefer is also the piano many other people prefer, and thus it was more often in use than not. I didn't actually find it until a couple weeks into my summer. When I found it, however, I fell in love.

This paragraph will be a bit technical, so if you're not a pianist you may want to skip it. I'm going to try to explain why I'm in love with this instrument. Now, I don't like bright pianos. Some have a very tinny sound, especially in the upper registers, and it drives me insane. I much prefer my piano to have a softer sound. I prefer my keys to be a bit weightier than average, probably because the piano I use at home has very weighty keys. I like the action to be a bit slower - that is, I want to have to push the keys a little harder and for a little longer than on some instruments, where the action is very quick. I don't know all that much about the physics or engineering behind pianos, so I may be using terminology improperly, and if so I apologize. The point I'm trying to make is that this piano, in room G19, is about as close to perfect as any instrument I've ever played. There is very little I would change about it, were I given the chance to custom design a piano. It has a relatively soft sound, but is bright in the right areas to facilitate balance in harmonies. Its action is not to quick and also not too slow, and its keys are weighty enough but not so weighty that my hands get tired too quickly. It's a wonderful instrument.

In any case, the point of all this is to say that, when I practiced right after lunch, I didn't get the piano I wanted. I was stuck in room B11, with a very nice instrument that drove me insane. The action was far too quick and easy, and the sound was far too bright. So I didn't end up practicing for long, and it wasn't my best practice session by far. I had trouble focusing on what I was playing, and I really didn't accomplish much.

After lunch, I spent some time in the music library listening to Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. If you haven't heard this piece of music, I highly recommend it. The second movement has one of the most divine horn solos you will ever hear, and the whole piece fits together beautifully and is masterfully written. It's also exhilarating. I've been around classical music for my entire life - my mother listens to classical music on the radio, so it's literally been omnipresent in my house since (I'm sure) before I was born. I've also been playing piano since I was five (and viola since I was about nine), so essentially as long as I can remember, I've been both listening to and making music on a regular basis. Music is a part of my soul. I walk around with soundtracks running through my head that nobody else can hear. I conduct as I'm walking, drawing strange looks from passersby. I think in music, and it's very rare for me to not have some tune or other running through my head.

Listening to beautiful music such as this Tchaikovsky symphony, however, is really something else. I was listening to Dorati conducting some famous orchestra (I don't remember which), and the recording was beautifully done. The piece, as I said, is amazing. Combine those two things with headphones that block out the world, and I was really completely focused on the music and only the music. It was glorious. When I listen to music, I don't really think about it. I don't analyze it, and I don't really think about other things either. It's just me and the music, especially when it's awesome music like that particular symphony. While it was playing, it's really all that mattered. It's an amazing feeling, and I could talk about it for hours, but I want to move on to the next part of my day.

After listening to Tchaikovsky, I was going to leave when I noticed that my favorite piano room, G19, had opened up. I don't pass up opportunities on that instrument, so I decided to practice again. Now, this practice session was as good as the previous one was bad.

I started with scales, mostly to warm up, but also to get into what I like to think of as the Zen of piano playing. It really worked this time. I had my eyes closed while I was playing scales over and over (I did each key, major and minor, three times at varying speeds, for those keeping score at home). I honestly think that playing scales is the closest I ever get to meditation. After a certain point, it blocks out other thoughts, and especially with my eyes closed, it was particularly effective. I got this sensation that my consciousness was moving farther and farther away from my hands and the piano itself, but my hands kept playing like they were connected to the instrument. It was one of the most surreal sensations ever, but it felt amazing.

After I played scales, I practiced the Goldberg Variations, my current piano project. The Goldberg Variations are a set of variations by J.S. Bach, and they're beautiful. They're also a huge project - there are about 30 of them, plus the aria they're based on. As of this afternoon, I've memorized the aria and variations 1-8, and I'm working on number 9 at the moment.

Here's the thing about me and music, though. I don't think about what I'm playing as notes, or as a score written on a page, or even really at all. Playing piano isn't really a thinking thing for me. Granted, when I'm drilling specific passages, I think about them to make sure I learn them properly, but once I know a piece, that's not really my focus. At some point, the music ceases to be an object, a thing I have to learn. It becomes more of a vehicle. I had an orchestra conductor once who told us to think of the music as always existing somewhere in the "ether," so to speak. He said that when we played, it was like we were rising up to the music, and becoming tangent to it, in a way. For the time we play the music, we merge with it, and then when we finish, we gently fall away and back to earth. When I play music I know fairly well, that's a very good description of what it feels like. It ends up being a direct conduit between my emotions and what sounds come out of the instrument. The emotions don't get filtered by thoughts, I don't think about what my hands are doing to create the sounds, it just all happens at once. It's incredibly cathartic. And that's how my second practice session went. My hands were doing exactly what they needed to, and I was in the moment, not thinking about the rest of my life, just enjoying the music for what it was.

So that's an approximation to how I experience music, both through listening and making it. I can't describe this stuff nearly as well as I'd like to, but that's close at least. And yes, this works on viola too, but I don't practice viola much these days - I just play in orchestra. That's another entry for another time, though, as this one is already plenty long.

The Real World, among other ruminations

2008-07-29T12:23:00.003-04:00

And here I said I'd be posting more often. Clearly that's not going as well as I meant it to. I've had a busy life for the past couple of weeks. I'm scrambling to do well in my econ course while simultaneously preparing for my job next year. I have to balance homework assignments with reading for my job, while finding extra time to figure out what I need sent from home. Not to mention that I need time to relax. So it's been a bit crazy. I've also been having trouble coming up with things to write about. It's not that I'm not thinking about stuff, it's just that it's all either private or half-baked.

Nonetheless, I promised more regular entries, so here I am. I'm currently sitting in the computer lab in the Harvard Science Center. I'm working on a Mac, since the PCs were all taken and the Linux machines don't play nicely with my iPod. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Macs, but the keyboards on these machines are obnoxious, especially for typing extensively. I'll probably spend this afternoon shopping, since I need to purchase professional clothing before I start my job in August. I have to say, I absolutely despise clothes shopping, but sometimes it's just a necessary evil. I'll also be at used clothing stores, which are at least marginally more fun than department stores.

I've been spending a lot of time lately trying to figure out what I want to do after this year at MATCH. Unfortunately, my priorities and desires seem to change every couple of weeks, which makes long-term planning rather difficult. My other problem in all this is that I have a rather clear idea of things I'd like to accomplish in my life, but I lack a clear vision of how to go about accomplishing them. There are changes I'd like to make, and things I want to do, but I'm at a loss as to what experiences or educational opportunities would best prepare me to do those things. At the moment, I'm mainly focusing on policy analysis and public policy degrees. A policy analysis degree program would focus heavily on my math background, which would be nice, and either a policy analysis or a public policy program would give me the policy skills I need to make changes in policy, assuming that remains my goal.

To make a rather long story quite a bit shorter, the bottom line is that, yet again, I have no idea where I'll be in a year, let alone farther in the future. I find this incredibly disconcerting. I went through most of my life (up until last year, as a matter of fact) having at least a good idea of where I'd be in a year. Even when I was trying to decide on a college to attend, I knew I'd be in college the next year. Geographical location hadn't been determined, but in a more general sense, I knew what I'd be doing, how I'd be doing it, and what kind of environment it would be. Now that I'm past college, though, that's no longer the case. I've been envying people who decided to go to graduate school immediately, because they have a few more years of certainty. I'm not trying to detract from graduate school here - it's certainly a difficult place to be, and to complete a graduate education is quite an accomplishment. In this respect, however, they have it easy. They know what they'll be doing, and it's not all that different from what they've done before.

Those of us who opted out of that path, however, are in an entirely new situation, at least for most of us. We're going out into the world with no defined path. There are no academic requirements for us to follow, no core courses to give us guidance. We don't have faculty advisers to help ensure we complete all our required courses and get all our paperwork turned in on time. The safety nets that have held us on track for the past couple of decades of our lives are slowly falling away. I'm not objecting to this - they should be. We're growing up and becoming "adults," whatever that means. It's just not an easy process to deal with. Nonetheless, regardless of how easy or hard it is, it's reality. So I guess the most we can do is learn to deal with it in our own time.

I've been watching a video of Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture." I haven't finished it yet, so I'm going to wait to comment on it until another entry. For the moment, though, I highly recommend that everyone watch this video. To that end, I am posting the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo
It's long, but it's worth seeing.

Until next entry, and I hope you are all well and relaxed.

Next Year

2008-07-20T15:42:00.001-04:00

I promised an entry about next year, so here goes. Unfortunately, I can never quite explain my job the way I'd like to, so this will inevitably take me about three times as long as it should, but I'll give it a shot and try to let go of my perfectionism.

I'm going to be working as a full-time, residential tutor at a charter high school in Boston. The school is called the MATCH school (check out www.matchschool.org if you like). It has lottery enrollment among its applicants from the Boston school system. Most of its students are from low-income backgrounds, and are generally a year or two (or more) behind their grade level in terms of their math and/or English skills. MATCH has an extended school day, from 8 AM until 5 PM, and each student has mandatory tutoring every day with a MATCH Corps tutor.

At this point, I don't yet have details on exactly which grades I'll be tutoring. I know for sure that I'll have one or two ninth graders, and I'll work with them on algebra and on their English and language arts course. I'll probably be TA for either AP Physics or AP Calc, depending on which teacher is the best match for me. Beyond that, I don't know what combination of sophomores, juniors and seniors I'll be tutoring, but I imagine I'll find out soon enough.

So that's my life for the next year. I'll be in Boston, tutoring kids every day. This job is really quite similar to Teach for America, except that I won't have to manage a classroom full of students, which will be nice. It's also only a year-long commitment.

In any case, it may not sound like it from the last couple of paragraphs, I'm really looking forward to this year. If any of you have been at all involved in my job search, you know I've been agonizing over whether or not to do something real and meaningful this year. That is, I spent quite a bit of time in college feeling like I wasn't doing anything meaningful with my time. I felt like there were people out there that I should be helping, or at least interacting with. I was so wrapped up in my school work that I wasn't really a part of the world that I so desperately wanted to help. So I'm thrilled to be spending a year learning from these kids and helping them acquire the skills they need to succeed in college and life.

I don't know how many of you have been involved in such an organization, but I've found that many volunteer or service oriented organizations tend to be full of really amazing, passionate people. The organization I volunteered with over a couple of summers, Amigos de las Americas, was like this. I was astonished the first summer I volunteered with them, because everyone there was incredible. Anyway, MATCH is like that. I had an on-site interview a few weeks ago, and everyone I met there was absolutely wonderful. These are intelligent, passionate people who honestly care about not only their kids, but about education in general. They honestly want to make a difference, and they're doing the best they can to make a dent in the many problems with our public education system. I can't wait to spend a year working with such exceptional people.

As for after this year, I'm still not sure where I'm going. I have a lot of ideas, but I'm not really secure enough in any of them to want to share them on the internet. If you ask me about them over AIM or email or something, I'll be happy to tell you (after about a million disclaimers about how unsure I am of them). At the moment, they all seem to have something to do with education policy, but that could change any day. Please don't hold me to any "plans" I happen to mention here or elsewhere, unless I've already committed to them.

I think that pretty much covers the vital information about what I'll be doing this coming year. It'll be challenging, but it'll also be incredibly rewarding, I'm sure. I'll be learning about the problems with public education from a firsthand perspective, and I can think of nothing better for me at this stage in my life.

Perseverance

2008-07-20T13:40:00.003-04:00

In my experience, there are multiple ways to persevere, multiple motivations to do so, and many different emotions that persevering can create. Perseverance is far from being as simple an action as its one-word description would have us believe. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, mostly because I've been persevering in a number of different ways lately. I'm not going to be able to articulate this terribly well, but I figured I'd give it a shot, and at least spend an entry discussing my thoughts on the issue.

I went rock climbing at a climbing gym a few days ago for essentially the first time - I've been before, but only once or twice. Climbing requires perseverance, clearly, especially for those of us who are inexperienced. I tried to climb a four-story wall. I got stuck on that wall about three times, including once at the very beginning. I must have fallen back onto the ground ten or fifteen times, because I hadn't gotten far enough up the wall to actually fall. I spent most of my time saying I couldn't keep going, complaining to my friends about how difficult it was, and claiming I was going to give up. In fact, however, I was feeling incredibly obstinate and determined. I was persevering because I was angry and indignant that I wasn't succeeding, and that I felt I couldn't succeed. I was persevering to prove to myself that I could do it regardless of my own defeatism. I was ticked off at myself and at the wall, and was determined to conquer it, just to prove that I could. As a side note, I made it halfway up, which was my original goal. This is the same type of perseverance that keeps me doing an average of three hours of homework per day for my summer economics course, even though I could do quite well in the course without doing virtually any work at all.

I've been trying to learn the Goldberg Variations, by Johann Sebastian Bach, for a while now. I got ahold of the music for the first time last August, and since then it's been an on and off battle. I spent the fall semester learning some of the variations, but didn't learn nearly as many as I'd have liked to. Since then, I've picked the music back up a number of times, and this summer I've been practicing them for a couple hours every day. This requires a different type of perseverance. I'm not persevering because I'm angry at the Variations, nor because I'm angry at myself for not learning them. I'm persevering because I love this music. It's very beautiful, and I'd very much like to be able to play it. More importantly, learning it is fun. Sure, it's frustrating at times, especially when I've been working on a passage for days and days and still can't get it to sound the way I hear it in my head. But I persevere because I love the Variations and because learning them makes me happy and fulfilled. It's the same type of perseverance that often kept me working on my thesis last year. I honestly loved what I was doing, no matter how frustrating it was and no matter how much I didn't want to work on it. I knew that the final result would make up for all the frustration.

The type of perseverance I seem to experience most often, though, is very different. It's the type of perseverance that happens when you keep going because the other option simply isn't an option for some reason. I felt this way while writing research papers in multiple all-nighters last semester. I kept writing because to stop would be worse. I kept writing because I just had to. The same thing happens when I continue trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. I keep trying and thinking about it because to give up would be worse - it could mean I'd end up with a meaningless job, and that would be worse than all the frustration I feel now, not knowing what I want to do and struggling to figure it out. It seems like this type of perseverance is always involved in anything that's really important and really difficult. Like making it through college, or figuring out life, or helping people, or anything like that. I don't know if anybody else feels this way, but it seems logical that there'd be such a thing - a type of perseverance that exists in the absence of other motivations and other emotions. These are times when I'm honestly motivated by the need to keep going and persevere, no matter what.

I guess what I can't decide is whether any type of perseverance is any "better" or "worse" than the others. In any case, those are my thoughts at the moment. I'm curious what people's reactions are, if anybody has any reactions or thoughts. I'll post again soon (today or tomorrow) about my plans for next year, but this entry needed to be written first.

My Summer

2008-07-18T14:27:00.004-04:00

I've decided that I'd really like to post here more often, so I'm going to start making myself post at least every few days, no matter how much (or little) I have to write about. For the moment, however, it occurs to me that I haven't said much about what I'm doing this summer.

I'm currently attending Harvard Summer School, and I'm taking a course entitled Principles of Economics. It's the equivalent of a two-semester course that covers the introductions to both micro- and macroeconomics. During the year, it's taught by Professor Gregory Mankiw, who wrote the book we're using, but this summer the course is taught by Professor James Medoff. I complain a lot about him, mainly because he's not the most exciting lecturer in the world, and because he's awkward to the point of being a bit of a jerk. Honestly, though, it's clear that he at least knew his stuff at some point, and he does have some interesting research he's told us about. He focuses primarily on microeconomics and labor, so we spend a lot of time discussing the idiosyncracies of the labor market.

Our TA is named Jen Lao, and she goes to MIT. I have to admit, I'm officially jealous of people who take economics at MIT, because the introductory economics course there uses calculus. Meanwhile, the rest of us poor saps are going to have to take another econ course that covers virtually the same material, except with real mathematics in it. It all seems rather silly and wasteful. In any case, Jen is quite a good TA, and generally very good at stepping in during lecture and explaining things our professor can't communicate well.

My class seems to be composed primarily of high school students, although I'm not certain what the breakdown is exactly. I've been hanging out with a good group of kids most of the time. I try to ignore the fact that most of them try to flirt with me constantly, and just enjoy their company. They're bright and motivated and knowledgeable, so it's been fun to hang out with them.

Most of my time (when I'm not procrastinating as I am now) is spent doing homework, in a manner of speaking. We have very little assigned work for this course, but at some point I decided that if the class was going to be as dull as it's been, then I should kick its metaphorical bum. As a consequence, I've been doing all my reading, and going through every chapter in the study guide after lecture. This generally entails an average of three hours of work per afternoon, so I haven't had much time for socialization. Nonetheless, I can't really complain, since I spend most afternoons sitting in the music library, listening to beautiful music while I learn interesting economics.

For those of you keeping track at home, Jason Fennell visited me this past week. We met up with Meg Mason and Lauren LaCount at various points during the week, and yesterday we went to a climbing wall up near where Meg lives. As a consequence, my arms are currently in quite a bit of pain, and my ability to form fists has been severely diminished. Squeezing ketchup bottles, toothpaste tubes, and opening Gatorade bottles have all proven incredibly difficult. Even taking notes in class was a bit of a challenge. Nonetheless, it was incredibly fun, and I hope to visit her and go climbing at least a couple more times this summer.

I'm still waiting to hear back from a job I interviewed for a week and a half ago. It's at the MATCH charter high school here in Boston (see matchschool.org for details). They hire a full-time tutoring staff that lives on-site and tutors students in their two hours of mandatory tutoring per day. As a result of their high expectations, standards (both academic and disciplinary), and the immense dedication of their faculty and staff, their students make tremendous gains in basic skills and academic achievement, and nearly all go on to be successful at four-year colleges.

What excites me most about the MATCH school is the extent to which their philosophy lines up with my own. Their program focuses on expecting much from their students, and then supplying them with the resources and support they need to meet those expectations. Students are not coddled, but they are cared for and assisted in meeting their lofty goals. I was drawn to this school because of its intense focus on high expectations and how, given the right environment, anyone can meet those expectations. After interviewing at the school, I am also incredibly impressed by the dedication and passion of the staff at the school. Everyone I met there was committed to helping students succeed, as well as to reforming public education in general. They form a very tight-knit family, and they create the environment of (often tough) love that their students need to succeed.

In any case, I don't know yet if I've even gotten the job, so I suppose I should stop getting myself all excited about an unsure thing. It's the biggest disappointment of this whole "real world" thing, for me anyway. I manage to get myself excited and motivated and passionate about some plan or idea I have for the rest of my life, and then for whatever reason, the plan doesn't work out. Generally, it's my fault - I change my mind, or decide the plan wasn't as cool as I originally thought. On the rare occasions when it's out of my control, it's actually a little easier to deal with. After all, at least this time it won't be my fault if I end up no better off than I was before I applied to this job.

I've rambled for quite a while now, but I will try to update this more frequently from now on. I'm sure many of my posts will be mundane and possibly even dull, but if I remain consistent, eventually my writing will improve. We hope.

I hope you are all having lovely summers (if "you all" exist - I don't know if anyone is reading this). I'll write again soon, I hope.

On Love and Expectations

2008-07-06T21:32:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking about love and expectations today. I won't be able to articulate my thoughts nearly as eloquently as I'd like, but I'm going to give it a shot in the hopes that someone out there will read this and share their thoughts on the subject. For the sake of discussion, before you read the next paragraph, I want you to think for at least a moment about how you would complete the following sentence:
"I am most myself when ________ "

As far as I can tell, expectations have an incredibly powerful impact on all humans. Whether we're living up to them or rebelling against them, we all react to expectations, often in very visceral ways. One of the most difficult things I've dealt with while trying to figure out what I want to do "when I grow up" is expectations. I have expectations for myself, and others have expectations for me, and all those expectations have incredibly powerful impacts on my decisions and on how I go about making those decisions. I often set myself up, in a way, to disappoint my own expectations. I let myself get all excited about a job or career path or graduate school program, only to realize a couple of weeks or a month later that it's not what I really wanted. It's incredibly disappointing. Simultaneously, I tell other people about something I'm excited about, only to have to disappoint them as well when I change my mind later.

Everyone is ruled by expectations. They make it hard for us to change, because we don't want to disappoint people, or surprise them by living beyond their expectations. If you expect more from someone, often they will put more effort into something, whereas if you expect less, they are often defeated before they begin. Don't even get me started on parents and their spoken and unspoken expectations for their children. My parents are incredibly laid back and very rarely try to push me, but I still feel the pressure of their expectations.

I was thinking about all of this because I was thinking about my answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this entry, "I am most myself when ____." I realized that my answer first, gut-reaction answer to that question would be, "I am most myself when I am alone." There is no doubt in my mind that the reason for this is that when I am alone, I am not ruled by anyone else's expectations. I am free to live up to my own expectations without fear of disappointing or surprising anyone else. And just as people often do, I tend to live up to my own expectations when I'm alone, rather than living up to other people's expectations for me.

That was when I realized something else. This is the bit that I'm not sure about, but I have a sneaky feeling it's pretty close to being true, if not spot on. I'm pretty sure that finding True Love is really just about finding someone who expects of you exactly what you expect of yourself ... Finding someone with whom you are just as much yourself as you are when you're alone. That's pretty hard to find, when you think about it. Much though it shouldn't be, love is just as easily tainted by expectations as any other form of human interaction. But to find someone with whom you can be unashamedly and entirely yourself, without fear of expectations ... That seems like it'd be worth looking for, and waiting for.

Notes, anecdotes and observations: Harvard

2008-06-29T15:52:00.004-04:00

I was eating brunch at the dining hall one afternoon, and decided to make myself a waffle. The waffle makers here have the Harvard seal imprinted into them. So this afternoon I ate a waffle with the Harvard seal stamped into it. Seriously, though, how full of itself does a college have to be before it purchases waffle-makers imprinted with its seal?

I saw a shirt this afternoon that I've decided is completely awesome. It said, "I only read the Constitution for the articles."

There's a rule here that college-age students aren't allowed to be in relationships with the high schoolers here for the secondary school program. This is fine with me. There's a guy in my class who's seventeen and in high school. He flirts with me constantly. When he gets to college, he's going to turn into one of those preppy, arrogant economics jocks who wouldn't give me the time of day.

My professor ignores questions. Literally. Someone will ask a question, he'll let the TA start answering it, and then halfway through he'll cut her off and say, "So I have here in my notes ..." and then go back to the lecture, leaving the question unanswered.

It turns out Harvard professors aren't necessarily good teachers. At all.

Economics is a lot cooler with math. Unfortunately, many people who take economics classes are mathophobes. I don't blame the professor for wanting to make them feel welcome, so I don't particularly blame him for avoiding advanced mathematical concepts. But when he asks me to explain something mathematically and then makes fun of me for giving him a mathy answer he asked for, I find it difficult to see it as making the mathophobes feel welcome. It seems more like he's making me feel unwelcome.

If I were going to design anything like a Heaven, I would have a place in it with circular rooms surrounded by practice rooms with instruments in them. I'd love playing the instruments, but that's not why I'd put it there. I'd lie in the middle of the room and hear the beautiful music from all the different rooms blending into a pleasant sort of cacophony, where you can't sort out any one piece, but it all blends together into the plural form of Musics, so to speak.

If I were going to design anything like a Hell, I'd make people drive constantly through Massachusetts during rush hour.

Enough people think Obama is Muslim that I actually met one.

It is surprising how much my productivity goes up when I'm sitting in the listening room of a music library, large headphones isolating me from the outside world and beautiful music making studying worth it.

I should try to transition out of wearing T-shirts. They kind of mark me as being rather young. I've been asked if I'm in high school at least five times now. I rather like polo shirts. Maybe I'll switch to them.

Randomly emailing people whose blogs you're reading can be very fun. I emailed one guy whose blog I've been reading for over three years, and he was very pleased to hear from me.

Just because a school is good doesn't mean the homework assignments will be worth your time. Economics assignments should have problems in them, even numbers and math, if you ask me. They shouldn't consist wholly of "Write one page about the effects of _____ on _____" assignments. Evidently my professor thinks differently.

I haven't used a calculator in about two years. It didn't quite occur to me that it might be a useful thing to have with me. I don't know where my calculator is, but I assume it's somewhere at home in my closet. Perhaps I should have brought it.

Computer help-desk people are fun to hang out with, no matter where you are.

If you start a blog and intend to write in it regularly ... Chances are you won't.

On My Blog Title

2008-06-26T11:22:00.000-04:00

In the time of King Arthur, there was a king by the name of Pellinore. He appears in a number of Arthur legends, and takes on different roles in various versions of the legends. In T.H. White's The Once and Future King, both King Pellinore and the Questing Beast take on a slightly different role than they do in other versions of the legends. In White's version, every Pellinore male is trained to hunt the Questing Beast from birth. It is clear that this is a quest they are never to complete. In White's book, King Pellinore is convinced to discontinue his quest. When he does so, he eventually discovers that the Questing Beast has been ill and dying for lack of attention, so King Pellinore nurses the beast back to health and resumes his neverending quest.*

I'm supposed to be going into the "real world" now, and this whole process reminds me a bit of King Pellinore's quest. Sometimes it seems that what I'm looking for in life isn't really something I'm meant to find. It's meant to be something I search for constantly. If I ever found it, I would be content and complacent, which is hardly good. There wouldn't be much of a point, really, if there weren't something driving me to keep searching, keep improving, and, honestly, keep questing. More importantly, the Pellinores didn't hunt the Questing Beast so that they could find it. Their quest was an end in itself. And if you ask me, that's really what the point of life is, at least at the moment. The point is to keep questing, not to capture the beast.

So that's the logic behind the title of my blog. I'm not terribly good at describing it, and I know that last paragraph got a bit corny. But my plan is to use this space as a general area for me to keep people updated on my thoughts as well as the events in my life. As far as I'm concerned, the two are both inextricable and equally important. My posts will often be rambly, corny, philosophical, literary, or just completely insane. With any luck, they will amuse all of us, but if nothing else they will amuse me.

I look forward to your comments and thoughts. Feel free to be as crazy (or more so) as I am, or to attempt to steer me to the path of rationality. Whichever strikes your fancy. If you take the second course, good luck.

Cheers!