Friends

Last Wednesday, I played with a pottery wheel for the first time in 10 years. In high school, pottery was one of my respites from hectic days full of AP classes, along with orchestra, print-making, and (even) auto mechanics. I found wheel-throwing particularly meditative, with its paradoxical combinations of muscle tone and gentle movements, extreme focus and sensory awareness, planning and improvisation, exercise (kicking the wheel) and stillness. The feeling was addictive. I've since found similar paradoxes elsewhere, particularly in karate, sewing, and partner dancing, but I've still longed to find the time to go back to pottery again. So a few weeks ago, I looked around for a class nearby that hadn't started yet -- and, after ruling out many options, found one in Sunnyvale that met once a week. Sold! First class was last Wednesday, and I found that I still had the muscle memory for throwing off the wheel. I threw three cylinders, two of which I sliced to make sure my walls were even, and one medium-sized bowl. I have lots of ideas for other things I want to do. I'm so excited to be back. And soon, Stanford will have its own brand-new studio up and running!

Having the time for this was predicated on a few other big changes that I haven't mentioned here yet. For instance, I'm no longer dancing competitively. Through the first half of the year, my partner and I were practicing maybe two times a week, with no coaching, while he juggled being a new father of twins and work commitments. In mid-summer, we talked about ramping up to our usual practice schedule of practicing four or five times a week, plus having coaching, training, or competitions on the weekends, and I balked. I've done it for years now, and there is a lot I love about ballroom dancing, but I just don't have time for 15-20 hours/week of it anymore. I've still been social dancing, I'm still teaching ballroom to kids (though high school kids this year) once a week, and I've continued my yoga practice, but I haven't been practicing ballroom since before all of my traveling in August. I miss it, but it really is for the best. It's funny that I find myself fidgeting in dance steps more than ever before, though.

I'm also taking a quarter off from school to finish up a project at Nokia Research and to be able to make more time to tackle my ever-growing reading list. More on this and other research directions later.

If I decide to pursue research on One Laptop Per Child for my dissertation, I'll need to re-learn Spanish, and I've been wanting to anyway. I was originally planning to take a refresher course through Foothill community college, but the first class session brought back all the horrors of high-school syllabi and petty grading systems, so I scurried home and bought a whole slew of teach-yourself-Spanish books instead. I'm hoping it will come back relatively quickly, with some practice, and that I can start conversational classes at Stanford in the winter. I still understand decently; I just can't remember many words or any conjugations. Pues, necesito practicar!

I'll be traveling this fall, as well! I'll be in Europe in late October, and in San Diego for the CSCW conference November 8-12 (participating in a workshop on family communication). Anyone else going?

There's raccoons on campus! Really fat raccoons. I didn't take a picture because they were skulking under a tree, and I didn't think they would appreciate the flash.

The things you see biking through campus at 3 in the morning.

Conjecture: there are two ways to enjoy life. One is experiencing things, and another is accomplishing things. One is passive and letting the book, movie, music, play, smell, taste, event come to you, and another is going out and making those things happen. One you're a sponge, and another you're a Creator.

Just a thought.

It's funny how the value of things change depending on what's scarce. Okay, it's not funny. I remember in high school agonizing over purchases because money was scarce (I didn't control my own money, or more precisely I didn't have my own money from an allowance, job, or otherwise), so each new book, CD, or game was weighed at length. Not surprisingly, it was then that I developed a fondness for Half Price Books.

One day, it may be my health/energy that's scarce. Right now, it's time: trying to partition the week between school, dance, games, sleep, food, laundry, and oh research so I can actually graduate.

But as I go to sleep at nights, I realize there's still one thing missing from that balance: people. Because I realize that even if it is my life and my limited, it's not about me. Because when I cease to be, I'd like to have left a positive effect on the people around me. And while I'm still here, it sucks to be alone.

So a few weeks back (when I originally planned to write this), I wrote my mother. As in a real letter, not the usual "I'm too busy to talk, I'm fine." And she was really glad to receive it. My brother called the same day, and we talked for 20 minutes. Hey, that's a long telephone conversation for me. I might visit his family on Christmas rather than spend it with my DVD player and Jimmy Stewart. The next day, my dad called... Well, two out of three is a start.

A couple weeks ago, I threw a little party for ballroom people who still live in Berkeley. I don't think I talked much, I just provided what I could: my apartment, my time, and some pie. Some people didn't come but, hey, other people's time is scarce too. You just have to keep on giving them opportunities.

But now I'm way behind on work again. I think I should have taken up juggling.

I'm taking one class this semester and auditing another one. The one I'm auditing is Ling 210: Phonetic Theory. It was one of the most amazing courses I've taken; basically, the goal of the class was impart the knowledge for linguistics grad students to pass the phonetic portion of their master's exam, and Prof. Johnson does this by getting everyone acquainted with the literature. Very acquainted, as people are expected to read 40+ papers spread over 5 different fields. We read and we discuss: discuss methodology, discuss conclusions, and discuss theoretical implications. And you really have to grapple with the material to be able to discuss it in this forum: a knot of linguistics faculty and Ph.D. students gathered around a table. Everyone has a different background and so has different strengths and perspectives and brings something different to the problem. This is vastly different from the engineering classes I'm acquainted with, which is absorbing information in lecture and exercising it in problem sets. I'm not getting as much out of it this semester as I can't spare that much time for the reading, which really does take the heart out of the course.

The course I'm actually taking is Psychology 290I: Motivation. Namely, it's the motivation of students and is co-taught by the GSI teaching and resource center, whose workshops I've been going to whenever I remember to. Pretty much everyone in the class is a GSI or somewhere along the track of becoming faculty. The readings for class are out of a in-progress book they're writing. So far I've read 5 draft chapters, and they have been... illuminating.

One of the central themes of the book is examining the motivations of all the actors involved in teaching process (including the teachers and GSIs). Of the students, they are particularly interested in the role fear plays in why students behave as they do. Specifically, fear that they have less ability than they appear to have, thus undermining their self-worth. Two patterns of behavior which they claimed supported this were surprising, especially since I see it all the time: First, the failure-avoidant seeks to avoid failure by not giving it their real try. Methods include using procrastination, being busy, or a psychologically-induced illness (e.g. test anxiety) as excuses why they couldn't live up to potential. As the authors note, they actually sow the seeds of their own failure before the exam as precaution to deflect the blow of the mediocre grade after taking the exam.

The second group, who they dub overstrivers, is surprising because outwardly they look a lot like the attentive, engaged students that teachers love. They study and prepare, but this activity is motivated by fear (again, of being found lacking) rather than out of enthusiasm for the subject. And while it may seem like any means to an end (the end in this case being intense study), it ultimately ends in tears because their's is the cult of perfection, which is something you can't keep up forever. I'm not too sure how common this is, but it's a possibility, especially in a place like Berkeley.

As for grades, that thing that seems to be in constant contention between professors and students at Berkeley, they argue against the conventional wisdom among professors that fighting over grades implies that students aren't interested in the material. Surveys show students often are interested in learning, it's just lower on the priority list than doing well (and not looking like a failure and maintaining that scholarship and getting a GPA they can put on their resume or graduate school application). Fighting grading practices, they claim, is another method of attributing potential failure to something besides themselves.

What the book advocates is not imposing your own mindset upon the students and then getting mad because they don't take it up. Rather, they say the class should be organized in such a way that serves the desires of all parties. In the case of the grading conundrum, they say the professor should lay out what is expected of the students and how they will be evaluated on those targets. If the system is transparent and fair, the students will understand what is asked of them and know what they should work on to get a good grade. If the professor matches the goals and evaluation measures to their own objectives for the course, then the teachers and students will be working together rather than fighting. At least, that's what they say; experience has made a lot of people into cynics and distrustful of the other side.

That's not all the book talks about; most of the recent chapters are setting up their problem-based course organization and how to go about designing a course from that perspective. But that's not what I really wanted to talk about. I'm having trouble reading the text because I often find myself stopping because something they said reminds me of something and my mind wanders off on a tangent. As you all know, I'm fascinated by how things work, the human mind especially, and what I've read provides abundant food for thought. I see living examples in the students I know and the classes I've taught, but the most shocking ones are the personal truths.

I think it can definitely be said that while I have learned a lot at Berkeley, I have not been learning as efficiently as I used to. There's always been a nagging fear that it's because I've reached my academic limit, but I doubt that based on a good deal of evidence that argues otherwise: I can still do the math and grok anything in EE, machine learning, linguistics, and whatever else I've tried my hand at. It's just that I'm not motivated. I procrastinate (I call it doing things of more immediate interest, like writing LJ posts), do assignments at the last minute, keep bad sleeping schedules so I don't work efficiently and get sick more often, and generally act like a classic failure-avoidant, sad to say. What has Berkeley done to me? I really like it here; it's so great to be surrounded intelligent, dedicated people. Yet, here I am, turtling up to protect my ego. It's not just academics, but I can see symptoms in my dancing and even gaming.

The alternate explanation is that it's not Berkeley, but TLRHG was a missed morale check which I never rallied from. Or because of my father. Or maybe I've always been this way but I've never been academically challenged until now.

The (McNeil/Lehrer) NewsHour ran an interesting series of reports this week. Based off interviews with friends and close associates, they discussed how the presidential candidates think and how they deal with adversity. For one thing, it's a welcome departure from what they have done or plan to do. Instead, it's how they arrived at those decisions in the first place. As I tell my students, it's not the what, it's the how and why we're interested in.

In terms of decision making, both candidates welcome advice and input (there was no mention of G.W. Bush, but I suppose the anecdotal data is that he's the sort of president who favors advice that supports a pre-conceived notion), even some supporters saying they welcome people to challenge them. However, McCain is more likely to then quickly make his decision based on instinct and what he feels is right; in comparison, Obama tends to be more deliberate and thoughtful. One of these was a fighter pilot, one was a law professor. Guess which is which. To quote Norman Ornstein in the report, since it pretty much sums up my view: "An impulsive decision-making style is fine if you're piloting a jet in combat. It's fine if you're a senator where the consequences are not going to be that long-lasting. It's a real question mark when you move into the presidency." Links: McCain, Obama.

As for how they deal with adversity, I couldn't hear much a difference. Both candidates seem to take their setbacks, brush themselves off, and continue. Links: McCain, Obama.

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