Six Degrees

There's this new show called Six Degrees. I haven't watched it but it takes place in New York and there are seen ad campaigns on the subways. They bug me. "The girl across the aisle is flirting with you." "The man next to the door will one day be your boss." Ack, how gender stereotyping is that. Not that you were going to watch it anyway, but I vote for a boycott.

The other day a teacher asked if I celebrated the high holy holidays. I said no, and then I said something funny, "I got to a presbyterian church." Was it that I didn't want to say I'm a Christian? Was it that I was trying to b specific to let her know what "kind" of Christian I was? I also didn't want to imply that Christians didn't/couldn't celebrate "Jewish" holidays.

I've been trying to coordinate getting this computer experiment to work to use with my class next week. It's been quite involved. But if I can get a reservation for the middle school Mac lab I'm all set. It's a flashcard study we used in the research methods class I TAed for where the students learn English-Swahili word pairs. It helps show that spaced apart learning is better (an old finding) and that it's better to keep studying things you think you already know. In one condition you're forced to keep every word pair in the "pile" and in another condition you get to choose whether to keep it or drop it.

A teacher at school gave me feedback yesterday that she'd been hearing that some of my students felt like the class was too lecture-y, wanted more discussion and might be too demanding. That was a little heard to hear because I'm trying hard not to do those things. The day before I had felt really good about school and how class went, students participated, "got it," and enjoyed it. One good suggestion was to get student feedback, so I did so with anonymous forms with my class today. One helpful thing I learned is that many of them really want more structure - they want to know exactly what pages to read for each class and exactly what they need to know and what's just "discussion."

E and I watched The Last King of Scotland for date night this week. I learned something about Idi Amin (and we agreed with the critics that Forest Whitaker did a great job) but the movie was just okay.

My sister and I went to hear a trio of sisters last night, one of whom I met through church...talk about an Asian parent's dream (piano, cello, violin). It was nice to hear some good classical music. I also liked their encore, this tango piece called Oblivion. Students got in free. Adults $15. I've been good about not using my student ID anymore. Extra motivation now - would hate to have one of my students catch me trying to pass!