Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1173 (SoD #1582) - Exam Day - Throwback Thursday 1906.20
Exam today. My students probably hate me. I can't tell. I know there was some shit talking on Facebook. The grapevine whispered to me.
UPDATE: I have been working on this one for days off an on. It's Monday following 6/20 now. I fell behind because of life and final grades.
So, back to exam day...
I appreciate that no one expressed extreme disgruntled attitudes to my face, not that I would tolerate any of that crap.
I am in the minority when it comes to giving exams in English classes, but I think it's a valuable experience. I have not always enjoyed it myself, but, wow, that sense of accomplishment is intensely powerful. Awesome.
I stay committed to giving a final exam. Some students who struggle with the writing part actually excel at the test part, especially since I hand them the entire test ahead of time. I wasn't even going to write down the study guide and then a student convinced me to do so. Thus, they actually did have the entire test in advance mostly. I believe in preparation more so than study and memorization. It's the process, the journey, less so than the knowledge. The material to know is not unimportant; it's just not paramount.
Also, I want some of them to have that realization that they SHOULD HAVE prepared, that their ordeal would have been easier with preparation. I do feel a little badly that they did not get the full study guide until Monday, three days before the exam (though not quite three full days), which is not really a terribly long time. But then, given that some teachers do not share the entire written question for the essay part ahead of time, verbatim, then I do not feel so badly. But next time I teach, if I keep teaching, I will try to provide them with a written thing farther in advance and maybe do more things in class to prepare it more directly. We did things this term that prepared what I asked of them but not the exact thing, at least not for both choices. We did one of the essay choices more or less exactly the same in one of our Writing Wednesdays. Actually, now that I think of it, the other choice was sort of set up but could be set up better.
At the end of the semester, I am always second guessing and feeling guilty, especially if I feel I could have helped the students more effectively. Not really because I slacked off -- though this may have been true at other points in my career -- but because I could have figured out how to help more effectively.
HUMILITY
According to a friend of mine, who I will not out by name, I am humble. I come off with a lot of humility. She was shocked that I used to be arrogant or have been accused of being arrogant. This comment made my day back on Monday, so I had to save it here. Humility and being humble is something I have been working very hard to achieve. Success. And yet, I am still filled with self doubt that I am actually humble in my heart as opposed to seeming humble but not really being humble in the core.
I simply wanted to note my quest for humility here and chart the fact that it may be working. Now, I will continue to monitor my heart because as I wrote I want to be truly humble not just appear to be humble.
But is one really humble if one is self aware of trying to be humble?
More on this subject later as I feel it is related to imposter syndrome, which I also feel quite strongly in the computer science world.
THE CHOICE
My friend Lynse spoke at an event back in March. I couldn't attend, but here's her video of the speech about how she realized she was gay and what she did about it.
It's really excellent. I have watched it a few times.
https://www.wired.com/2019/06/geeks-guide-college-fantasy-sci-fi/
Good article linked here (above). Here's two good bits from it.
John Kessel on teaching science fiction:
“There’s a lot more fiction being published today that is not realism, by people who don’t label themselves genre writers. So I think there’s more of an opening for that even in a program where none of the people on the faculty have any genre connections whatsoever. But it does seem to me that if you’re writing science fiction and fantasy, it wouldn’t hurt to have somebody in the program who knows that world, like me, or when I went to graduate school I went to the University of Kansas, and James Gunn—an old-time science fiction writer, a grand master of SFWA—is on the faculty there, and he was very instrumental in my learning to write the stuff. And places like Stone Coast—the low residency program—have people like James Patrick Kelly, and many other writers who are well-published in the genre.”
Steph Grossman on genre boundaries:
“I’m in that new category of speculative fiction writers that are slipstream-y at times, but I think maybe one of the things that this is coming from is that people don’t want to be limited in what they can write. In these programs a lot of people are writing more soft science fiction, at the most, or maybe what’s called ‘domestic fabulism’ rather than ‘fantasy,’ necessarily. But then I think sometimes a lot of those people may be struck with an idea that is more traditional in the genre, and then at least they’re like, ‘Well, I wrote that [slipstream] sort of stuff, maybe I can get more fully into some hard science fiction right now,’ depending on what strikes their fancy. As a writer I want the option to write basically everything.”
https://www.wired.com/story/cosmologists-clash-over-the-beginning-of-the-universe/
Some excerpts...
Before Hawking’s talk, all cosmological origin stories, scientific or theological, had invited the rejoinder, “What happened before that?” The Big Bang theory, for instance—pioneered 50 years before Hawking’s lecture by the Belgian physicist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaître, who later served as president of the Vatican’s academy of sciences—rewinds the expansion of the universe back to a hot, dense bundle of energy. But where did the initial energy come from?
Hawking and Hartle were thus led to ponder the possibility that the universe began as pure space, rather than dynamical space-time. And this led them to the shuttlecock geometry. They defined the no-boundary wave function describing such a universe using an approach invented by Hawking’s hero, the physicist Richard Feynman. In the 1940s, Feynman devised a scheme for calculating the most likely outcomes of quantum mechanical events. To predict, say, the likeliest outcomes of a particle collision, Feynman found that you could sum up all possible paths that the colliding particles could take, weighting straightforward paths more than convoluted ones in the sum. Calculating this “path integral” gives you the wave function: a probability distribution indicating the different possible states of the particles after the collision.
Likewise, Hartle and Hawking expressed the wave function of the universe—which describes its likely states—as the sum of all possible ways that it might have smoothly expanded from a point. The hope was that the sum of all possible “expansion histories,” smooth-bottomed universes of all different shapes and sizes, would yield a wave function that gives a high probability to a huge, smooth, flat universe like ours. If the weighted sum of all possible expansion histories yields some other kind of universe as the likeliest outcome, the no-boundary proposal fails.
The problem is that the path integral over all possible expansion histories is far too complicated to calculate exactly. Countless different shapes and sizes of universes are possible, and each can be a messy affair. “Murray Gell-Mann used to ask me,” Hartle said, referring to the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist, “if you know the wave function of the universe, why aren’t you rich?” Of course, to actually solve for the wave function using Feynman’s method, Hartle and Hawking had to drastically simplify the situation, ignoring even the specific particles that populate our world (which meant their formula was nowhere close to being able to predict the stock market). They considered the path integral over all possible toy universes in “minisuperspace,” defined as the set of all universes with a single energy field coursing through them: the energy that powered cosmic inflation. (In Hartle and Hawking’s shuttlecock picture, that initial period of ballooning corresponds to the rapid increase in diameter near the bottom of the cork.)
......and........
No matter how things go, perhaps we’ll be left with some essence of the picture Hawking first painted at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences 38 years ago. Or perhaps, instead of a South Pole-like non-beginning, the universe emerged from a singularity after all, demanding a different kind of wave function altogether. Either way, the pursuit will continue. “If we are talking about a quantum mechanical theory, what else is there to find other than the wave function?” asked Juan Maldacena, an eminent theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who has mostly stayed out of the recent fray. The question of the wave function of the universe “is the right kind of question to ask,” said Maldacena, who, incidentally, is a member of the Pontifical Academy. “Whether we are finding the right wave function, or how we should think about the wave function—it’s less clear.”
CLASSY...VERY CLASSY...
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/26995085/warriors-take-ad-congratulate-raptors
AND NOW SOME NEWSY BITS>>>>>>>>>>>>>
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/06/12/1920217/jordan-peterson-announces-free-speech-anti-censorship-platform-thinkspot
Jordan Peterson Announces Free Speech, Anti-Censorship Platform 'Thinkspot' (newsbusters.org)
Posted by msmash from the marching-forward dept.Psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson announced a subscription-based free speech platform called 'Thinkspot' on Wednesday that promises to provide users the best features of other social media platforms, but without censorship. From a report:It's being marketed as a free speech alternative to payment processors like Patreon in that it will "monetize creators" and as provide a social media alternative to platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Peterson discussed Thinkspot with podcaster Joe Rogan on June 9, emphasizing a radically pro-free speech Terms of Service. He described that freedom as the "central" aspect saying, "once you're on our platform we won't take you down unless we're ordered to by a US court of law."
https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/06/19/0053252/two-potentially-life-friendly-planets-found-orbiting-a-nearby-star
Two Potentially Life-Friendly Planets Found Orbiting a Nearby Star (nationalgeographic.com)
Posted by BeauHD from the possibly-habitable dept
A tiny, old star just 12 light-years away might host two temperate, rocky planets, astronomers announced today. If they're confirmed, both of the newly spotted worlds are nearly identical to Earth in mass, and both planets are in orbits that could allow liquid water to trickle and puddle on their surfaces. National Geographic reports:Scientists estimate that the stellar host, known as Teegarden's star, is at least eight billion years old, or nearly twice the sun's age. That means any planets orbiting it are presumably as ancient, so life as we know it has had more than enough time to evolve. And for now, the star is remarkably quiet, with few indications of the tumultuous stellar quakes and flares that tend to erupt from such objects.
The two worlds orbit a star so faint that it wasn't even spotted until 2003, when NASA astrophysicist Bonnard Teegarden was mining astronomical data sets and looking for dim, nearby dwarf starsthat had so far evaded detection. Teegarden's star is a stellar runt that's barely 9 percent of the sun's mass. It's known as an ultra-cool M dwarf, and it emits most of its light in the infrared -- just like the star TRAPPIST-1, which hosts seven known rocky planets. But Teegarden's star is just a third as far from Earth as the TRAPPIST-1 system, which makes it ideal for further characterization.The team of astronomers reported their findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/06/19/0126243/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century
World's Population Is Projected To Nearly Stop Growing By the End of the Century (usatoday.com)
Posted by BeauHD from the nearing-the-tipping-point dept.
schwit1 writes:The world's population is projected to nearly stop growing by the end of the century due in large part to falling global fertility rates, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new data from the United Nations. By 2100, the world's population is projected to reach approximately 10.9 billion, with annual growth of less than 0.1% -- a steep decline from current levels. Between 1950 and today, the world's population grew between 1% and 2% each year, with the number of people rising from 2.5 billion to more than 7.7 billion.The report also found the world's population is getting older, with people over the age of 65 being the fastest-growing age group. "One in four people living in Europe and Northern America could be 65 years or older by 2050," reports USA Today. "And the number of people age 80 or over is projected to triple globally, from 143 million in 2019 to 426 million in 2050."
As for the global fertility rate, it fell from 3.2 births per woman in 1990 to 2.5 in 2019 and is projected to decline even further to 2.2 in 2050.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Reflect and connect.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.
I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Days ago = 1447 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1906.20 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
No comments:
Post a Comment