It's been a rough week for the people around me. Three of my friends had to travel long ways to visit ill grandparents. One friend serving in the Peace Corps in Africa with only a month til he goes home got dumped by his longterm girlfriend over Skype. My dear friend and successor as captain of the Clare Hall women's boat club is struggling with the work and responsibility and freezing cold weather that rowing involves. A fellow PhD student has crippling back pain for no reason and finally was admitted to the hospital because it got so bad. The kid who was dating me had his experiments go all wrong, broke his bike lock key thus leaving his bike permanently locked to the rack, and then got broken up with all on the same day.
Awful.
Since I'm in a culture that doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, I'm going to have mine a day early and list What I'm Thankful For now while I'm feeling very thankful...
-my family is so healthy and well that 4 of them are on a tropical vacation this week and the other 2 live in Florida on a permanent tropical vacation
-I am so healthy and well that I rowed under a below-freezing brilliant sunrise this morning and survived
-I am not in charge of anything where people can get hurt or be cold (I only run seminars, which are quite pleasant compared to rowing outings)
-I have a new home with a skylight window with A RAINBOW shining through it right now (honestly, I'm feeling thankful enough already, the rainbow's just icing on the cake!)
-I get to spend today (and most days) in a warm welcoming office full of hard-working grad students who are glad to be there
-I get to spend today (and most days) talking to undergrads about ideas that they're excited about
-I get to spend today (and most days) being part of discussions about ideas that academics get excited about, despite their best efforts to act as good stoic Brits
-I'm going to London this afternoon, just for fun. ?! I'll get to ride the train and the tube and go see a free science museum with my friend. In London. And I am so thankful!
I hope your list is just as long and heartfelt as mine. Happy Thanksgiving!!!
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Wednesday, 17 November 2010
Spot the pun...
I LOVE grading undergrads' essays, especially when they (unintentionally) leave gems like these for me to find:
Student 1: “The mechanical philosophy was the belief that natural objects operate like machines. This was a new idea as part of the new scientific movement which was gaining momentum during the 1600s.”
Student 1: “The mechanical philosophy was the belief that natural objects operate like machines. This was a new idea as part of the new scientific movement which was gaining momentum during the 1600s.”
Student 3: "And in a similar vein by considering the magician healers in medieval Europe it can be shown how their own emphasis on results at the expense of theory bled through into much of the more formal medical tradition wherever it was judged to work."
:)Saturday, 6 November 2010
Snapshots - "real" ones this time :)
These are from last weekend's trip to my friend's new flat in Thetford, a tiny town about a 45-minute train ride from Cambridge. It poured down rain, making all the different shades of green even greener and more beautiful. Can you tell who's English in this picture? (Hint: they're wearing the Brits' favorite outdoor footwear...)
The town has ruins of a medieval monastery. No big deal. Doesn't every town? (?!?! How cool is this!!)
In between rainshowers we got to see lots of these! Susannah (from Dublin) made the joke about the leprechauns at the end of the rainbow, though all the rest of us were thinking it and not wishing to spread stereotypes...
Also, my friend's college had a Harry Potter-themed formal dinner!! It was absolutely perfectly like Hogwarts, complete with a super high hammerbeam wooden ceiling and long trestle tables and students sitting separately from the professors. And, of course, everyone wore their normal black formal gowns... and maybe a special hat. :)
And look what they brought in as special guests!! (they were very camera-shy, especially in the candlelight - can you tell what (or who0oooo) it is? :) )
And in between all this excitement, there's some work thrown in at my beloved desk in the PhD office, which I share with 14 others including 5 new PhD students (very exciting!).
And after a long day of "work" (can learning about interesting things really be work?), I go home to my wonderful attic room and try to make space around the enormous and cuddly cat who also lives there.
The town has ruins of a medieval monastery. No big deal. Doesn't every town? (?!?! How cool is this!!)
In between rainshowers we got to see lots of these! Susannah (from Dublin) made the joke about the leprechauns at the end of the rainbow, though all the rest of us were thinking it and not wishing to spread stereotypes...
Also, my friend's college had a Harry Potter-themed formal dinner!! It was absolutely perfectly like Hogwarts, complete with a super high hammerbeam wooden ceiling and long trestle tables and students sitting separately from the professors. And, of course, everyone wore their normal black formal gowns... and maybe a special hat. :)
And look what they brought in as special guests!! (they were very camera-shy, especially in the candlelight - can you tell what (or who0oooo) it is? :) )
And in between all this excitement, there's some work thrown in at my beloved desk in the PhD office, which I share with 14 others including 5 new PhD students (very exciting!).
And after a long day of "work" (can learning about interesting things really be work?), I go home to my wonderful attic room and try to make space around the enormous and cuddly cat who also lives there.
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
Snapshots of reality (not)
Today was unreal. It started with this crazy pilates class organized by my rowing team, at 7am. Ugh. It was a hard class, and being up and sweaty that early brought unwelcome flashbacks of rowing, and the class was run by a tiny American woman named Babs who had a really loud voice and no sense of what it might be like to not be in incredible shape like she is. When it finally ended, my friend Chrissie and I went for coffee and discussed the U.S. midterm elections. ?! I just love that my dear friend, a German-born, Welsh-educated, 27-year-old Cambridge grad student in classics, knows all about the U.S. Congress, Christine O'Donnell, and the dire predictions of what's going to happen to the Democrats.
Then I went home and got back in bed with a pile of student essays and my landlord's cat. (This cat is huge and striped and looks like he should be scary, but he's desperate for attention and purrs just when you let him hang out near you.) Then, very symbolically, my favorite marking pen ran out of ink. Following my mom's view of pedagogy, I use colored pens to mark essays, so my writing stands out from the printed words. But my mom does NOT use red pens, because red can suggest a negative connotation for her comments when they may not be negative at all, and they also may not be the best or the only possible comment to be made about that essay. Anyway, in line with this expert advice I bought a green pen last fall when I first started supervising undergrads, and it had an ink cartridge with about 3 inches' worth of green ink. Now, a year in, it's totally empty! Does that mean my students write essays that deserve a lot of my ink? or just that I've marked a lot of essays in the past year? Hmmm.
Day full of seminar, marking essays, writing crappy ideas about the role of museum volunteers in modern scientific practice, loading the department's little dishwasher with people's coffee cups just because it's so satisfying, and having a typically infuriating interaction with the University Library's policy of not letting people read their books. Postdocs in my department are planning to go to a national demonstration against the planned humongus funding cuts to British universities, and they're recruiting PhD students. Ironically, most of us can't afford to go, either time-wise or money-wise. But how nice to be part of a community that's going to demonstrate. Can I be politically active in a country where I can't vote? I also found myself in the "Magic and the Occult" section of my department's library, looking for a book about alchemy to show my students tomorrow. ?! Too bad Halloween is over. Then I walked through gorgeous Kings College, with evensong coming from the chapel, on my way to yoga class #2 (rough life I lead, right?). This one was much more fun, especially when we learned "corpse" pose and the instructor (a student who just likes yoga and isn't actually an instructor) said "your arms and legs are heavy, let them sink into the ground..." Halloween is everywhere! Then dinner at Clare Hall with my friend Geoff and a Clare Hall Fellow from Australia who invited me to speak at her department's seminar - cool! We totally don't know each other but anyone is a friend at college dinners, I guess. Then Geoff and I strolled home through the streetlight-free, twisty streets in the crazy way-too-darkness caused by the end of daylight savings time on Sunday. It's the time of year when the grass is still green and the leaves are every color and HUGE and Cambridge is just beautiful. Unreal, but beautiful.
Now if only I can please wake up tomorrow to my country not laden with a red-state Congress??
Then I went home and got back in bed with a pile of student essays and my landlord's cat. (This cat is huge and striped and looks like he should be scary, but he's desperate for attention and purrs just when you let him hang out near you.) Then, very symbolically, my favorite marking pen ran out of ink. Following my mom's view of pedagogy, I use colored pens to mark essays, so my writing stands out from the printed words. But my mom does NOT use red pens, because red can suggest a negative connotation for her comments when they may not be negative at all, and they also may not be the best or the only possible comment to be made about that essay. Anyway, in line with this expert advice I bought a green pen last fall when I first started supervising undergrads, and it had an ink cartridge with about 3 inches' worth of green ink. Now, a year in, it's totally empty! Does that mean my students write essays that deserve a lot of my ink? or just that I've marked a lot of essays in the past year? Hmmm.
Day full of seminar, marking essays, writing crappy ideas about the role of museum volunteers in modern scientific practice, loading the department's little dishwasher with people's coffee cups just because it's so satisfying, and having a typically infuriating interaction with the University Library's policy of not letting people read their books. Postdocs in my department are planning to go to a national demonstration against the planned humongus funding cuts to British universities, and they're recruiting PhD students. Ironically, most of us can't afford to go, either time-wise or money-wise. But how nice to be part of a community that's going to demonstrate. Can I be politically active in a country where I can't vote? I also found myself in the "Magic and the Occult" section of my department's library, looking for a book about alchemy to show my students tomorrow. ?! Too bad Halloween is over. Then I walked through gorgeous Kings College, with evensong coming from the chapel, on my way to yoga class #2 (rough life I lead, right?). This one was much more fun, especially when we learned "corpse" pose and the instructor (a student who just likes yoga and isn't actually an instructor) said "your arms and legs are heavy, let them sink into the ground..." Halloween is everywhere! Then dinner at Clare Hall with my friend Geoff and a Clare Hall Fellow from Australia who invited me to speak at her department's seminar - cool! We totally don't know each other but anyone is a friend at college dinners, I guess. Then Geoff and I strolled home through the streetlight-free, twisty streets in the crazy way-too-darkness caused by the end of daylight savings time on Sunday. It's the time of year when the grass is still green and the leaves are every color and HUGE and Cambridge is just beautiful. Unreal, but beautiful.
Now if only I can please wake up tomorrow to my country not laden with a red-state Congress??
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