http://whipplelib.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/nature-teaching-on-the-blackboard-by-william-plane-pycraft-and-janet-kelman-london-caxton-publishing-co-1910-donated-to-the-whipple-library-by-jim-secord/
I wrote this like a year ago for the Whipple Library (my department's library, tiny and oh so full of history of science books), and they just put it online. Cool!! And somehow funny that pictures from a 1910 book on blackboard drawing would be on the internet?
My favorite part is the comment. :) Whipple Library, I <3 you!
Thursday, 28 April 2011
the woes of a supervisor
My dear friend and classmate Emily is a philosopher. She has studied basically only philosophy since she was 17. Her PhD is on what makes a just society. She also supervises the introductory class to Philosophy of Science, which has nothing to do with justice or society, really.
The students' essay question this week was about the philosophy of quantum physics. After giving the Philosophy of Science supervision, Emily walked into our office looking pale, exhausted, and shell-shocked. When I said "what's wrong?", she said in a small and defeated voice, "They asked me what quantum physics was."
Maybe this is one of those you-have-to-know-her stories, but to see a very accomplished and dedicated philosopher completely done in by undergrads' questions was unsettling. It happens all the time, sure, but it highlights the narrowness of knowledge that we all get from postgrad degrees. Trusting undergrads think that we have all the answers. They call me Dr Wylie in emails no matter how many times I tell them I'm not. They trust our inked-in-the-margins feedback as the way forward. So did it shake Emily's students' whole worldviews that she didn't know what quantum physics was? Did they leave the supervision looking as traumatized as she did?
Probably not. My guess is those students were super relieved that Emily didn't know what the major topic of their essay meant, because that meant it isn't important and thus that THEY don't have to know it either. Rather than necessarily failing her students in her role as their teacher, as Emily felt, instead she probably did them a huge favor by showing that philosophy is not about knowing all the facts but actually is a frame of mind, a worldview, a way of thinking. Insert any old case study, even something as daunting as quantum physics, and Philosophy will analyze it just fine.
Even so, I'm going to Google the topics of my students' essays so I can rattle off some kind of definition for everything. Like a good all-knowing (egotistical, bull-shitting...) supervisor should. :)
The students' essay question this week was about the philosophy of quantum physics. After giving the Philosophy of Science supervision, Emily walked into our office looking pale, exhausted, and shell-shocked. When I said "what's wrong?", she said in a small and defeated voice, "They asked me what quantum physics was."
Maybe this is one of those you-have-to-know-her stories, but to see a very accomplished and dedicated philosopher completely done in by undergrads' questions was unsettling. It happens all the time, sure, but it highlights the narrowness of knowledge that we all get from postgrad degrees. Trusting undergrads think that we have all the answers. They call me Dr Wylie in emails no matter how many times I tell them I'm not. They trust our inked-in-the-margins feedback as the way forward. So did it shake Emily's students' whole worldviews that she didn't know what quantum physics was? Did they leave the supervision looking as traumatized as she did?
Probably not. My guess is those students were super relieved that Emily didn't know what the major topic of their essay meant, because that meant it isn't important and thus that THEY don't have to know it either. Rather than necessarily failing her students in her role as their teacher, as Emily felt, instead she probably did them a huge favor by showing that philosophy is not about knowing all the facts but actually is a frame of mind, a worldview, a way of thinking. Insert any old case study, even something as daunting as quantum physics, and Philosophy will analyze it just fine.
Even so, I'm going to Google the topics of my students' essays so I can rattle off some kind of definition for everything. Like a good all-knowing (egotistical, bull-shitting...) supervisor should. :)
Thursday, 21 April 2011
Gone too far?
One of the paleontologists and I were walking down the museum hallway, discussing his work on fossil microvertebrates (small furry animals) and I was asking my usual questions about why paleo-rat teeth are useful for his research, etc, and he looked at me and said, "Can I just say, I feel like I'm on the couch here."
OMG. Ethnography turned psychoanalysis?! Good thing fieldwork has given me a lot of experience and skill at BACK-PEDALING.
OMG. Ethnography turned psychoanalysis?! Good thing fieldwork has given me a lot of experience and skill at BACK-PEDALING.
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
End of term celebrations
Today is the last day of Lent Term. Tomorrow starts the 6-week "term break" when the undergrads go home to rest, party, and hopefully study for their exams, and the grads hunker down to do all the work that we didn't get to during the busy-ness of term.
An HPS professor who started working here in October is starting a new tradition today - he invited all the 2nd-year HPS students (there's like 100 of them) to the pub! He'll give tonight's lecture and then shepherd the undergrads to the pub!! How amazing is that? and how foreign to Americans! I can't even imagine drinking with my professors as an (underage) undergrad.
In my surprised and admiring reaction to the professor's invitation (which included us supervisors as well as the students), I emailed, "This is so cool of you! What a lovely gesture." This inadvertent and quickly-typed combo of American and British expressions actually totally captured my mixed feelings of how welcoming it would feel to be invited to hang out with your professors, and how strange it would be to go drinking with them.
So I'll go along tonight, get my half-pint of cider, and see what the undergrads make of this incredibly egalitarian event, and hope like crazy that no one gets embarrassingly drunk.
An HPS professor who started working here in October is starting a new tradition today - he invited all the 2nd-year HPS students (there's like 100 of them) to the pub! He'll give tonight's lecture and then shepherd the undergrads to the pub!! How amazing is that? and how foreign to Americans! I can't even imagine drinking with my professors as an (underage) undergrad.
In my surprised and admiring reaction to the professor's invitation (which included us supervisors as well as the students), I emailed, "This is so cool of you! What a lovely gesture." This inadvertent and quickly-typed combo of American and British expressions actually totally captured my mixed feelings of how welcoming it would feel to be invited to hang out with your professors, and how strange it would be to go drinking with them.
So I'll go along tonight, get my half-pint of cider, and see what the undergrads make of this incredibly egalitarian event, and hope like crazy that no one gets embarrassingly drunk.
Thursday, 10 March 2011
Stuck.
My chapter - my pride and joy a few weeks ago - is not going well. My supervisor said I need to define what makes preparators a group... what unifies this community, when all my data are about how different preparators' work and beliefs and skills are?
Crap.
While busy being stuck on this problem, I searched around my computer looking for... well, who knows what I was looking for, besides a few minutes of distraction. And I found it, in a poem I wrote last spring and forgot about. It had struck me then how the PhD students ahead of me talked about the way they write and how they GET themselves to write when they're stuck - they had very diverse, strange, individualized, "magic" methods. Now I need one!
Crap.
While busy being stuck on this problem, I searched around my computer looking for... well, who knows what I was looking for, besides a few minutes of distraction. And I found it, in a poem I wrote last spring and forgot about. It had struck me then how the PhD students ahead of me talked about the way they write and how they GET themselves to write when they're stuck - they had very diverse, strange, individualized, "magic" methods. Now I need one!
A line at a time
Quick clicks, or long stares at a blank screen with a few tentative clacks
A line at a time
What makes your words come? What makes you “hot”? “on”? What “loosens your writing fingers”? Is it coffee or clouds or mornings or gin or deadlines?
You know what you want to say. Good thing there’s so much space to say it in.
The white plain stretches between the margins, limitless to the boundary of 80,000 words.
Unreachable? Better not to think about it. “PhDs write themselves”, they say – once you know enough.
5,333 lines. 762 paragraphs. Footnotes not included.
That’s enough to make a contribution to knowledge… right?
Sunday, 27 February 2011
a lovely weekend
Flowers are a BFD in this country. Everyone can identify the different kinds, and they talk about how daffodils are so much more appealing than tulips, etc. I've never understood the interest, but I tried to learn by going to Anglesey Abbey, a National Trust house near Cambridge that's famous for its "snowdrops", an early spring flower. None of my loser friends wanted to go (to be fair, it was raining), so I put on my waterproofs and cycled over. (The map says it's 7 miles, but I added some "scenic" extra miles thanks to a few wrong turns.) It was Saturday, the second-to-last day of "snowdrop season", so I was just in time.
Snowdrops! In a muddy, rainsodden layer of dead leaves. And most of the garden's snowdrops were wilting or dead. I was not impressed.
The white dots under this tree are all snowdrops! That was kind of pretty.
The garden mostly looked like this - dead stuff with some tiny shoots of green stuff. Barren and wet and kind of sad, but with a glimmer of hope for spring!
Everyone else was super excited to see snowdrops. I got there 15 minutes after the place opened, on a Saturday morning, and there was a queue to get it! And it was raining!
The Brits love their flowers. That's why they turned up in droves to Anglesey Abbey this weekend, with their wellies, macs, and brolies in tow.
Don't you love the road symbol that means "Cambridge"? A castle?! What a fun sign to follow home! Unfortunately my arm was just not long enough to photograph the sign AND me, so I just captured the important part - the sign.
So on Sunday (today), after I had finally gotten dry and warm after yesterday's rainy cycle ride and bleak garden walk (although I did actually have a really good time and plan to take people there soon, when there is less dead stuff to see), I gave up on the flowers and went for good old muddy field-walking. But first...
After a yoga class with my friend (where I did more yawning than stretching, I think), we went to Susannah's for pancakes! These were British "pancakes", of course, which are what we'd call crepes - thin and not sweet (unlike American pancakes). Susannah had us wrap the pancakes around bacon and pour maple syrup ("from Canada!", she said proudly - it's rare here!) on them... bacon is not my typical pancake topping of choice, but it was fun to see how excited she and her friends were about it. Then Susannah and I went for a walk. As we walked out the door, the rain started. Great. Susannah grabbed two umbrellas and off we went. Through muddy fields and over fences (and through one! thank you, yoga, for making me limber enough to fit through horizontal metal slats...), we tramped the three miles to Coton, the town west of Cambridge. We marveled at their cute thatched houses and one pub, then spent AN HOUR at their humongus garden store! It had everything - a farm shop, a garden shop, a kitchenware shop, a how-to-take-care-of-your-pond-and-fish shop... it was amazing. Then we walked home, skipping the WWII cemetery that had been our original destination because we were wet and tired from the excitement of the garden store. We had tea and cake in her kitchen, then I tromped home across the dusky fens, admiring the mud and the barren trees and the just-starting-to-grow green stuff.
What a wonder. Spring is on the way! And all this rain is good for it, right? :)
Snowdrops! In a muddy, rainsodden layer of dead leaves. And most of the garden's snowdrops were wilting or dead. I was not impressed.
The white dots under this tree are all snowdrops! That was kind of pretty.
The garden mostly looked like this - dead stuff with some tiny shoots of green stuff. Barren and wet and kind of sad, but with a glimmer of hope for spring!
Everyone else was super excited to see snowdrops. I got there 15 minutes after the place opened, on a Saturday morning, and there was a queue to get it! And it was raining!
The Brits love their flowers. That's why they turned up in droves to Anglesey Abbey this weekend, with their wellies, macs, and brolies in tow.
Don't you love the road symbol that means "Cambridge"? A castle?! What a fun sign to follow home! Unfortunately my arm was just not long enough to photograph the sign AND me, so I just captured the important part - the sign.So on Sunday (today), after I had finally gotten dry and warm after yesterday's rainy cycle ride and bleak garden walk (although I did actually have a really good time and plan to take people there soon, when there is less dead stuff to see), I gave up on the flowers and went for good old muddy field-walking. But first...
After a yoga class with my friend (where I did more yawning than stretching, I think), we went to Susannah's for pancakes! These were British "pancakes", of course, which are what we'd call crepes - thin and not sweet (unlike American pancakes). Susannah had us wrap the pancakes around bacon and pour maple syrup ("from Canada!", she said proudly - it's rare here!) on them... bacon is not my typical pancake topping of choice, but it was fun to see how excited she and her friends were about it. Then Susannah and I went for a walk. As we walked out the door, the rain started. Great. Susannah grabbed two umbrellas and off we went. Through muddy fields and over fences (and through one! thank you, yoga, for making me limber enough to fit through horizontal metal slats...), we tramped the three miles to Coton, the town west of Cambridge. We marveled at their cute thatched houses and one pub, then spent AN HOUR at their humongus garden store! It had everything - a farm shop, a garden shop, a kitchenware shop, a how-to-take-care-of-your-pond-and-fish shop... it was amazing. Then we walked home, skipping the WWII cemetery that had been our original destination because we were wet and tired from the excitement of the garden store. We had tea and cake in her kitchen, then I tromped home across the dusky fens, admiring the mud and the barren trees and the just-starting-to-grow green stuff.
What a wonder. Spring is on the way! And all this rain is good for it, right? :)
Thursday, 24 February 2011
No secrets in my supervisions
One of my students came to her supervision with plastic wrap (or "cling film" in this country) around her wrists. She didn't mention it so I didn't either, but, being very tattoo-conscious, I was DYING to ask her about the fresh tats that I could just see under the plastic. So, subtle person that I am (not), I emailed her later and got this reply:
"Thanks re: the tattoos. You must have previous experience with tattoos as most people who saw my cling-filmed wrists thought I must be slightly suicidal!"
Oh my. Does this make me a "cool", with-it supervisor, or a stalker?
"Thanks re: the tattoos. You must have previous experience with tattoos as most people who saw my cling-filmed wrists thought I must be slightly suicidal!"
Oh my. Does this make me a "cool", with-it supervisor, or a stalker?
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