Light and Momentary

Need Some Tea and Sympathy

On Monday I took our aged laptop to campus to give my presentation to the other doc students. The laptop appears to have found this a disagreeable journey, because yesterday it died. Or it mostly died, as Miracle Max might say; my husband has coaxed it into a Linux-driven new life.

The problem is that I have a big stats assignment due on Friday. With the Windows machine, I had a GUI that gave me access to the SAS server. We now have two Linux boxes and I have no access to stats software with friendly little check-box windows saying "make me six histograms, please."

I have a powerful but forbidding stats program on this machine. It makes me want to cry, actually. As I have posted before, the topic most likely to trigger a big argument between Elwood and me is the computer, and that kind of makes me want to cry too.  Oh, UGH, now I am crying. Over the computer. Time to get a grip.

It's also time for me to run and see a family for therapy. Here's hoping the learning curve for R (the scary stats program) seems less precipitous when I get back.

Absolutely Not Gonna -- Oh, Maybe I Will After All

At the beginning of October I said to my children, "I cannot make your Halloween costumes this year. You will have to pick something that does not require me to sew or construct papier-mache heads." I did not expect this to be a hardship because I am not very good at sewing or papier-mache, but all month long I have been fielding requests for one crazy costume idea or another.

I forgot that I get sucked in, that I like making costumes as much as they like having me make them costumes. I went to Target fully intending to bring home some packaged made-in-China thing and was surprised to find I could not do it. So here we are on the 30th of October, and I am making costumes. This afternoon I am constructing a Sculpey nose with a chunk taken out of it for Mad-Eye Moody, along with claws for his wooden leg. Hee hee, I can't wait to see him in full regalia.

Let us gloss over the fact that my naptime attempt to finish a section of my statistics assignment failed miserably. Let us also gloss over the fact that I have bunches of changes to make to that talk I'm giving. Tomorrow is Halloween, and Mad-Eye Moody needs a nose. Pictures to follow.

Oh P.S. I dreamed about blogging. I dreamed that I saw a little girl from my caseload and she had miraculously figured out how to use plural -s and possessive -'s, both of which have been a long time coming. "This is wonderful!" I said in my dream. "This is so cool I will have to blog about it! I will call the post 'S  S, Baby.'" And even in my dream, I wondered what Vanilla Ice was doing in my unconscious mind.

Y oh Y (and more)

For anyone who wants to know more about the /y/ thing, here's a bit from Wikipedia.

What does it say about a person if she sees an article called "Phonological history of English consonant clusters" and responds with an excited "ooooooh!"?

I had such a good day. My advisor has been trying to derive a linguistic measure with a language analysis program that is not very user-friendly, and I have been working for weeks on the "fell swoop" approach. I was assigned to this project in August and it was immediately clear to me that we could obtain the measure far more efficiently. I've been working out the details ever since, and today was Fell Swoop Day: in my lab hours today I generated results that would have taken approximately 125 hours of woman-power to obtain under the old system. I have also learned lots of useful stuff about a program that's very powerful even though its learning curve is steep and its manual is less than helpful. I'm going to use it for my stats project later this semester. On which topic--

My stats prof is earnest but...less than dynamic. I am learning the material mostly from the slides and the book, because I have trouble with his lectures. But today I spent most of class tracking, even though the material wasn't in the book. He was talking about logarithmic transformation, which is extremely useful but not really intuitive for me. It's also not in our book, so it's a good thing I was able to follow today's lecture. Here's hoping for more of the same.

This afternoon I went to a seminar on the impact of No Child Left Behind on kids with disabilities. I was not looking forward to it, because our guest speaker was the author of two articles we read in preparation for the seminar and he seemed astonishingly pro-NCLB. I loathe NCLB. I mean, I really, really despise what it has done to American public schools. The goals are worthy but the execution is a disaster. How was I going to sit in the seminar and be polite to someone who apparently failed to recognize that much of what is valuable in an education is difficult to quantify? How, for instance, does one quantify "qualified"? (I find the criteria for "qualified" teachers" woefully inadequate.) I was happy to discover that virtually everyone besides the speaker shared my reservations, so I was able to participate without frothing at the mouth. Or with the merest modicum of frothing at the mouth.

The midterm for my departmental class was tonight and it went really well. I wasn't sure about taking this class because I'm the only doctoral student in there. But I've learned a ton, and pretty painlessly too.

Oh! And I also spent some time today communing with the file cabinets in the basement, whence I am digging out addresses so I can send out the questionnaires for my early research project. I want to get them mailed off very soon, so they do not arrive with a slew of Christmas cards and charities' year-end pleas for money. But it's been hard to put the time in. (Plus I am a little resistant to putting the time in. What if nobody responds? What if my pet idea is wrong? If I don't send out the questionnaire, my study can't be a disaster. Spot the error!)

All right, if I don't get to bed I am going to be ill-equipped to provide fun and enriching speech therapy in the morning. And that, my friends, would be a bummer. Night, all.

P.S. Are you in need of a way to waste time on the web? Yeah, I know, you need a web time-waster approximately as much as you need a gaping hole in your head. But still: check this out. (Totally addictive for a word person like me.)

Fun with Phonology

No, wait! Wait, come back! Phonology is fun, I promise.

Phonology is the study of sound systems: why many native Spanish speakers say "estudy Espanish" and why Americans aren't sure how to get their mouths around Gstaad.  Phonology offered me an entirely sensible explanation when a little boy on my caseload started saying "bagel" instead of "camel." See?  What fun?

One of the things I noticed when we moved to Scotland was that they used a lot more "y" sounds than I was used to. Styupid. Nyewspaper. Dyuty, to use Mary's example. Because I am a phonology geek, I pondered this. In American English, omitting a "y" where it belongs is quite conspicuous. If someone says "bootiful moosic from the footure," you notice. (You also wonder what, precisely, he thinks he is talking about.) If a wedding usher says "May I show you your poo?" when he means "pew," you really notice. I was suddenly curious: did Americans sound that odd to Britons? I started adding in the occasional "y."

In most dialects of American English we don't use a "y" sound after tongue-tip sounds like /t, d, n/. It also drops out in some less familiar words where it actually belongs even on this side of the ocean. Legoom instead of legyume. Scoot instead of scute. Spur-ious instead of spyur-ious. (Spellcheck is having a cow about this post, waving its little hands and saying, "Will you stop already with the 'y' thing?") If it were sturious instead of spurious, I'd never have mentioned the difference, since we don't pay attention to that in my part of the world. But spur-ious makes me think of someone saying "coo the boogles" when he means "cue the bugles," or "poor" when he means "pure."

Today one of my classmates teased me about saying "spurious," suggesting that I'd confused it with "furious." But really, what native English speaker would say "furry-us" when she meant "furious"? I find her amusement curious. Curry-us, she might prefer me to say.

PSA

In the word "spurious," just in case you were in doubt, there is a "y" sound between the "sp" and the "ur."

Everyone who has said it aloud in my stats class, including the instructor, says "spur" + "ious," as if it ought to mean "full of spurs." Roy Rogers takes on multiple regression. Or something like that.

Perhaps I am sensitive to missing "y" sounds because I spent 23 years telling people my last name had a hidden "y" sound in the middle. My father-in-law still doesn't know how to pronounce it. It's not that weird, I'm telling you.

When I was first contemplating a return to grad school, I thought it would be great to have a dashing and handsome math geek for a husband because he could help me with my stats questions. Alas, it doesn't work like that. If I am wrestling with something he finds trivially easy, it is not a recipe for a helpful conversation. So I will tell you, my pals in the computer, that I am utterly flummoxed by the chapter on curvilinear regression that I set out to read at 2pm and still have not finished.

Random example: "The cross-product vectors represent the interaction. The approach is similar when the design includes continuous and categorical independent vectors. The latter are coded in the usual manner and the former are coded by orthogonal polynomial coefficients." [faint whimper]

None of the stuff we have been doing is really very complicated. Simple linear regression looks at the way that one variable can predict or explain another, like SATs and college GPA. Multiple regression throws other explanatory variables in there: motivation bumps GPA up and weekly alcohol consumption brings it down, and we can figure out how important those effects will be. Curvilinear regression is just the idea that lots of important relationships don't look like straight lines and we need to be able to explain them too. So I went sailing into the chapter with confidence, but there is no wind in my sails at the moment.

Probably I will get more out of tomorrow's lecture if I go to bed than if I stay up blogging, though, you figure? Over and out from a weary moi.

Pass the Maple Syrup--

--I am a giant waffle.

A couple of weeks ago Joe brought home a sheet from his kindergarten teacher headed "Homework for Parents and Kindergarteners." Just typing that makes me twitch. It came with a workbook filled with Fun Activities that make me want to throw things. We are instructed to complete some activities in each of the nine worksheet sections, and return both workbook and worksheet by October 12.

Yeah, I'm a little behind.

I cannot quite decide what to do. I am unequivocally not going to do 18 or more Math Activities with a 5yo and document them on this worksheet. I am philosophically opposed: I will not participate. Joe is interested in numbers. He asks me all the time about sums and products and how big a googolplex really is. He spots patterns everywhere and he counts out cupfuls as he helps me cook. I have this inner certainty (and I may be wrong, but I am not uncertain) that this horrible worksheet is more likely to suck the joy out of these explorations than to nourish it.

The activities are an irksome mix of too babyish, like "find things in your house that are "above" and "below" other things!" [note to the workbook developers from your neighborhood SLP: in typically developing children, mastery of the concepts of "above" and "below" takes place well before kindergarten], and inappropriately complex, like making multiple graphs for classifying leaves collected in the yard. Not gonna do it; just not gonna do it.

My husband did a few things with Joe the night he brought the book home, and he pointed out to me that Joe was excited about having homework. For that reason, I haven't been vocal about my opinion that lengthy homework assignments for kindergarten kids are a rotten idea. His teacher is in her first job, fresh out of college, and I hesitate to tell her how much I loathe these materials. So far I have opted for the passive-aggressive approach. They sit, untouched since the night Joe brought them home, in the dining room, waiting for me to decide what to do.

Sometimes I get myself in such a state that I feel stuck. Maybe all I need to do is send the teacher a note summarizing, pleasantly, my objections and assuring her that we a) talk about math all the time around here and b) will follow up carefully with any concerns she may have about Joe's actual abilities. But I have been so incensed that I am afraid putting pen to paper will result in a thousand-word screed about the problems of public education in general and my views on kindergarten in particular. Ergo: I waffle.

What do you think? Does it make you twitch too? Or are you puzzled by my reaction? I am slightly puzzled by my reaction, but I can't seem to react any differently.

Maybe You Should See A Doctor About That

Proud to be on the first page of hits for "my baby has a pump on the head at 4 months." Brain juice, anyone?

While I was looking for a baby picture to be silly with, I came across one that made a little nostalgic. This is my oldest in 1998; this is Pete taking a nap today in that same red corduroy shirt. Oh! Bonus! I was looking for a picture of Joe (that's Marty in the brain juice picture and I'd hate for anybody to feel left out), and found this one of him reading Middlemarch, wearing everybody's favorite shirt.

Do you know, last Saturday I was a whirling dervish. I got so much accomplished. I thought about posting a list but I was too busy doing things to write them down. This weekend I am spinning my wheels. Time to walk away from the computer and see if I can't figure out how to get from spinning back to whirling.

Phew

It's been a busy week: reports due at work, stats midterm on Monday, and a guest lecture in my advisor's class today. I was nervous nervous nervous about speaking to her class with her there, but I think it went fine.

Brief thoughts for you: A person who says that socks are the scourge of her existence should really stop complaining about her life because socks are pretty low on the scourge-y scale. But can we have a moment of silence here at the very end of sandal season? I hate socks.

I told my oldest son he would need to use some of his own money to replace the socks he destroyed deliberately. He asked if he could knit some instead. He wants to borrow my needles. How's that for frugal? I haven't told him how much sock yarn costs.

Here are the Gladly boys building with their K'nex. I have so few pictures of the four of them together that even though this isn't a great one, I'm posting it anyway.

All's Well

Rock is out. Ear is fine. Procedure was uncomplicated. Mom is relieved.

Adventures in Ear Spelunking

I was studying for my stats midterm when Pete woke up from his nap. When I lay down beside him, he fell asleep again and I dozed off for a little bit too. It was the nicest feeling, snoozing next to him in the autumn sunshine. The phone woke me up. Probably nothing important, I thought to myself.

It was the school calling. Joe says it made his kindergarten friends laugh when he put rocks in his ears. He wasn't laughing, though, when he stuck a pebble in his ear and it wouldn't come back out.

Someone could see us right away in our family practice clinic; he took us over to ENT to use their cool mini-ear vacuum. "That's a big rock," said the doctor. The vacuum didn't work and the probe didn't work. The ENT PA, who has ample experience sucking things out of ears, couldn't get it out either.

This means surgery. Tomorrow, at noon. Again I say, thank GOD for health insurance. Say a prayer if you're so inclined, please.

Girls

I am the oldest person in my advisor's lab -- a couple of years older than her, at least 15 years older than the other students. Old. It's a little strange to me when they include me in their greetings: "Hi, girls!"

When I was in college, I was rather emphatic about not being a girl anymore. (Was this just part of getting a liberal arts degree in the late 80s/early 90s? Did you have to wax wrathful about the hegemony of the male gaze while the eyes of those around you glazed over? To anyone reading this who knew me then, I'm sorry for being so strident.)

I am no longer emphatic about it, but I still notice: does the babysitter say "a girl in my dorm"? does the student teacher talk about the girls she lives with? I still think the same thing I did in shriller days: if she's legally an adult, I'll call her a woman.

No one has called me a girl in ages. These days the collective noun is usually ladies, as in, "Ladies, where should we go for our night out?" "Ladies, who's got a recipe for mint brownies?" Twenty years ago I disliked "ladies," too -- viewed it as a relic of the days when women were expected to be meek and well-behaved. I've mellowed on that one, I guess.

I'm not sure what I expect the younger women in the lab to do, really. "Hi, girls, and also CJ, you old crone." (No.) "Hi, women." (I don't think that would fly.) "Hi, everybody." I don't know. Tell me what you think.