Bus post: are you smarter than a 2-year old?

Just left work, where everyone was involved in a lively discussion about how it's totally fine to hit your kids.  I can't believe that out of four relatively educated people, three see absolutely no problem with this.  Three women, at that. 

I'm not really a bleeding heart and I'm not going to drone on about how violence against defenseless children makes angels cry.  However, I will say one thing:  Anyone who condones hitting kids, plans to hit their children, and is comfortable bragging about this fact in public should really know how ignorant it makes them sound.  I mean why not just come right out and say it?

"Oh yeah, totally... I DEFINITELY lack the mental capacity to express my thoughts to or reason with someone who is a fraction of my age.   In fact, I get so frustrated even TRYING that I usually just injure the offending party in order to silence them."

That's essentially what I said before leaving but there were a lot of multisyllabic words so I'm not sure the message came through very clear.  Next time I'll say it using a backhand instead.  It would be easier to understand.

Are you smarter than a two year old?
Apparently not.

Bus post: motivation

On days that I work, I spend a good hour at least on trimet busses.   Combine that with swype, which enables me to communicate with decent speed on a touchscreen and I figure this could be somewhat more productive than playing angry birds. 

Motivation is an interesting thing, and lately I’ve learned a lot about it.  Two case studies:

First: Deciding to go back to school took plenty of deliberation on my part and lots of pushing from my better half. But once classes started and homework was assigned, the real work began. The homework came on fast and heavy, and I almost got completely left behind in one of my classes because I wasn’t quite ready for the deluge. So I had to start getting up early on my only day off to study, and cutting back on social outings in the evenings.  I got caught up on the homework and even scored extra credit on my projects.  I have yet to get my grades but I am pretty sure I did well on finals. 

Second:  I don't really ever make new year's resolutions, but in back in January I decided that our trip to Hawaii (4 days  from now!!!) was a great excuse to get in shape.  School happened, and two and a half months later, I hadn't been to the gym once.  It was frustrating to admit that I had basically failed to accomplish that goal, but I decided that complaints of my body be damned, I was going to the gym as much as possible in the 2 weeks I had left until we were in Hawaii.  As I write this, I’ve gone for 9 out of the past 10 days and lost almost 7 pounds in 2 weeks. 

I hope this doesn’t come across as arrogant and boastful because the real point is that I came very close to failure in both of those examples before I found the will to succeed.  So really, I think they are both lessons in motivation.  Now, I believe that at least for me,  motivation has nothing to do with getting the job done and everything to do with getting it started. 

70% is not acceptable

I just finished a math class and we only covered 70% of the material. Material I am now expected to know for my next class. Material I wanted to learn. Even if I get a 100% in the course that’s technically a C in terms of what I learned. Why? Because the majority of our lecture time was dominated by two students asking inane questions, including but not limited to:

• I don’t understand why multiplying two negative numbers yields a positive product
• How do you know which way is “up” on a graph?
• You just said X=4 in the last problem, but in this problem you said X=0.5. How did it change?
• Why does dividing by 2 remove the 2 from 2x=4?
• Oh god kill me now

(I made that last one up) Those are the kind of vacuous questions that myself and 38 other students had to sit through on a daily basis. Instead of asking to them to meet with her or a tutor, the professor decided to teach the entire course to the lowest common denominator—so to speak—letting them completely control the path of the course. And I got to pay $33 an hour to listen to painfully asinine questions for 3 months. I don’t know what the latest issue of consumer reports has to say about that particular rate, but I’m pretty sure I’m not exactly getting a bargain.

I’m not claiming to be any smarter than anyone else. That’s not what this is about. In fact, in my other class, Digital Circuits, I was probably the most academically ill-prepared student in the entire room. I had never done any programming before, yet I was handed a project worth 25% of my grade with a deadline one week away. Multiple times I downloaded the homework and didn’t even have the basic knowledge to begin it. In that class, I’m the person whose questions would have elicited sighs and eye rolls from the class. So here’s what I did:

• Went to office hours.
• Did extra reading.
• Spoke with the professor after class.
• Talked to my peers.
• Met with TAs.
• Went to tutoring.
• Asked my friends.
• Emailed many of the above.
• Occasionally I utilized a personal computer system to access a global network of interconnected computers and servers to search the contents of HyperText Markup Language files for the answers to my questions, which is nice because it doesn’t take up anyone’s time but my own.

You might have noticed that “waste everyone’s time and slow down the entire course so much that we can’t get through the material” was conspicuously absent from that list. Also, I think it goes without saying that the review I just finished writing for that professor wasn’t exactly favorable.

Me too! Me too!

Just to get it out of the way first: Sure, I’m joining the blogging game a bit late.  Late by maybe 10 years or so.  And yes, I was indeed inspired to take the plunge in part by Beth’s new project.  But regardless, I believe that occasionally I have thoughts for which Facebook’s status update function isn’t exactly the right medium.

So here it is:  Random Sequential.  I was pretty psyched when I discovered that name wasn’t taken, and I actually registered it a few weeks ago.  I don’t have a precise explanation of what it means yet, but what I can say is that I have been described as a linear-sequential thinker many times, and while that may be true of how I think, I expect the topic matter here to be fairly… well, for lack of a better term, random.

It's difficult to anticipate what the purpose of this blag will be before anything is written, but if I had to guess, I suppose the overarching theme here will likely revolve around my return to school.  More specifically, the trials and observations of a student with a bachelors of arts in environmental philosophy (read: no educational background in math or science) returning to school for an education in one of the most mentally demanding technical fields offered today:  Electrical Engineering.

So I’ve covered the origin story, the explanation of name, and the declaration of purpose.

In closing, here is a wonderfully appropriate video:

EDIT:  Something odd going on with that video-- it still plays here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYM6UEk_ywk