The Laursonian Institute

The quarter is starting to get to its feet over here.  I’ve had all my classes save one, my neurolinguistics seminar, which I’m rather looking forward to tomorrow.  Monday was a bit more harried than I anticipated, as the professor I’m TAing for wanted us to hold section.  This is rather unorthodox for the first week, let alone the first day!  On the bright side, he also is in the habit of preparing exercises in advance, so there was not much work to be done in that short preparation period.  Section is required for this class, and as such it was completely packed this week – not a single spare seat in the house.  Teaching in cramped conditions is a little difficult because the room gets hot, and the kids are a little less apt to volunteer in a large class.  Last quarter I averaged something like 10-15 students in my non-required sections, and yesterday I had about 30.  It’s slightly ridiculous, and I think slightly unnecessary to have required section attendance, but on the other hand, this class is also going to be a fair bit more difficult. Other than a bunch of TA stuff, I only have Quechua on Mondays, so it works out nicely to have several low-stress hours of class attendance and then just one hour of teaching.  Very nice indeed.

Today all I had was Phonetics, which I fear is going to be equal parts trying and inspiring.  It’s taught by the professor I TAed for last quarter, who is the most laissez-faire professor I’ve seen.  We have no syllabus, no book, no readings, no homework, and no real expectations for our term paper.  This is nice, but it also means he teaches the class with the expectation that none of us are really learning anything, or even want to be there.  He told us this morning that he expected us to attend class “at least 51% of the time”, which I know is a joke, but sets an odd tone for a graduate seminar.  Graduate students don’t skip class – we’re putting a lot of our lives into being here, and we tend to be rigorous and reliable students.  We wouldn’t have been admitted if we weren’t!  For all that, it’s still going to be an interesting class.  We’re doing acoustic phonetics exclusively, and it’s a subject that’s one of my secret loves.  I feel some days like I could have been a phoneticist in another life, if acoustic phonetics had been taken seriously by our Generative-minded undergraduate department.  As it’s not really part of the Generative research paradigm, it wasn’t actually taught at USC.  What little of it I’ve done (which is more than most, admittedly) was from my very favorite professor, an adjunct who USC didn’t hire and who was teaching Intro Phonology, though he was in fact a phonetician.  I got a big kick out of reading spectrograms, and he inspired me to be a linguist.

Sometimes I look back at those days and I see what it was that got me inspired about linguistics and linguistic research.  If I hadn’t continued to bark up the phonology tree (though each class after his was somewhat of a disappointment), I certainly could have ended up as a phoneticist.  There’s a lot of room for phonetics in phonology, actually, particularly in the cognitive science approaches.  I think all three of these things converge in some way, if for no other reason than both being concerned with scientifically describable data with direct language interface.  In other words, both cognitive science and phonetics are among the very few contact points of hard science (biology, physics) and language.  Typology fits into this picture too, if you think of it as an offshoot of applied statistics interfacing with evolution, biology, migration, what have you.  Typology is an interesting grab-bag of domains, which I think takes a particularly large mind to grasp and is probably why Lewis is well suited to it.  It’s like majoring in world history.  The world is a large place, with lots of history, affected by an inconceivable number of factors, and those who can synthesize that knowledge are laudable.

My brain feels flushed with thoughts of career.  And today, I’m feeling determined to be a straight-backed eyes-forward engaged-in-my-life sort of individual.  This happens to me less than it ought, but if there’s anything less useful than being a defeatist by nature, it’s feeling defeated about being a defeatist.  I’m not getting much work done today, but I’m determined not to let it get the better of me.  I’ve been to class, finished my Quechua homework, emailed all my potential referees for the internal fellowship application whose deadline is coming up, and I even found time to blog.  I’m prepared for tomorrow, and I’m not going to feel swamped or behind on anything though I am, at turns, both.  Today, I do what I can, and revel in the very success of doing.

January 5th, 2010 | Tags: career, class, future, past, phonetics, section | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Excellently productive day?  I think so!  Though I didn’t do any reading, and a day without reading is never a great idea.  What I did get done was some prep for section, and the approval of a prompt for both my neuroscience class, and my typology class.  In fact, my typology professor had some really good ideas about what direction to take my paper, and thus I’ve even sort of gotten an outline put together for that one!  I’m hoping sections go well tomorrow.  I have to hand back the midterms, and my Wednedsay section did particularly poorly.  We’re also moving into real “discussion” territory, and these guys also aren’t too participatory when I’d like them to be.  So we’ll see how well I can manage to swing chattiness.    I’ve also been scheduled for my fMRI safety training tomorrow, so I can officially operate the magnet!

In non-school triumphs, yesterday we did our tri-weekly co-op trip, so there is actually food in the house today.   I had a smoothie and toast this morning, which is hands down my favorite (regular) breakfast.  I also made it to the gym, which is good since I skipped yoga in favor of food shopping yesterday.  I really need to get to yoga on Thursday, I miss it.  I was pretty stressed out pre-gym, and I’m happy to say that working out calmed me down.  Also, I came home and cleaned our room (which was a complete disaster) so I’m feeling pretty accomplished!  Here’s to hoping I can keep up this level of optimism for the rest of the week.

May 12th, 2009 | Tags: cleaning, essays, fmri, gym, midterm, optimism, section, training | Category: home, school | Comments Off

It’s going to be an early night, and thank goodness, cause I’m exhausted!  I made it through midterm week.  Midterm went well, and I spent about six hours grading yesterday with one of my favorite linguistics people (and co-TA) Ariel.  We squatted in Sudwerk and had some drinks and snacks, and our waiter was even a linguistics major!  Very surprising.  Anyway, I got the rest of the papers graded this afternoon, and thus I am done with midterms!  Yay!

No one came to office hours today, so I had a really relaxing day.  Actually I was dreading section this morning, but our sort of short day of essay topic stuff went over really well.  Students were engaged and amused, and I got to talk to each one individually about their topic choice, and it was nice.  They didn’t even notice how close to being out of time we were at the end of class!   So good times.  Walked around the beginnings of the Whole Earth Festival that has taken over campus today.  It’s way more intense than I anticipated – I knew Davis had a bunch of hippies, but this was pretty crazy!  So we escaped after partaking in ice cream and some free sewing machine repair advice.  Came home and cooked up a chicken I had thawed.  I had meant to roast it yesterday, but ran out of time, so I was getting nervous about leaving it sitting around all uncooked.  Made a spicy fried chicken instead, and holy crap was it good!  I’m not a big frying-things fan, but damn, sometimes it just hits the spot.  Mmm.

It’s gonna be a busy weekend.  We’re going to a conference in Stanford tomorrow morning, because one of the professors in the department asked us to come with him.  I’m not super keen on spending a whole surprise day at a conference, but Lewis and I weighed the lost time and stressful weekend against the probable benefit of bonding with a professor we both like, and meeting some of our peers (it’s a meeting of the graduate students and faculty of Stanford, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz) and decided it’d be worth it.  So we’re meeting at the train station at 7:30 tomorrow morning for our carpool to Stanford, and then I think he’s going to drop us off at the end of the day somewhere in the East Bay so we can take the train home.  Should be exciting!

May 8th, 2009 | Tags: conference, cooking, grading, midterms, section, taing, whole earth | Category: home, school | Comments Off

Wednesdays are great days.  Though I had section this morning, and it was sort of just alright.  For some reason, that section is sort of… slackery.  They only sort of of half did their homeworks, half participated in class, and only one or two kids really seem to care at all.  A couple fell asleep, which is par for the course.  My Friday section just seems sharper and more with it.  But as I said, section was passable, and I got through it, and really 50 minutes a week is nothing I should be losing sleep about.  Though I did have a total anxiety dream this morning that everything I wrote on my board was jibberish and I mixed all my examples up and everyone snuck out of the room but a few kids at the end.  A complete mess!  Thankfully section was not nearly that bad!

After section I always feel really free, even though I’m already running late for cogneuro.  Class was great, we had a guest lecture from a professor who is also heading up the “ERP Bootcamp” Lewis and I are attending this summer.  His lecture was great, his research was interesting, and he was really open to questions.  It’s interesting to be taking this cogneuro class which is being treated essentially like a weekly rotating seminar.  I’m getting at least a taste of all the major labs at the Center, and who is doing research on what.  Very neat.  Also heard from my lab professor today, and I’m feeling well relaxed about our plans.  He’s been on vacation and I was worried I was being lazy, but it turns out he’s really busy, and I think working by myself for now is probably best for both of us.

The rest of my day was great – hit up the gym, had a really delicious salad for dinner, watched episode three of our Masterpiece Theater adventure, read two and a half papers, and graded my Friday section’s homework.  So good!  It’s been a good, relaxed, productive day.  Yep.  Oh!  I also forgot to blog about summer jobs – Lewis and I both got minimal employment with the department for part of summer, which when I put it that way, sounds lame.  But realistically, I hadn’t been holding out getting any work this summer, and a TAing gig for each of us is fantastic.  Minimal work, minimal pay, but a little bit of cash flow is just what I could have hoped for.  And it’s within the school at that!   All is well.

April 15th, 2009 | Tags: class, lazy, section, summer, taing, work | Category: life, school | Comments Off

Pretty good day today, but mighty long.   Had a lovely surprise evening with our friends Heather and Kevin who kept me company (and took me to Sudwerk!) while Lewis was out with his padre tasting some tasty cheese and beers in SF.

Section this morning was great!  I skipped the stuff that I thought was crappy from the earlier section, and went straight to the exercises and group work.  I think it went really well, and there was a great vibe with the students.  I’m feeling quite good about both sections this quarter, and I hope I can keep that feeling rolling for a while.  Had office hours after that, which was kind of a disaster.  I only had one kid come in, sort of at the end of my time, and I spent a full 90 minutes with him.  Arg.  I don’t know quite what to do with this kid, but I’ve never seen anyone completely lacking in any kind of linguistic intuition before.  I never even got to the point where he could tell a consonant from a vowel.

I feel bad, cause I know he’s really struggling with his phonetics homework, but I just don’t know what to do to teach him this stuff that should theoretically be intuitive.  He keeps blaming it on being a second language learner, but I’ve had tons of esl kids before, and that’s really not a valid excuse.  As a linguist, I think I’m more atuned to the difficulties language learners face since we spend so much time talking about SLA and bilingualism.  This really turns me around in application though – it’s impossible to know when you’re being too hard and when you’re not being sympathetic enough.  I don’t think asking people to memorize the IPA and the position of your articulators.  I think there’s a leap of faith you need to take as an ESL student that what we’re saying isn’t some kind of crazy conception of how the English language should be done.  [t] is the most common sound cross-linguistically, the least marked if nothing else, so asking an ESL student to decompose a [t] into it’s phonetic parts isn’t ridiculous – they should be the same parameters in their native language as they are in English, more or less.  I have a lot more sympathy for the vowels, because I know English has a middling-to-terrible vowel system.   Urgh.  I’m doing my best, but by the time I explained what the questions on his homework were supposed to be asking (and spending 90 minutes doing that…) I was just so totally drained.  I want to help him, but I really can’t keep this level up all quarter.

Thankfully, my afternoon class was great.  Lots of interesting discussion on typology, and I got my assignment for the presentation I’m giving for that class.  Got the paper (book?) I wanted, and I’m looking forward to getting my one presentation out of the way early (I’m going the first day) since I’ve got my cogneuro presentation on the last day of class.  It’s probably time to start thinking about paper topics, I suppose.  The quarter system is rough that way – it’s just the end of the second week, and it’s already time to start hammering out final papers.  It’s at least good to get your topic started so you don’t get blindsided later when you’re completely lacking in time to do research.  My topics for both classes are completely open, so it’s almost more difficult to start thinking about whether I can work these papers into the thesis-y master plan.  Or something like that.

April 10th, 2009 | Tags: class, friends, papers, section, taing | Category: school | Comments Off

It’s 8:30, and I can barely keep my eyes open.  I didn’t get up particularly early or any such thing, but I guess it’s been sort of a long day.

I had my first section this morning at 9.  It both went well and sort of crap, which seems to be how section always goes.  The atmosphere was really great.  The kids asked a bunch of questions, some clarification, some curious, and I had good participation in all the questions I asked of them.  That’s the good.  The bad… my computer wouldn’t work with the projection system for some reason, so I couldn’t use all the web resouces I had prepared.  But we didn’t even end up getting that far, because we spent so long on the really basic (and reallllly boring) consonant chart.  It’s good if it was helpful, and it seemed to be so, but I definitely felt like I wasn’t quite on my game, and couldn’t entertain the kids like I wanted.  We’ll see if I can’t spice it up next week.  And hopefully I can think of some way to improve Friday’s section so they don’t get stuck with this same boring task!

Skipped over to the Center to get into my cogneuro class (late, since my section conflicts) which had a guest lecturer today.  I got there only about 35 minutes late, which was good, but the lecturer didn’t seem to know how long our class was.  We got out about 45 minutes early, which means I didn’t get much of the matieral at all!  It is, however, always a nice treat to get out early.  Walked home with Lewis (sans bike), recombobulated myself here, and then headed out to the Center again to meet with my fMRI partner from yesterday.  She was too busy to discuss data or anything, and our lab professor is in Hawaii, so there really wasn’t anything to do.  Thankfully the Center is right next to the gym, so it wasn’t out of the way to drop by.

Gym was good.  It’s ridiculous how easy it is to get my heart rate up to near max, so I always try and make sure I’m staying at a reasonable rate and not working too hard.  I’ve been trying to aim for something like the suggested 30-minutes of vigorous activity a day, and that’s pretty managable.  I’ve never worked out regularly before, but I’m really surprised how big of a difference it makes in my stress levels.  I was chuckling to myself in the lockroom today when I realized that I’m one of the lucky people there who achieves their goal every day.  Very easy when your goal is “do any exercise”, and not gaining strength or losing weight or learning to do stuff.  Whoohoo!  I’d like to think the regular de-stressing exercise has something to do with my lack of migraines so far this month… and I’m still major palipitation free since spring break too!

April 8th, 2009 | Tags: center, gym, section, stress, taing, tired | Category: life, school | Comments Off