Who can tell me what this is?

Instructional Tech @ MIT

I've been told that I should go to the "Tech'in it to the Next Level" exhibit at MIT. I am thinking of going next month, maybe some time around October 20th. Has anybody seen this? Is it worth the five hour trek in the splendor of the Chinatown bus?

Bored.

Nobody is on aim. Of course, that makes sense. It’s Thursday night. Most normal people are not stuck in programming class. Most normal people are out, eating dinner, having a good time. Hell. Even most abnormal people are not stuck in programming class.

Java makes me sad.

Office hours:

- You put everything in the main method!
- Yea. So? It works.
- Why do you think I told you to create all those other classes?
- I was sort of wondering that myself.

And later:

- Look. I re-wrote it. Lots of different methods.
- Wow!
- What do you mean wow?
- You use arrays everywhere. That is so cute!
- Cute?
- That's my way of saying that you have to do it over.
- So cute means wrong?
- Only for you.

Lack of progress.

I was writing a paper, and it was going well. Really well. Then, I wrote the following: "A single Wikipedia article is like a single at bat. Any discrete entry in Wikipedia is not probabilistic, but the entire encyclopedia is." At that point I had to stop. If I smoked, I would probably go out for a cigarette right at that time. However, since my only vice appears to be over-priced fruit smoothies, I went to Jamba Juice. When I got back, full of strawberry goodness, I changed my mind about the whole idea, and decided to start from the beginning. Oh well.

On being the one with the chalk.

After teaching my third class today, I have started to form some general conclusions. First, it's a bad idea to wear a black dress on days when I am teaching, because by the end of the hour, I am covered in chalk; high heels, however, are a good idea, because they let me reach the top most area of the board with relative ease.

Also, I started to classify my students by type. There are many types, and they become so apparent when you assume the position at the front of the room.

There is the anxious type, and the relaxed type. There is the guy who took pre-calculus in college, and rolls his eyes whenever somebody asks an obvious question. There is the girl who sits quietly during class, but as soon as the hour ends, stalks me to the elevator and presses on with numerous questions. There is the girl who brings me cookies during office hours. And there is the guy who clearly knows the material really well, but is painfully unsure of himself. And his friend, the guy who doesn't understand that numbers don't behave like that in our universe. And there are, of course, those who want to know why the hell they have to learn this.

If I were teaching an undergraduate math class, for example, the answer would be simple: because I said so. Or, more convincingly: because The Dean said so. I think that the College bulletin even has a bit about how seemingly useless courses contribute to a well-rounded liberal arts education, and therefore, make you more interesting at cocktail parties. We all know that bit, and some of you even made a career out of it. But at the graduate level, especially at the School of Social Work, I can't spin that shpil too effectively. (Also, everyone in the class is older than I am, which makes it somewhat difficult to command great authority about such things). The people that I am dealing with are studying with a specific goal in mind. And to make things worse, that goal is quite noble, especially as compared to the more popular make-the-rich-richer ambitions of the law and b-school crowd. These people take classes like Child Abuse 101, so my sense of perspective makes it difficult for me to wax poetic about the profound significance of differential calculus. The best that I could come up with is that knowing how to do this math will make it possible for them to successfully argue about economic policy, and that will make their cause stronger. A mathematical argument about supply and demand makes a greater impression on heartless politicians than does an emotional appeal about right and wrong. So, I said that, because I buy it, and hopefully they do too.

Also, I had to come to terms with the devastating realization that when you only have one hour, constructivist teaching principles go out the window, and the dreaded need for coverage takes immediate precedence. Oh how I wish that I could let them discover the fundamental theorem of calculus. How swell that would be. But I only have enough time to explain it to them, and hope that they understand enough to be able to do the problem sets. And so I am beginning to see that the greatest constraint in adopting a true constructivist pedagogy is time, rather than the availability of quality instructors and resources. That is a disheartening conclusion, you see, because the quality of instructors and resources can be improved with higher requirements, better graduate programs, and more funds. But time is a more rigid constraint.

If anything, I can now say that I really do understand the (surmountable) challenges of this issue, and the fact that overcoming those challenges is far more crucial at the formative elementary and secondary grade levels.

Sobering thought.

I realize that my continuous efforts to learn how to program in Java can be summarized by the following phrase: it works, but it's generally not done that way.

Java

- Did you study Java?
- Uh... yeaaaa. I guess so.
- That's a bad answer.
- What do you want me to say?
- I want you to say "I read the book cover to cover, I did the practice exercises, and I am now one with Java."
- I am not one with Java. I am, at best, four or five with Java.
- Oh stop it.
- You know what?
- What?
- If we were in high school and Java wanted to hang out, I'd have to wash my hair.

The Black Dahlia

My coworker gave me the best-selling James Ellroy book, The Black Dahlia. I did not have very high expectations, because the last time that a coworker gave me a best-selling book, this happened.

However, this book was an excellent read. Perhaps it helped that I had just come off a serious Raymond Chandler binge, and this was taking the whole matter to its logical conclusion. The characters were complex, and the story was fascinating. Throughout the book, I kept hoping that this wouldn't be one of those "we didn't actually find the killer, but look how much we learned about ourselves and our society in the process of investigation." That would have been a huge letdown, and I am glad that the author had enough sense not to opt for such an idiotic conclusion.

So, I really recommend it to anybody interested in a fast and engrossing read. The movie just came out too. I can't say how it compares to the book, because I haven't seen it yet. But I am sure that I'll end up watching it eventually.

Brooks' Law

Thom Shanker of the Times published this depressing little bit in the New York Times about the idea of sending more troops to Iraq.

"But given the current debate, the question becomes how would more troops help in Anbar? And for how long? The answer is, they would help, in the short term. But many military analysts also warn that sending in another division — anywhere from 12,000 to 15,000 troops — could create more problems. An extra division could flood the zone in Anbar, a province the size of Louisiana stretching from the west of Baghdad to the Syrian border."

As I was reading that, I sadly began to realize that the War in Iraq has become the Mythical Man-Month of modern warfare.

Mets win NL East

The Mets clinched the NL East Division last night. You know, I am almost as happy about that as I am about being right. So, clinch division - check. Next, the league, followed by a Subway World Series. And that followed by many years of Mets supremacy. And soon your children will be attending Omar Minaya Elementary.

40 - 40

Today, Alfonso Soriano became the fourth person in history to reach 40 home runs and 40 stolen bases. Some time ago I blogged that this would happen. Nobody believed me. I feel vindicated.

The other three players in the 40-40 club are Conseco, Bonds, and A-Rod. Not counting A-Rod, this is some pretty bad company, but strictly in the substance abuse sense. In the future hall of famer sense, you could do worse. This may not be a popular sentiment in these moneyball times, but I think that this is a very impressive accomplishment.

Mutually Assured Destruction

Goldberg started his first week at CCIT, and now my super-cool facade at work is at risk of being dissolved.

For two years I've managed to successfully maintain that image of the cool chick who listens to Black Flag and the Misfits, and knows the words to a sufficiently impressive quantity of Ramones songs. My Tom Lehrer fandom threatened to put an end to it, once it became public, but that was just dismissed as a peculiar fascination with yet another out-of-the-mainstream entertainment figure. And the coolest people have plenty of those, you know.

Now, Goldberg stands to destroy all that, because he knows about my secret affinity for Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals and Russian pop from the 1980s (the other 15 gigs on the iPod that didn't get copied to Jukebox) as well as an endless series of not at all cool anecdotes about me. And no amount of skinny black skirts, trendy dark-rimmed glasses, and off-shoot "oh I'm just having an espresso for lunch" comments is going to be sufficient, should he choose to display his knowledge in a public manner.

However, the only comforting thought in all this is that for every "that time freshman year" story that he can tell about me, I can tell five more about him. I think this is pretty much what Kennedy and Kruschev had going for them in the sixties.

Just so long as nobody gains second strike capability.

9/11, Five Years

The question today seems to be - what did you learn after 9/11? I think that is a very bad question. A wrong kind of question.

I didn't learn anything. I already knew that our foreign policy was not sustainable, and that people around the world despised us for it. I already knew about the strength of our local leaders, and the incompetence and corrupt motives of our federal bureaucrats. I already knew about the resilience of my fellow New Yorkers. And I knew that the sentiment of newfound camaraderie would never last. I already knew that the tallest buildings in Manhattan were a target, and that the Walmart in Little Rock was not. And I knew that this administration was planning to fight a war in the Middle East. We all already knew that. Our body of knowledge, generally, hasn't been much altered by the events of 9/11, even though mass media has been working overtime to distract us from the facts and encourage ludicrous gut reactions that don't achieve anything besides longer lines at the airport.

A better question, certainly a more interesting question is - when did you start to recover? That will give you the human story. That is where you will find the sentiment and the emotion. And that is what you want to hear, and to tell, on a day of mourning. Just that, and not political commentary.

For some, things never got back to normal. They can tell you their story, about loss and grief. About an empty room. About ashes and tears at a mass grave, and how things can will never be able to recover.

For many, it was the moment when they had their first genuine laugh. They will tell you about Saturday Night Live with Rudy Giuliani. Or, about a joke that a coworker told that now, they will never forget.

For some, it was going back to work. They will tell you about taking the train across the Brooklyn Bridge. About the first day that they realized that the new security in their office building has become a normal part of their morning routine.

I was in Manhattan on 9/11, living in the East Campus high rise. We had a view of the towers from our floor, and we saw them come down. Classes were cancelled, and I lost track of time. We stayed in our suite, watching television for hours. I was working on the East Side at that time, and I went to work the following day, on 9/12, just so I could stop watching news. The subway and the streets were empty. I had never seen 5th Avenue so empty before in the middle of a weekday. My manager was at the office, telling everyone to go home. Classes resumed and the mayor told everyone to get back to work, to get through this. And of course I knew that everyone would, but the shock of grief was still so strong.

On September 21st, we had baseball. It was the first major professional sporting event in New York City following the tragedy. The intensity of the stadium crowd was a powerful accumulation of the stress and misfortune of the previous ten days. Everyone who was there knew just how bad everything was, but realized that the sheer act of being in a crowd was a step toward making things better.

In the 8th inning, New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza hit a two-run homerun against Steve Karsay, the Atlanta Braves pitcher. New York won, 3-2.

Some say that it was a sign. I don't know. It was a victory. It felt like more than that. The explosion of raw emotion during that moment was almost surreal.

New York, my city, won on that day, and I started to recover.

Are you on Facebook?

First, I'd like to say that 6:50-9:10pm on a Thursday is a really awful time to learn how to program in Java. There are so many better things that you can do - eat hotdogs at Mike's Papaya and play Thursday nights at the Marshall, or eat pirogies on Brighton Beach and play spades with the old Russian men on the boardwalk, or eat dinner at The Mill, or read a book, or walk down Broadway until you get too tired, or sit in traffic on the BQE, or work on your thesis. So many things.

I was really engaged for the first hour of the programming class. The teacher is excellent. He is smart (a plus), competent (a plus), well spoken (a plus), and seemed genuinely interested when he let me prattle for 20 minutes about Papert and Dewey (a big big plus). He also thinks that Java is super-duper-great (a big minus). All I can say is that I'll make a serious effort to learn how to program in Java this semester. But at around 8:30pm, my attention started to drift. Maybe if I had another espresso, I could've made it. But they don't allow food or drinks in that room. Alas.

So, first, I checked out LinkedIn. This site was recommended by my manager, Peter Cooper, and a random bloke on the train. The site is basically Facebook for adults. It was boring, and I barely got through completing my profile, before I quit. So much for trying to be an adult.

Next, I went to Facebook. The interns have been particularly vociferous about it lately, and I already had an account on it anyway. So, first I joined the CCIT group. I added my picture, I deleted my picture, and I added another picture. I added Jeff. I found that guy who used to pull on my pony tail in the 6th grade. I added the girl sitting next to me in class. I joined the Bronx Science group. I got bored.

This is not for lack of trying, but I just can't seem to get into these types of social networks. I gave it a fair go with orkut. I had high hopes for that one. But I just don't see the point. It seems like you just add people who you want to be associated with, but don't actually like enough to interact with in person. For example, I don't see the point of adding Sonu. What will that mean? A public announcement of our friendship? Who needs that? I don't need to know that he just made friends with the guy sitting in the next office, or joined the I-Love-Star-Wars group. If he has something to tell me, he can just come to my house or call me on the phone.

Here is what will not happen: the great TA in the math help room who is so smart and always has crowds of people waiting for him will tell everyone to bugger off and say "Irina! I saw you on Facebook, because my roommate's brother's girlfriend's cousin went to Bronx Science! Come, let me answer all your questions!" Here is what will happen: the Java teacher, who has undoubtedly joined Facebook because his interns have been particularly vociferous about it too, will start looking up his students one day, and will see that I have been updating my profile while in his class.

And I know that a lot of smart people are trying to write scholarly papers about this. All sorts of cognitive research and educational research is coming out about these types of technologies. But frankly, I don't think Facebook will revolutionize the Internet, or change education.

Not like Web 2.0.

Happy Fall 06

I am sorry that I haven't been around much lately (and I mean that in the virtual and physical sense). I finally managed to settle my schedule for this semester, and although Thursdays are going to be miserable, it's actually quite manageable.

I am teaching on Tuesdays, and am holding office hours on Thursday, from 6-6:50pm. I met the class for the first time this week, and I can already tell that this experience is going to be an extremely fertile source of blogging material. I am also working on an interesting project, to see how wikis can be used in math education (or not used, I don't know yet).

The campus is drastically different. For one, our once pristine ivy walks are now infested with numerous individuals who have only a miniscule understanding of differential calculus. On the other hand, the men's track team is back to their frequent shirtless jogs on said ivy walks. And who can object to that, really.

The new semester spririt is infectious, in wonderful, positive ways - crisp fall mornings, new notebooks, sharp pencils, and this semester, a red pen. I love the first day of school. Happy Fall 06 everyone!