Worry is a funny thing. I don't tend to worry for myself until the very last moment, when there's nothing to do about it. Horyon is the worrier in this family, and she usually makes up for me. Of course, Maxine doesn't worry about anything. She's either happy, or not happy, and doesn't think about her situation in the future at all.
Which means that we get to worry for her.
And while usually I am content to sit back and let Horyon do the worrying, I am finding that sometimes it doesn't work that way. Especially when a family is involved. I am having a hard time convincing her that our future is secure, and there are times when I am worried about her future just because she is so worried.
Which is odd, because I have no doubt about her ability to cope. She is so intelligent, adaptive, enthusiastic, and charismatic that she can't help but succeed. She is also so stubborn that wild horses have been known to snort in resignation upon at the very sound of her name. She will be fine, and I have made this prediction:
By 2010, she will be making more money than I will be. That or she will be enjoying her job more than I will be. Maybe both. I am very confident in her sewing ability, as well as the marketability of her talents. The only thing I'm really not sure about is the Lawrence market for hand-made garments and tailoring, but I'm still sure enough to think that Horyon will do well. She plans to start by offering free garment alterations to family and friends, mostly so that she can get enough practice to keep up her skills. She will then move up to very cheap prices, and hopefully soon after that up to full price. And hopefully full prices won't be the same as the very cheap prices.
Just a month a go, this would have been a slightly empty prediction, but Horyon has started studying sewing again. You would know all about it by now, but that was the post that got dumped. After that, I went back to Netscape. Today I am writing in Firefox again, for one reason: it has an as-you-type spell checker built right in. Email, blogging, filling out forms, whatever you do, it does puts a red line under anything it thinks you've spelled wrong. Right click on it, and it gives you a list of suggestions, or the option to add the word to your dictionary. And so I have decided to be more careful. I won't do other stuff while I'm blogging or emailing. And if I am doing other stuff, I'll save my work more often.
Once I post this little gem, I'll start reconstructing the missing post.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Feeding Maxine
This is not the missing post. The post that Firefox threw away for me. This is a feel-good post. You see, everyone feels good when they see a baby eat. I believe that this is for
1. Empathy: When we see someone having a good time, we feel good. And babies who are eating are most assuredly having a good time, unless they are not.
2. Entertainment: It is fun to watch a baby eat. Even when I am the one who has to hose the baby off afterwards, it is fun to watch.
3. Self-satisfaction: It is almost always satisfying to watch someone else struggle with a skill which we have mastered. Unless, of course, you have not yet mastered eating without getting food all over yourself.
As my wife (and my shirts) testify, I only enjoy these pictures for the first two reasons.
A few days ago I made pasta with tomato sauce. It was quite good, and I thought that Maxine would enjoy it. I made sure to put a bib on her, to avoid making a mess.
She loved it, but the only part of her body and clothing that didn't have spaghetti sauce all over it was that little patch under the bib. Next time I feed her spaghetti, she's wearing nothing but a diaper. And with a smile like that, I guarantee that I will give her another chance at it.
Maxine, if you are reading this 10 years from now and feeling a bit embarrassed, don't worry. There's much worse to come.
A few days later, Horyon's friend from back in her high school days came to visit around lunch time. Her friend's son wanted pizza, so we ordered pizza. Horyon was worried about what to feed Maxine, and I suggested that I could feed her pizza.
It was hardly a smashing success. Do you like the pizza, Maxine?
"Well, I don't know. Let me take three little bites then start crying, and you can just guess whether it's because I don't like pizza or because Mommy's in the other room. OK?"
Sometimes taking care of a baby reminds me of being married. But I digress.
This morning I found a happy compromise: a food that Maxine enjoys that doesn't require 20 minutes of bathing to clean up afterwords: french toast. (Freedom toast, if you are an idiot.)
I've given her french toast before, and she has enjoyed it. But this morning I thought that she might like a condiment, since there's no way I'm going to pour syrup on it and put it within her grasp.
My friend Jon VanHoose once told me that french fries were nothing but a vehicle for ketchup. Apparently some sort of rift in time and space opened when he said that, and delivered the message to Maxine. Usually she eats about half a piece; Today she ate all but two bites! (Daddy-sized bites, not baby-sized bites.) And tell me, does she not look happy? I had heard that the Brits not only eat their french toast with ketchup, but call it "eggy bread". Weird, huh.
On a more serious note, I find myself... concerned about our upcoming move. I've moved to new homes more times than I can remember off hand, and across the ocean three or four times, depending on how you count. I've never given any of it a second thought: where exactly I would live, my job, friends, keeping in touch with family. I've always been pretty laid back that way.
But this time is different. More later.
1. Empathy: When we see someone having a good time, we feel good. And babies who are eating are most assuredly having a good time, unless they are not.
2. Entertainment: It is fun to watch a baby eat. Even when I am the one who has to hose the baby off afterwards, it is fun to watch.
3. Self-satisfaction: It is almost always satisfying to watch someone else struggle with a skill which we have mastered. Unless, of course, you have not yet mastered eating without getting food all over yourself.
As my wife (and my shirts) testify, I only enjoy these pictures for the first two reasons.
A few days ago I made pasta with tomato sauce. It was quite good, and I thought that Maxine would enjoy it. I made sure to put a bib on her, to avoid making a mess.
She loved it, but the only part of her body and clothing that didn't have spaghetti sauce all over it was that little patch under the bib. Next time I feed her spaghetti, she's wearing nothing but a diaper. And with a smile like that, I guarantee that I will give her another chance at it.Maxine, if you are reading this 10 years from now and feeling a bit embarrassed, don't worry. There's much worse to come.
A few days later, Horyon's friend from back in her high school days came to visit around lunch time. Her friend's son wanted pizza, so we ordered pizza. Horyon was worried about what to feed Maxine, and I suggested that I could feed her pizza.
It was hardly a smashing success. Do you like the pizza, Maxine?
"Well, I don't know. Let me take three little bites then start crying, and you can just guess whether it's because I don't like pizza or because Mommy's in the other room. OK?"Sometimes taking care of a baby reminds me of being married. But I digress.
This morning I found a happy compromise: a food that Maxine enjoys that doesn't require 20 minutes of bathing to clean up afterwords: french toast. (Freedom toast, if you are an idiot.)
I've given her french toast before, and she has enjoyed it. But this morning I thought that she might like a condiment, since there's no way I'm going to pour syrup on it and put it within her grasp.
My friend Jon VanHoose once told me that french fries were nothing but a vehicle for ketchup. Apparently some sort of rift in time and space opened when he said that, and delivered the message to Maxine. Usually she eats about half a piece; Today she ate all but two bites! (Daddy-sized bites, not baby-sized bites.) And tell me, does she not look happy? I had heard that the Brits not only eat their french toast with ketchup, but call it "eggy bread". Weird, huh.On a more serious note, I find myself... concerned about our upcoming move. I've moved to new homes more times than I can remember off hand, and across the ocean three or four times, depending on how you count. I've never given any of it a second thought: where exactly I would live, my job, friends, keeping in touch with family. I've always been pretty laid back that way.
But this time is different. More later.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Gack!
Yesterday I spent about an hour and a half writing a Roblog post. While doing so, I clicked an MP3 to play, and my player (Winamp) suggested that a new version was available and would I like to download? Sure, I clicked. The download page opened in a new tab of my browser (Firefox), and I clicked through to download it.
That's when Firefox froze.
Firefox is no longer my default browser. I was not in the mood to redo the Roblog entry, so it will have to wait. As will you.
That's when Firefox froze.
Firefox is no longer my default browser. I was not in the mood to redo the Roblog entry, so it will have to wait. As will you.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
First Week
So the first week of 2007 has come and gone. Felt like a month to me.
We've made arrangements for a moving company to come get our stuff on February 8th. They brought a bunch of boxes and bubble wrap in case we feel like packing first, but they will be happy to pack if we just sort everything out for them first. Yeah. We could just make one room be the "stay" room and the rest be the "go" room.
In addition, on Friday I started a temporary job. Four weeks of elementary school children, twice a week for about 2.5 hours each. Friday it was 2nd and 3rd graders, for 2.5 hours. I read three stories, and we sang "Old McDonald" and played "Simon Says". I also answered some questions about myself and my family. By the end, I had them all totally charmed.
I originally thought that I would be teaching three different age groups every day, but instead each age group gets two or three days. Totally cung, as Earl pointed out when I told him.
It will be OK. I can be charming for two and a half hours, especially if I do a bit of planning, put together a Powerpoint presentation or two and bring some fun ideas. I am just tackling this as a sort of public relations gig: helping kids to think that English can be more than just a lot of work.
You may have noticed that with my format change, I added a link to Librarything over to the left. It's pretty cool. I've always wanted to keep track of all of my books. When I was in junior high ("middle school" to you youngsters out there) I tried writing them down in a notebook. I'm not sure how many I recorded, but I got tired of it pretty quickly, as a notebook has no option for alphabetizing a list. Later I started on a computer data base version, but didn't get far with that either. I'm not sure what went wrong with that, but it probably had something to do with being in university, hence not in the same house as most of my books. I believe that I started on an old MacIntosh, though I wouldn't bet on it.
Now this Librarything is something else all together. You sign up for an account with just an email address and a password you make up, then they never bother you again unless you want them to. Click on the button to add a book to your library, and off you go. Type in an author or a title, and it gives you a list to choose from, including thumbnails of covers, so you can even be picky about which edition you are adding.
For now I have decided to just add books as I read them, as it would be way too easy to just sit and spend an hour or two adding books to my online catalog.
And if that weren't enough, it packs a few other features that could very easily lead to spending lots of time on line: discussion groups, for starters, based on genre and other things.
I found it in sort of a roundabout way, starting at Neil Gaiman's blog. (Be careful, the man is not only a very good author, he posts links to things that are fun to read. On this particular night of "research" I spent an hour and a half getting not much done!) He refered to this article, about the way books are organized in libraries and the way information is being organized on the web. It is a very fascinating read, if a bit lengthy. Not at all difficult to read, and it will point out things that you may have noticed.
They both mentioned the Librarything in ways that piqued my interest, so I checked it out. And now it's one of my regular websites. I've got a button for it on my personal task bar. Whenever I go online, I buzz it up and add whatever book I'm reading or have read recently.
One other way to waste (sorry, I meant spend) time at the Librarything is with the Suggester. You type in a book you like, and it goes through its vast library lists and tells you what books other people have in their libraries when they also have the book that you suggested. It's not really a recommendation, just a sort of observation: "So, you have Dune in your library? You know, a lot of people who have Dune in their library also have 'Ringworld' by Larry Niven, 'Man plus' by Frederick Pohl and these others. And they tag 'Red Mars' and 'The Left Hand of Darkness' the same way. Oh, and Amazon.com suggests these books..."
It is what the name says it is: a suggester. But along with it, on the same page in fact, is the unSuggestor. The unSuggestor looks at other collections with the book you type in, and notes which books seem to be missing from those libraries. Right now the database seems a bit small, because almost any SF title you give to the unSuggestor throws back Christian books, and vice versa. Eventually I will help to iron out this statistical anomaly, but I will absolutely not sit down and type in my library just to satisfy myself on this point.
I'm afraid I need to be doing other things. Horyon will already be upset that I spent time Roblogging when I should be packing.
Peace,
Rob
We've made arrangements for a moving company to come get our stuff on February 8th. They brought a bunch of boxes and bubble wrap in case we feel like packing first, but they will be happy to pack if we just sort everything out for them first. Yeah. We could just make one room be the "stay" room and the rest be the "go" room.
In addition, on Friday I started a temporary job. Four weeks of elementary school children, twice a week for about 2.5 hours each. Friday it was 2nd and 3rd graders, for 2.5 hours. I read three stories, and we sang "Old McDonald" and played "Simon Says". I also answered some questions about myself and my family. By the end, I had them all totally charmed.
I originally thought that I would be teaching three different age groups every day, but instead each age group gets two or three days. Totally cung, as Earl pointed out when I told him.
It will be OK. I can be charming for two and a half hours, especially if I do a bit of planning, put together a Powerpoint presentation or two and bring some fun ideas. I am just tackling this as a sort of public relations gig: helping kids to think that English can be more than just a lot of work.
You may have noticed that with my format change, I added a link to Librarything over to the left. It's pretty cool. I've always wanted to keep track of all of my books. When I was in junior high ("middle school" to you youngsters out there) I tried writing them down in a notebook. I'm not sure how many I recorded, but I got tired of it pretty quickly, as a notebook has no option for alphabetizing a list. Later I started on a computer data base version, but didn't get far with that either. I'm not sure what went wrong with that, but it probably had something to do with being in university, hence not in the same house as most of my books. I believe that I started on an old MacIntosh, though I wouldn't bet on it.
Now this Librarything is something else all together. You sign up for an account with just an email address and a password you make up, then they never bother you again unless you want them to. Click on the button to add a book to your library, and off you go. Type in an author or a title, and it gives you a list to choose from, including thumbnails of covers, so you can even be picky about which edition you are adding.
For now I have decided to just add books as I read them, as it would be way too easy to just sit and spend an hour or two adding books to my online catalog.
And if that weren't enough, it packs a few other features that could very easily lead to spending lots of time on line: discussion groups, for starters, based on genre and other things.
I found it in sort of a roundabout way, starting at Neil Gaiman's blog. (Be careful, the man is not only a very good author, he posts links to things that are fun to read. On this particular night of "research" I spent an hour and a half getting not much done!) He refered to this article, about the way books are organized in libraries and the way information is being organized on the web. It is a very fascinating read, if a bit lengthy. Not at all difficult to read, and it will point out things that you may have noticed.
They both mentioned the Librarything in ways that piqued my interest, so I checked it out. And now it's one of my regular websites. I've got a button for it on my personal task bar. Whenever I go online, I buzz it up and add whatever book I'm reading or have read recently.
One other way to waste (sorry, I meant spend) time at the Librarything is with the Suggester. You type in a book you like, and it goes through its vast library lists and tells you what books other people have in their libraries when they also have the book that you suggested. It's not really a recommendation, just a sort of observation: "So, you have Dune in your library? You know, a lot of people who have Dune in their library also have 'Ringworld' by Larry Niven, 'Man plus' by Frederick Pohl and these others. And they tag 'Red Mars' and 'The Left Hand of Darkness' the same way. Oh, and Amazon.com suggests these books..."
It is what the name says it is: a suggester. But along with it, on the same page in fact, is the unSuggestor. The unSuggestor looks at other collections with the book you type in, and notes which books seem to be missing from those libraries. Right now the database seems a bit small, because almost any SF title you give to the unSuggestor throws back Christian books, and vice versa. Eventually I will help to iron out this statistical anomaly, but I will absolutely not sit down and type in my library just to satisfy myself on this point.
I'm afraid I need to be doing other things. Horyon will already be upset that I spent time Roblogging when I should be packing.
Peace,
Rob
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Happy New Year
Here in Pusan we have about an hour and 20 minutes left in 2006, so I thought I would get on the Roblog and shake things up a bit.
First, I hope you like the new format. I'm afraid I lost some bits that I liked. All of my links are gone now. I will put them back eventually. I'm using the new Blogger software, so it's supposed to be easier to edit the way Roblog looks. It looks to be true so far, though I haven't rolled up my sleeves yet to really get into it.
I just put Maxine to bed. It took her around 30 minutes to get to sleep, which is a bit long for her. Usually she is snoring within 20 minutes of lights out. Tonight she tossed and turned, tumbled and mumbled, played with her pacifier, and held on to my finger a bit before going to sleep. Her latest trick is to lay face down, plant her forehead on the mattress, and walk her feet towards her head, pushing her butt into the air. While doing this, she waves her hands in the air or grabs her legs or my finger. I swear this baby is ready to be a yoga instructor. I would love to post a picture of this, but she mostly does it at bed time, and the last thing I want to do is flash a camera at her or turn on the lights. When she does it during the day, it's never long enough to get a shot of, and we are afraid that this is one of those tricks that will disappear into the hazy mists of memory.
And so it goes on the Roblog, along with all of my whining.
One advantage of leaving Korea is that Horyon will be very unlikely to be put in charge of a high school Enlgish newspaper club in America. Right now she is editing articles for her sixth English newspaper. (As she pointed out, that means that I have also corrected six papers worth of articles. I had no idea this marriage would be so much work!) The students in her club write articles, usually in Korean and English, as well as choosing or taking pictures to put with them. Some of the articles are actually a little bit coherent as the students have written them, but many are not. And for every newspaper there are one or two articles that are so badly written that they are painful to read. I swear, last year I was reading one and I almost fell out of this dimension into a world populated by large, walking, talking soju bottles.
As usual, Horyon is doing the first editing pass on the articles, then I go through making them get there more perfect Englishly. It's a good gig, as I have many opportunities to slip in clever innuendos and scatological references which not even Horyon can catch. You would be surprised at how few Koreans realize that "pinching off a loaf" and "they enjoyed her buns" are not appropriate phrases to use in an article about baked goods.
So that's what Horyon is working on as the new year approaches. She has already printed up some for me to check, but I am following my motto: "Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?"
It looks like I will not be teaching an extra class at Kyungsung University in January. I'm a bit sad, because I taught a similar class last summer and loved it. It was an academic writing class for Kyungsung students who were going to Turkey as exchange students for a semester. Unfortunately, they only have one student for the coming semester, and the school doesn't want to pay me $30 an hour to make sure that they don't look like a complete idiot when they turn in their first paper.
I realized that it's been a while since I wrote about Maxine's progress in life, so here's a general update:
She still doesn't talk much. She says "amma" and "appa" (Korean for "mommy" and "daddy", respectively), but still doesn't seem to connect saying those words to us yet. I say "seem to" because in as much as one can ever know what's happening in another person's head, I have absolutely no idea what's going on in Maxine's head. It does seem to me that this shows a gap between listening and speaking, because she can understand very well. When asked, "Where is mommy?" in English or Korean, she points right to Horyon, or a picture of her if she's not there. She can do the same for daddy in both languages. "Grandpa", "Grandma" and "Handsome Uncle Youngwhan" are very solid in Korean, a bit shaky in English. She also has a pretty good handful of other vocabulary in both languages, though her Korean vocabulary is larger than her English.
All of this is somewhat expected if you do any reading on bilingualism in children. (You see, that Master's degree that I didn't get wasn't a complete waste of time!) Horyon was still a bit annoyed when a woman at church pointed out that Maxine doesn't talk as much as other children her age, and maybe something is wrong with her?
Yes, we are starting to personally discover the "mother bear defending her cubs" thing is true.
Back to Maxine. She has been walking for some time now, and running, too. When we visited J. and Sujin after Thanksgiving, Maxine had a great time with Maya and J. Jr. running around their house. It's one of those houses that has hallways and doorways that make a circuit through the house. Round and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows.
She enjoys shredding paper, tissues and the like, with occasional bits going into the mouth. She seems to have slowed down a bit on putting stuff in her mouth, but it certainly hasn't stopped yet.
She likes it when we read to her. Her favorite book from Horyon is "Boyinda boya!" ("Hide and Seek"). From me, she likes "Goodnight Moon", but her favorite is "Moo, Baa, La la la". I can rattle off the latter without even looking at the pages, but "Goodnight Moon" is not quite memorized. Yet. I'm pretty sure I remember all the stuff in the great green room, but darned if I can get it all in the right order.
She likes tangerines. Give her a tangerine segment and she will carry it around, getting juice all over everything, and slowly eating it. Give her a whole tangerine, and she will peel it herself. Sometimes fairly neatly, sometimes by plunging a thumb deep into it and just tearing it apart.
This Christmas Horyon's parents gave Maxine a singing Satan Claus. It moves around waving a bell while playing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" at an obnoxiously loud volume, even after putting tape over the speaker holes. (That's right. The "Satan" wasn't a typo.) Well, it used to move around. Now the base moves around, but Santa has become somewhat... detached from the whole thing. And so I present for you a brief photo essay entitled, "Santa had better watch out!":
First, I hope you like the new format. I'm afraid I lost some bits that I liked. All of my links are gone now. I will put them back eventually. I'm using the new Blogger software, so it's supposed to be easier to edit the way Roblog looks. It looks to be true so far, though I haven't rolled up my sleeves yet to really get into it.
I just put Maxine to bed. It took her around 30 minutes to get to sleep, which is a bit long for her. Usually she is snoring within 20 minutes of lights out. Tonight she tossed and turned, tumbled and mumbled, played with her pacifier, and held on to my finger a bit before going to sleep. Her latest trick is to lay face down, plant her forehead on the mattress, and walk her feet towards her head, pushing her butt into the air. While doing this, she waves her hands in the air or grabs her legs or my finger. I swear this baby is ready to be a yoga instructor. I would love to post a picture of this, but she mostly does it at bed time, and the last thing I want to do is flash a camera at her or turn on the lights. When she does it during the day, it's never long enough to get a shot of, and we are afraid that this is one of those tricks that will disappear into the hazy mists of memory.
And so it goes on the Roblog, along with all of my whining.
One advantage of leaving Korea is that Horyon will be very unlikely to be put in charge of a high school Enlgish newspaper club in America. Right now she is editing articles for her sixth English newspaper. (As she pointed out, that means that I have also corrected six papers worth of articles. I had no idea this marriage would be so much work!) The students in her club write articles, usually in Korean and English, as well as choosing or taking pictures to put with them. Some of the articles are actually a little bit coherent as the students have written them, but many are not. And for every newspaper there are one or two articles that are so badly written that they are painful to read. I swear, last year I was reading one and I almost fell out of this dimension into a world populated by large, walking, talking soju bottles.
As usual, Horyon is doing the first editing pass on the articles, then I go through making them get there more perfect Englishly. It's a good gig, as I have many opportunities to slip in clever innuendos and scatological references which not even Horyon can catch. You would be surprised at how few Koreans realize that "pinching off a loaf" and "they enjoyed her buns" are not appropriate phrases to use in an article about baked goods.
So that's what Horyon is working on as the new year approaches. She has already printed up some for me to check, but I am following my motto: "Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?"
It looks like I will not be teaching an extra class at Kyungsung University in January. I'm a bit sad, because I taught a similar class last summer and loved it. It was an academic writing class for Kyungsung students who were going to Turkey as exchange students for a semester. Unfortunately, they only have one student for the coming semester, and the school doesn't want to pay me $30 an hour to make sure that they don't look like a complete idiot when they turn in their first paper.
I realized that it's been a while since I wrote about Maxine's progress in life, so here's a general update:
She still doesn't talk much. She says "amma" and "appa" (Korean for "mommy" and "daddy", respectively), but still doesn't seem to connect saying those words to us yet. I say "seem to" because in as much as one can ever know what's happening in another person's head, I have absolutely no idea what's going on in Maxine's head. It does seem to me that this shows a gap between listening and speaking, because she can understand very well. When asked, "Where is mommy?" in English or Korean, she points right to Horyon, or a picture of her if she's not there. She can do the same for daddy in both languages. "Grandpa", "Grandma" and "Handsome Uncle Youngwhan" are very solid in Korean, a bit shaky in English. She also has a pretty good handful of other vocabulary in both languages, though her Korean vocabulary is larger than her English.
All of this is somewhat expected if you do any reading on bilingualism in children. (You see, that Master's degree that I didn't get wasn't a complete waste of time!) Horyon was still a bit annoyed when a woman at church pointed out that Maxine doesn't talk as much as other children her age, and maybe something is wrong with her?
Yes, we are starting to personally discover the "mother bear defending her cubs" thing is true.
Back to Maxine. She has been walking for some time now, and running, too. When we visited J. and Sujin after Thanksgiving, Maxine had a great time with Maya and J. Jr. running around their house. It's one of those houses that has hallways and doorways that make a circuit through the house. Round and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows.
She enjoys shredding paper, tissues and the like, with occasional bits going into the mouth. She seems to have slowed down a bit on putting stuff in her mouth, but it certainly hasn't stopped yet.
She likes it when we read to her. Her favorite book from Horyon is "Boyinda boya!" ("Hide and Seek"). From me, she likes "Goodnight Moon", but her favorite is "Moo, Baa, La la la". I can rattle off the latter without even looking at the pages, but "Goodnight Moon" is not quite memorized. Yet. I'm pretty sure I remember all the stuff in the great green room, but darned if I can get it all in the right order.
She likes tangerines. Give her a tangerine segment and she will carry it around, getting juice all over everything, and slowly eating it. Give her a whole tangerine, and she will peel it herself. Sometimes fairly neatly, sometimes by plunging a thumb deep into it and just tearing it apart.
This Christmas Horyon's parents gave Maxine a singing Satan Claus. It moves around waving a bell while playing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" at an obnoxiously loud volume, even after putting tape over the speaker holes. (That's right. The "Satan" wasn't a typo.) Well, it used to move around. Now the base moves around, but Santa has become somewhat... detached from the whole thing. And so I present for you a brief photo essay entitled, "Santa had better watch out!":
You'd better watch out!
For this little girl!
She'll grab hold of Santa
and rock his little world!
Ma-axine is coming, to town!
She totally busted up that Santa, dude.
The New Year has come, ushered in by a kiss from my wife. She stopped working long enough for that, but no champaign. Bummer.
Horyon's sister, Chaeryon, is in town for a while. As soon as she got off the plane, her father suggested coming to meet Maxine. So she did. Yeah, it was after 10 p.m., past Maxine's bedtime. And I'm sure that Chaeryon was tired after all that flying. But hey, this is Maxine we're talking about! How could she wait one more night?
Somehow Chaeryon manages to look better after a transatlantic flight than I look before I start one.
Maxine likes Chaeryon, but doesn't recognize her as "Eemo" (young aunt) yet. We'll keep working on it.
We're down to about two months left in Korea. The visa paperwork has started flowing, though at typical government work pace. We're talking about packing, and deciding what to take and leave. I've asked my Dad to keep an eye out for a minivan that we can buy through him. Horyon started worrying about the whole thing months ago, I have already made serious progress in putting off getting ready, and Maxine is just cruising along, completely unaware that we are about to completely change her world. Isn't that what parents are for?
Peace,
Rob
Ma-axine is coming, to town!She totally busted up that Santa, dude.
The New Year has come, ushered in by a kiss from my wife. She stopped working long enough for that, but no champaign. Bummer.
Horyon's sister, Chaeryon, is in town for a while. As soon as she got off the plane, her father suggested coming to meet Maxine. So she did. Yeah, it was after 10 p.m., past Maxine's bedtime. And I'm sure that Chaeryon was tired after all that flying. But hey, this is Maxine we're talking about! How could she wait one more night?
Somehow Chaeryon manages to look better after a transatlantic flight than I look before I start one.Maxine likes Chaeryon, but doesn't recognize her as "Eemo" (young aunt) yet. We'll keep working on it.
We're down to about two months left in Korea. The visa paperwork has started flowing, though at typical government work pace. We're talking about packing, and deciding what to take and leave. I've asked my Dad to keep an eye out for a minivan that we can buy through him. Horyon started worrying about the whole thing months ago, I have already made serious progress in putting off getting ready, and Maxine is just cruising along, completely unaware that we are about to completely change her world. Isn't that what parents are for?
Peace,
Rob
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Moving Numbers
I'm starting this entry on September 27th, but don't plan to publish it until this semester is finished. It could cause problems if any of my students managed to hunt it down, understand it, and apply it to their course work. And as much of a pain in the ass as that would be for them, some of them would rather do that than actually do the work required to get a good grade without cheating.
Cheating has always made me angry. I will admit that I did cheat once or twice in university ("college", for those of you who speak American). Without getting into the sordid details, I'll just say that I had a very geeky calculator that had some memory available for storing variables, programs, formulas, etc. I honestly can't remember whether I had to did into any of those formulas, but I definitely did the rest of the work the hard way. And I had a sneaking suspicion that the engineering profs didn't care what you had on your calculator, as long as you knew what you were doing with it.
So perhaps I'm a bit hypocritical, now that the shoe is on the other foot. But there are definitely degrees of cheating, and what I'm seeing takes things to an extreme degree. You see, I am using a program called Moodle to enrich my courses. Moodle is an Internet-based Learning program. My main uses are
1) handouts, because with 250+ students, it's a pain for me to do photocopies. This way they each download and print. All I have to do is have it up on the website the morning of class.
2) on-line quizzes, so that students have a chance to practice and apply what we studied in class, to prepare for the test and keep the material reasonably fresh in their minds
3) passing information, such as canceled classes, reminders of assignments, etc.
Uses 1 and 3 are fine, but the quizzes... The students who took my Present Continuous (PC) Quiz on the first day got pretty low grades, many of them in the 50-60% range, and took the entire 15 minutes to get that. Oddly enough, some of the students who took the same quiz the next day took a minute and a half to get 90%.
I smelled a rat.
My current solution is that their on-line quiz grade will be automatically adjusted down to meet their in-class test/quiz grades.
There. The semester is finished, it's the end of December, and I know how the whole thing turned out:
I decided that adjusting quiz grades to match the written test grade would be too much trouble, and maybe not fair. Instead, I minimized the impact of the quizzes on their grade. Each quiz was worth about 1.5% of their total grade. Not enough to worry about the cheaters, when the written test was worth 25%.
The problem came when I exported the data from the website and tried to import it to my grading spreadsheet. The Moodle would only export as Excel files, and my spreadsheet is Corel's Quattro Pro. It's an excellent spreadsheet, and I've been using it for years. Which may be the problem. The version I'm using was current a decade ago. And I don't use Excel at all, relying instead on OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet, Calc.
Oh, by the way, if you are not interested in computer stuff, you might want to skip the rest of this post, if you haven't already fallen asleep.
I ended up opening the Excel files with Calc, and then saving them in Calc as Quattro files. It was then quite easy to move the data into the correct sheet.
But when I tried to juggle the numbers, I got some funny results. 11.38 looked fine on the sheet, but when I tried to divide it by 14 and multiply by 100 to get the percentage, it came out zero. All of them came out zero.
I figured maybe it was a mistake in my lookup formulas.
No. They worked fine.
I went back to the data page and typed in 11.38 again over the top of the original 11.38.
Boom. Out pops 81%. The rest of the scores are still saying zero, but the one I typed in manually is working fine.
That suggests one solution: type in all the scores. But here's the thing: I am sitting next to a machine that can do 902,000,000 calculations per second. That's why I'm not adding up numbers on a piece of paper using a calculator as a mental crutch. There's already a mental U-Haul sitting on the desk, and all I have to do is figure out why the gears don't engage.
Those of you who use computers probably have some idea of how this story turns out.
Technical Explanation: Instead of exporting the files from Calc, I copied and pasted the numbers. This made them appear to Quattro as numbers, rather than the labels which it original thought they were. ("Why is this a problem?" is not nearly as important as the "How do I fix it?" to me, so don't ask why!)
Real World Impact Explanation: I spent more time figuring out how to solve the problem than it would have taken to type in all the numbers by hand. And if I had known this would be a problem, I could have paid one of my assistants to type it in by hand. This is how Horyon would interpret the results.
To me, however, the more numbers I put in by hand, the more likely I am to make a mistake. Also, I am now aware of this glitch, and will be able to recognize it and do something about it in the future. True, I will probably not remember the details of how to solve the problem, but the mental pathway will still be there. I will also be able to recognize similar problems, and deal with them, too.
Our grades were due on Thursday. Earlier in the week I was worried that I might accidentally finish on Wednesday, but as it turns out I had nothing to worry about. I left my office Thursday night around 11:00 p.m. I didn't have to do much number juggling to get the right balance of A's, B's, C's and etc.'s, and when I left my office mate, Dennis, was still working. Score!
Actually, for me finishing at 11 p.m. is early, but that's another post. Something from the archives. Check back later, I'll see if I can hunt it down.
In the mean time, you can read about what we were going through back in November 2003 righ here. I got a chuckle or two out of re-reading it. Hope you do, too. You might also enjoy this from April 2002. Just after starting the ill-fated Master's Degree. Ugh.
Peace,
Rob
Cheating has always made me angry. I will admit that I did cheat once or twice in university ("college", for those of you who speak American). Without getting into the sordid details, I'll just say that I had a very geeky calculator that had some memory available for storing variables, programs, formulas, etc. I honestly can't remember whether I had to did into any of those formulas, but I definitely did the rest of the work the hard way. And I had a sneaking suspicion that the engineering profs didn't care what you had on your calculator, as long as you knew what you were doing with it.
So perhaps I'm a bit hypocritical, now that the shoe is on the other foot. But there are definitely degrees of cheating, and what I'm seeing takes things to an extreme degree. You see, I am using a program called Moodle to enrich my courses. Moodle is an Internet-based Learning program. My main uses are
1) handouts, because with 250+ students, it's a pain for me to do photocopies. This way they each download and print. All I have to do is have it up on the website the morning of class.
2) on-line quizzes, so that students have a chance to practice and apply what we studied in class, to prepare for the test and keep the material reasonably fresh in their minds
3) passing information, such as canceled classes, reminders of assignments, etc.
Uses 1 and 3 are fine, but the quizzes... The students who took my Present Continuous (PC) Quiz on the first day got pretty low grades, many of them in the 50-60% range, and took the entire 15 minutes to get that. Oddly enough, some of the students who took the same quiz the next day took a minute and a half to get 90%.
I smelled a rat.
My current solution is that their on-line quiz grade will be automatically adjusted down to meet their in-class test/quiz grades.
There. The semester is finished, it's the end of December, and I know how the whole thing turned out:
I decided that adjusting quiz grades to match the written test grade would be too much trouble, and maybe not fair. Instead, I minimized the impact of the quizzes on their grade. Each quiz was worth about 1.5% of their total grade. Not enough to worry about the cheaters, when the written test was worth 25%.
The problem came when I exported the data from the website and tried to import it to my grading spreadsheet. The Moodle would only export as Excel files, and my spreadsheet is Corel's Quattro Pro. It's an excellent spreadsheet, and I've been using it for years. Which may be the problem. The version I'm using was current a decade ago. And I don't use Excel at all, relying instead on OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet, Calc.
Oh, by the way, if you are not interested in computer stuff, you might want to skip the rest of this post, if you haven't already fallen asleep.
I ended up opening the Excel files with Calc, and then saving them in Calc as Quattro files. It was then quite easy to move the data into the correct sheet.
But when I tried to juggle the numbers, I got some funny results. 11.38 looked fine on the sheet, but when I tried to divide it by 14 and multiply by 100 to get the percentage, it came out zero. All of them came out zero.
I figured maybe it was a mistake in my lookup formulas.
No. They worked fine.
I went back to the data page and typed in 11.38 again over the top of the original 11.38.
Boom. Out pops 81%. The rest of the scores are still saying zero, but the one I typed in manually is working fine.
That suggests one solution: type in all the scores. But here's the thing: I am sitting next to a machine that can do 902,000,000 calculations per second. That's why I'm not adding up numbers on a piece of paper using a calculator as a mental crutch. There's already a mental U-Haul sitting on the desk, and all I have to do is figure out why the gears don't engage.
Those of you who use computers probably have some idea of how this story turns out.
Technical Explanation: Instead of exporting the files from Calc, I copied and pasted the numbers. This made them appear to Quattro as numbers, rather than the labels which it original thought they were. ("Why is this a problem?" is not nearly as important as the "How do I fix it?" to me, so don't ask why!)
Real World Impact Explanation: I spent more time figuring out how to solve the problem than it would have taken to type in all the numbers by hand. And if I had known this would be a problem, I could have paid one of my assistants to type it in by hand. This is how Horyon would interpret the results.
To me, however, the more numbers I put in by hand, the more likely I am to make a mistake. Also, I am now aware of this glitch, and will be able to recognize it and do something about it in the future. True, I will probably not remember the details of how to solve the problem, but the mental pathway will still be there. I will also be able to recognize similar problems, and deal with them, too.
Our grades were due on Thursday. Earlier in the week I was worried that I might accidentally finish on Wednesday, but as it turns out I had nothing to worry about. I left my office Thursday night around 11:00 p.m. I didn't have to do much number juggling to get the right balance of A's, B's, C's and etc.'s, and when I left my office mate, Dennis, was still working. Score!
Actually, for me finishing at 11 p.m. is early, but that's another post. Something from the archives. Check back later, I'll see if I can hunt it down.
In the mean time, you can read about what we were going through back in November 2003 righ here. I got a chuckle or two out of re-reading it. Hope you do, too. You might also enjoy this from April 2002. Just after starting the ill-fated Master's Degree. Ugh.
Peace,
Rob
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
December Wrap-Up
This morning I had breakfast with Maxine. First time since November. This month was rough. December is the month of final exams for me. Usually my students sign up for 8 minute appointments and ask me questions pertaining to the topic I give them on the spot. These topics have ranged from my vacation plans to what I do in my free time to how I met Horyon. It's fun, but exhausting. My first year at Kyungsung I had almost 350 students. I don't know how I did it without killing any of them. Or myself.
So this year I decided to back off a bit. I had only 250 students (ONLY???), and I had them sign up for 10 minute appointments in pairs. It lowered my testing time from 3.5 hours to about 2.5 hours per day. That one hour makes a big difference, but the bigger difference comes from the students working together.
In each class we worked up a list of conversation topics. In some classes it was only 8 or 9, but one class came up with two dozen, all approved by me. Each pair of students had to choose six topics to bring to their appointment. At the beginning of their ten minutes I rolled a die, choosing one of the six topics. They were to then have a conversation (with each other, not me) about that one topic for the rest of the ten minutes.
Of course, many of them prepared and memorized conversations, which was fine. But I was really grading them on how well they did once they were winging it. My role was usually to jump into the conversation and make some waves, see how they reacted. It was an interesting way to grade, and it required less mental exertion from me. It would have been the most relaxing final exam season ever except for one small thing: I had an extra class.
The extra class was made up of high school students who are about to graduate and start university. I was under the initial impression that they were students who were particularly interested in studying English. That impression was squashed like a python under a two ton weight.
The class was for university credits, and I was to grade it Pass/Fail. Out of 30 students, 16 passed. Pretty lame. My only demand was that they come to class on time. More than five minutes late, and I counted them absent (though they could still be present for the second hour of class). No real grades. No homework. I expected them to work in class, writing conversations, taking notes, all that crazy stuff teachers expect students to do, but without attaching a grade to any of it.
I must have been out of my freakin' gourd.
I'm used to teaching freshmen. I know that the first few classes are largely devoted to getting them to come on time, be quiet, and pay attention. In this class, some of them never got it. It was tiring, and made me look forward to my afternoon exams. I was paid well for it, and I suppose it was worth the money, but it gave me something I didn't really want or need: another reason to leave Korea.
It also reminded me of one reason I have stayed so long: the students who want to learn. There were about half a dozen students who were serious about the class. In a regular class they would have gotten A's and B's from me. In this class, they were the sanity check. They paid attention when I corrected their work. They seemed to learn from it! They were even willing to try working with me sitting next to them, coaching and encouraging them, rather than staring blankly and saying "English very difficult."
The point, from which I have once again strayed an unforgivable difference, was that this extra class was from 10 to 12 a.m. for the three weeks before Christmas. Until December, I had spent my mornings with Maxine. She usually woke up around six, demanding to get that special treat that only mommy can provide. She then went back to sleep in our bed, between Horyon and me. Horyon would get up, shower, have breakfast, and do all that morning stuff women do, then leave for work before Maxine woke up. We would sleep until eight or nine, then kick around for an hour or two until Horyon's father came to pick up Maxine.
I have to admit that I am not the best of company just after waking up. If that were our only time together, Maxine might grow up thinking that I only communicate in grunts and harumphs. Still, I manage to wake up enough to change a diaper or two, get breakfast into Maxine, and perhaps play with those crazy little stackable cups that she has. (It's so cool the way you can fit the small ones into the big ones but not vice versa.)
So in December we didn't get to do that. We basically woke up at 8, had about half an hour to get used to being awake, then Grandpa would come and take Maxine away. It has caused her attitude towards me to cool somewhat. When she's fussy, she doesn't want me, and sometimes runs away from me to get to Horyon. I can't believe how heartbreaking this can feel, even though she is fine with me at bedtime or when Horyon is behind a closed door for more than a couple of minutes.
It's a lot like when we first got married. Before we got married, things were almost always completely positive between us. But the stress of living with someone new, especially someone you love, can bring out the worst in anyone. As can menstruation, lack of sleep, job stress, or any number of other factors. And during that first year I had to learn to deal with the pain of the occasional sharp remark. I have gotten somewhat used to it. It was inevitable that I would, because my personality could try the patience of a saint under the right circumstances. For example, if I have a long-term project with a deadline.
Of course, it helps that Horyon and I can talk about our relationship and feelings. She always apologizes for hurting me, and has gained some control over the impulses to do so. But Maxine and I can't really talk about our relationship. She is only just starting to realize that other people have needs, much less feelings. And so I swallow the disappointment or talk with Horyon about it. In the mean time, I try to make it very clear to Maxine that I am always available to come back to, that I will always love her.
And there, right there, that's the problem with blogging about something like being a father for the first time. At times it is so overwhelming that the best words, the closest analogies, all seem inadequate to express what's going on in my head and heart. The best I can hope for is to stir a memory in the minds of the parents who read this. And for the not-yet-parents, like I used to be, or the never-parents, I suspect it's like reading an article about skydiving, or climbing Mt. Everest; you just can't get it, but I hope you can catch a glimpse of it.
In case I don't manage to get back on before Monday, I hope that you all bring in the New Year well. Maxine slept last night without waking up once. My sole hope for 2007 is that she continues this trend.
Peace,
Rob
So this year I decided to back off a bit. I had only 250 students (ONLY???), and I had them sign up for 10 minute appointments in pairs. It lowered my testing time from 3.5 hours to about 2.5 hours per day. That one hour makes a big difference, but the bigger difference comes from the students working together.
In each class we worked up a list of conversation topics. In some classes it was only 8 or 9, but one class came up with two dozen, all approved by me. Each pair of students had to choose six topics to bring to their appointment. At the beginning of their ten minutes I rolled a die, choosing one of the six topics. They were to then have a conversation (with each other, not me) about that one topic for the rest of the ten minutes.
Of course, many of them prepared and memorized conversations, which was fine. But I was really grading them on how well they did once they were winging it. My role was usually to jump into the conversation and make some waves, see how they reacted. It was an interesting way to grade, and it required less mental exertion from me. It would have been the most relaxing final exam season ever except for one small thing: I had an extra class.
The extra class was made up of high school students who are about to graduate and start university. I was under the initial impression that they were students who were particularly interested in studying English. That impression was squashed like a python under a two ton weight.
The class was for university credits, and I was to grade it Pass/Fail. Out of 30 students, 16 passed. Pretty lame. My only demand was that they come to class on time. More than five minutes late, and I counted them absent (though they could still be present for the second hour of class). No real grades. No homework. I expected them to work in class, writing conversations, taking notes, all that crazy stuff teachers expect students to do, but without attaching a grade to any of it.
I must have been out of my freakin' gourd.
I'm used to teaching freshmen. I know that the first few classes are largely devoted to getting them to come on time, be quiet, and pay attention. In this class, some of them never got it. It was tiring, and made me look forward to my afternoon exams. I was paid well for it, and I suppose it was worth the money, but it gave me something I didn't really want or need: another reason to leave Korea.
It also reminded me of one reason I have stayed so long: the students who want to learn. There were about half a dozen students who were serious about the class. In a regular class they would have gotten A's and B's from me. In this class, they were the sanity check. They paid attention when I corrected their work. They seemed to learn from it! They were even willing to try working with me sitting next to them, coaching and encouraging them, rather than staring blankly and saying "English very difficult."
The point, from which I have once again strayed an unforgivable difference, was that this extra class was from 10 to 12 a.m. for the three weeks before Christmas. Until December, I had spent my mornings with Maxine. She usually woke up around six, demanding to get that special treat that only mommy can provide. She then went back to sleep in our bed, between Horyon and me. Horyon would get up, shower, have breakfast, and do all that morning stuff women do, then leave for work before Maxine woke up. We would sleep until eight or nine, then kick around for an hour or two until Horyon's father came to pick up Maxine.
I have to admit that I am not the best of company just after waking up. If that were our only time together, Maxine might grow up thinking that I only communicate in grunts and harumphs. Still, I manage to wake up enough to change a diaper or two, get breakfast into Maxine, and perhaps play with those crazy little stackable cups that she has. (It's so cool the way you can fit the small ones into the big ones but not vice versa.)
So in December we didn't get to do that. We basically woke up at 8, had about half an hour to get used to being awake, then Grandpa would come and take Maxine away. It has caused her attitude towards me to cool somewhat. When she's fussy, she doesn't want me, and sometimes runs away from me to get to Horyon. I can't believe how heartbreaking this can feel, even though she is fine with me at bedtime or when Horyon is behind a closed door for more than a couple of minutes.
It's a lot like when we first got married. Before we got married, things were almost always completely positive between us. But the stress of living with someone new, especially someone you love, can bring out the worst in anyone. As can menstruation, lack of sleep, job stress, or any number of other factors. And during that first year I had to learn to deal with the pain of the occasional sharp remark. I have gotten somewhat used to it. It was inevitable that I would, because my personality could try the patience of a saint under the right circumstances. For example, if I have a long-term project with a deadline.
Of course, it helps that Horyon and I can talk about our relationship and feelings. She always apologizes for hurting me, and has gained some control over the impulses to do so. But Maxine and I can't really talk about our relationship. She is only just starting to realize that other people have needs, much less feelings. And so I swallow the disappointment or talk with Horyon about it. In the mean time, I try to make it very clear to Maxine that I am always available to come back to, that I will always love her.
And there, right there, that's the problem with blogging about something like being a father for the first time. At times it is so overwhelming that the best words, the closest analogies, all seem inadequate to express what's going on in my head and heart. The best I can hope for is to stir a memory in the minds of the parents who read this. And for the not-yet-parents, like I used to be, or the never-parents, I suspect it's like reading an article about skydiving, or climbing Mt. Everest; you just can't get it, but I hope you can catch a glimpse of it.
In case I don't manage to get back on before Monday, I hope that you all bring in the New Year well. Maxine slept last night without waking up once. My sole hope for 2007 is that she continues this trend.
Peace,
Rob
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