smart people (not the movie)

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/08/28_ucpd.shtml

nerdus maximus

I hope to apply to this if it doesn’t conflict with summer school: http://www.calvin.edu/scs/2010/seminars/Emerson/

My students alerted me to this free software that lets you make notes on to PDFs and save them: http://www.docu-track.com/

a new kfc…

I used to live pretty close to this KFC. Hilarious.

http://blogs.laweekly.com/squidink/fast-food/kfc-marijuana-dispensary/

this makes me want to throw something

“For black women, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” said Ingrid Banks, an associate professor of black studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “If you’ve got straight hair, you’re pegged as selling out. If you don’t straighten your hair,” she said, “you’re seen as not practicing appropriate grooming practices.”

Anyone who thought such preconceptions were outdated would have been reminded otherwise by some negative reactions to the president’s 11-year-old daughter, Malia Obama, who wore her hair in twists while in Rome this summer. Commenters on the conservative blog Free Republic attacked her as unfit to represent America for stepping out unstraightened.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/fashion/27SKIN.html?ref=fashion

kudos to a philosopher

my childhood friend: http://coas.missouri.edu/mizzoustories/students/story-moon.html

as long as i’ve known him, he has done everything with much gusto. it’s great that his work is getting some recognition. congrats andrew!

[on a side note, isn't it a little odd that a research 1 would only award one dissertation fellowship in the entire school? maybe fewer people applied or funds were low, but you'd hope they'd be supporting their students. or maybe it's a special fellowship and everyone else got some other fellowship. i hope.]

drool

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/dining/26unit.html

one fond ucla memory was walking down bruin walk to find one of the latino frats selling bacon wrapped hotdogs with horchata. they had aunties cooking on the grill; it was divine.

speaking of sat prep

obit for stanley kaplan: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/education/25kaplan.html?_r=1&hpw

jyip, at least you can use google reader with this one!

So I survived my first day of school…really enjoyed my first day with my Monday section. People were surprisingly alert for 9 AM on a Monday morning (we’ll see how long that keeps up). I have either second year masters students and first year Ph.D.s and they all held their own. Designing a course, it’s funny to think about what needs to go on in people’s heads to get from point A (week 1) to point B (week 16), the process of grasping research and the worldviews that influence it…pretty much my bread and butter for the next 15 weeks. 

Kim, Mitch, and I are sending off a revise and resubmit for a paper that we started my FIRST year of grad school. It has been rejected in previous reincarnations by oh, 1…2…I think 3 journals? I still remember being assigned to do the lit review and just aimlessly printing out anything and everything related to student-faculty interaction.  The paper is much, much better than its ever been (fortunately it hasn’t regressed in 5 years) and we’re hoping that this will be the one. I sent off the Korean SAT prep paper for the first time. Goodbye little paper…may you be met on the other side by kind and merciful reviewers.

I got my butt kicked in step n’ sculpt today. Good times (sort of).

In honor of the Julia Child analogy I used in class today (how the messiness of research is // to Julia Child dropping stuff in the kitchen and throwing it back in the pan–nobody knows if they’re not in the kitchen):

A quick search on Tweetfeel, for example, reveals that 77 percent of recent tweeters liked the movie “Julie & Julia.” But the same search on Twitrratr reveals a few misfires. The site assigned a negative score to a tweet reading “julie and julia was truly delightful!!” That same message ended with “we all felt very hungry afterwards” — and the system took the word “hungry” to indicate a negative sentiment. [from the same article, on how it's difficult to interpret text apart from context] “ ‘Sinful’ is a good thing when applied to chocolate cake,” he said.

(amen. full article)

first day of school

Classes start Monday. We spent this entire week getting oriented, or rather disoriented and then I guess reoriented in about 27 different ways (library orientation! new faculty orientation! divisional orientation! divisional retreat!). It was comforting to begin to see the same faces of fellow new faculty again and again. I especially enjoyed getting to talk a little more with two VAPs (visiting assistant profs) who are teaching in my program; we speak the same higher ed-ish language so it was nice having to explain my position for the 80th time (although i have it easier than fellow new person michael, who has appointments in 3 of our division’s silos. he wins the prize for most affiliated acronyms).

Some folks in our program have worked hard to put together a new learning outcomes framework that helps guide how we think about our curriculum, advising, identities as scholar-practitioners, etc. It’s really fantastic–at first I thought “aigu, another thing I have to worry about,” but it’s helpful to have a framework for thinking about how I want my students to experience development over the course of the semester, with cognitive development being more than just tucking away more facts and figures. There are reflection questions that I plan to have my students respond to over the course of the semester, which I wholeheartedly support in lieu of the paper on the benefits of reflection that Lisa and I finally wrapped up last week (hoo-RAY). Okay, off to go swimming.

awesome sign

http://poplicks.com/2009/08/light-treason.html