Babies

Here's my littlest cousin, Ian, reading What Makes It Go? with my mom. His vocabulary is growing fast. Soon he won't be the littlest any more! Congratulations, Auntie Therese and Uncle Dennis!!

Race and Percents

My Classroom

Lately, I've been working on percents with my 7th graders. What is a percent, how are percents and fractions related, how can figure out what 10% of a number is, etc. The way my team has been teaching this unit has been mathematically interesting, trying to get students to make a lot of connections between pictures and symbols and different methods, but I've been looking for other ways to make it engaging for students who don't really care about math. One thing I really wanted to do was get into some demographic statistics, so I've been putting together some activities along the way to do this. One day last week, we looked at global wealth distribution: What does it mean that the richest 5th of the world's people has 83% of the world's wealth, and what percent would each 5th have if the wealth were distributed evenly? Yesterday, we looked at the student body of our school by race and calculated how many teachers out of 50 would be Latino, white, Asian, African American, Pacific Islander, and "other" if the faculty was racially the same as the student body.

Today, we moved the desks out of their usual formation (5 groups of 4 desks each) and into a big circle. My central question was: Is it important to you to have teachers of your own race? Of different races? Why?

I brought in a rain stick to be our "talking stick" ("If you don't have it, don't talk"), and we passed it around the circle. I was really happy that the mere fact of having to hold the stick to pass it seemed to get a higher percentage of students talking than the typical "raise your hand if you wanna say something." The participation was still uneven, though, and I had moments where I was like, "Oh dear, the white girls and the black kids are dominating again, and Maria is looking at me like she would rather die than be here." I have no idea how I could have brought Maria, a frequently withdrawn Latina student, in. It didn't help that her two close friends were both absent today; she must have felt really isolated. In her letter at the end of the discussion, she wrote: "Today I learned 0%," and something to the effect of, "I don't think it's important what race teachers are as long as they teach GOOD here." (I had instructed students to write one paragraph starting with "Today I learned ..." using percents, and another paragraph starting with "I think it's (un)important ...")

Anyway, most of the students participated and were really engaged in the conversation. I was somewhat surprised by the uniformity of their responses: almost everyone said that they thought it was important to have teachers from different races so that they could learn from their different backgrounds, and then when I refocused on the question of whether it would be important to have teachers from their same race, everyone said, in different ways, that they did think it was important. Reasons? -Shared languages other than English for help on academic work and communicating with family, shared holidays, and shared background experiences that might make it easier to talk about personal stuff. One girl (white) also mentioned that it would be important to have teachers of your own race because they wouldn't be racist toward you. (No one mentioned having educational role models)

So then we looked at the actual racial characteristics of the faculty. Everyone seemed to interpret the data basically correctly. We passed the stick around again, and people commented on what they thought should be different. The basic consensus was that the faculty should reflect the diversity of the student body much better than it does. A few students wanted to know why there were so many white teachers (85% of faculty vs. 36% of students), but we didn't discuss it.

To wrap up, I gave students the option of writing a letter (Maria's is described above) to me or to the assistant principal, who has a bit of power in the hiring process. Most of them seemed really into it. We didn't get to finish; hopefully, it will still be fresh enough after the long weekend for them to keep going on Tuesday. I'm thinking that it would be neat to have the assistant principal come in and talk to the class, to show his appreciation of their letters and to address the question of why there aren't more teachers of color. It would great if he would also encourage the students to become teachers so that students like themselves in the future would get to learn from a more diverse faculty. I think he would do it. I have to talk to him about the whole thing.

Anyway, it was a good activity. The class stayed calm and the atmosphere stayed pretty respectful and safe, which I was worried about and which might not always be ideal (we learn from controversy and conflict, etc.) but which was really important for this first discussion. I was really impressed by students' ideas and how they expressed them, and I'm glad they got that chance to think about this issue, say what they thought, and hear what others were thinking. Deborah (my cooperating teacher) also suggested that it might have been nice for students of color to hear white students saying that they valued diversity.

I haven't enjoyed a discussion with my class this much in a while. Getting this kind of stimulation from students is why I'm in teaching to begin with, and sometimes it happens with math ... but it's so important to me to get beyond the numbers and into the world.

Lizzie's Bats

Aren't they beautiful?

I remember doing a tessellation project in 6th grade (at good old PMS). It didn't really turn out that well. And I don't remember what I learned from it.

Julian Cortella, one of my STEP friends, had his 9th grade geometry students do their final project for the course on tessellations, and wow! They made some beautiful designs, and their projects were very mathematical, involving all kinds of transformations and some analysis in the coordinate plane (I think). Julian, Ankur Dalal, and I are going to be making a presentation on the project on Friday, June 10, at the Center for Educational Research at Stanford. Let me know if you're interested in coming. :) 9:15 AM.

Adam's Alligators

Brett's Octopi

"It is about us, and our rejection of the treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred, some are more sacred than others."

This is House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, speaking on the subject of embryonic stem cell research. President Bush also commented that "every human life is a precious gift of matchless love."

When Bush was governor of Texas, 152 prisoners on Death Row were executed. Bush certainly didn't write the laws governing the death penalty in Texas, but he was a strong supporter of them.

Quotes are from a recent article in the New York Times (www.nytimes.com).

Whew!

Great! I just found someone to split my summer job. So I will still be teaching, but only for one or two weeks. That's only 4 or 8 days! I was getting used to the idea that I would be teaching the whole four weeks, but this is still a nice relief. Really, four weeks--sixteen days of instruction--wouldn't have been that much, but I was worried about doing all the planning, and now I feel like I definitely have a partner. She seems like a cool teacher, too, and I'm looking forward to working with her.

In other news, I've been thinking about the death penalty. There's an extremely compelling argument against it in the New York Review of Books, which has a summary of Sister Helen Prejean's latest book (her first book formed the basis of Dead Man Walking, with Susan Sarandon).

I should start the discussion by saying that some part of me really does believe that there are some crimes--a very, very few, to be sure, but some nonetheless--that are so messed up that I don't believe the perpetrators deserve to live. There's a big part of me that recoils from the idea that I could decide who deserves to live and who doesn't, true, but I feel like it's still important to acknowledge that other part. It's not even an issue of whether they would continue to be a threat to society or not, its just that their crimes are so heinous that they seem to have abdicated their right to be in this world.

But the death penalty? Even if I could convince myself that the government should have the power to say who should live and who should die (do you get any closer than that to playing God?), there are just too many cases of mistakes. Too many cases where innocent people are put on Death Row. And they are almost all people of color who have allegedly committed crimes against whites. They are invariably poor. What is most shocking to me is the incompetence of the people who are supposed to protect and defend the accused. Don't believe it? Listen to This American Life, Episode 282 (Feb. 11, 2005). As Michael would say, "In-credible. A-mazing." There is also an extremely sad movie with Bjork in it, called Dancer in the Dark. There are many other stories. But right now, I'm not sure there's any point in me telling them. So go listen to TAL!

Carl Friedrich Gauss, 1777-1855

I was listening to This American Life this weekend, a great radio show (link to their archives at the right). Patrick found an episode with the timely theme of fathers. One of the stories was told by a guy whose father abandoned his family--to look for aliens.

I won't go into that story, but there was a side story that really made me laugh. It regards Carl F. Gauss, the person widely regarded as the greatest mathematician of all time. I don't know enough math to have an opinion about this, though I've read some impressive stories about Gauss' childhood accounting feats.

Anyway, Gauss apparently thought that intelligent life had probably evolved in other parts of the universe, and he thought it would be neat to get in touch with them. But since he lived about 200 years ago, he didn't have access to satellites, space ships, even radio signals. So he came up with some other ideas:

1) Get the Russian army to chop a demonstration of the Pythagorean Theorem (a squared plus b squared equals c squared, used to find the lengths of the sides of a right triangle) into the Siberian forest, large enough to be seen from space and clear evidence that we Earthlings are civilized, and

2) Dig a huge trench in the shape of a perfect circle in the Sahara desert, fill it with kerosene, and, in the dark of night, light it on fire.

Brilliant, ladies and gentlemen. Simply brilliant.

It reminds me of a quote I read somewhere: "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."

Woohoo!

So, I haven't been posting much for the past few days. On Sunday, or maybe it was Monday, I had a flurry of posts: four, to be exact. I was working hard at avoiding real work. But now, I am back, with the news that I have one hurdle fewer to jump over (is that right? You jump over hurdles?) before getting my diploma. My teaching exhibition was this afternoon, and now it is over!!

The exhibition was basically a presentation of my year. I talked a little bit about my school, about my class, about the unit I designed to teach 7th graders to use exponents. I showed a short video clip of my class, which sparked a whole lot of interesting discussion around math and social interactions. Then, three people (a peer, a professor, and my supervisor) decided whether I should pass or not.

I had been really anxious about the exhibition. I'm just not that confident about my teaching; I know I have a lot of potential, but the reality right now is less than impressive. The learning that takes place in my classroom is limited by my failures as an authority figure, controller and protector of the learning environment; kids are constantly talking out of turn, getting off task, and generally being noisy and uninterested in math (and who can blame them). But the discussion at the exhibition turned out to be really good. It confirmed for me that I came to the right place to get my teaching credential. I really respect the way my colleagues and faculty approach education, from the most abstract elements of their philosophies to the most detailed of their stimulating observations and questions.

Zipper Fence, etc.

The blog is looking sort of dull, so here's a picture. As you can see, it's a zipper. And a fence. It's a Zipper Fence. Just down the street from my apartment. Built just for fun--for just $8,000. That's so typical of Stanford. Wonderfully whimsical, and totally rich.

By the way, I saw another Miyazaki movie last weekend. Nausicaa, from 1984 or thereabouts. It's really bad. The soundtrack is lousy, the dialogue is crappy, and the protagonist, Nausicaa, has a name that sounds sort of like nausea. It also sounds like Nautica, which reminds me of the sea--and seasickness, and nausea. Vomit any way you look at it.

I also saw Bad Education, a film by Almodovar, the Spanish director whose work I consistently like. All About My Mother was a fantastic movie, and Talk to Her was also solid. Bad Education didn't disappoint. Unless you have a problem with gay people or obscenity (there's plenty of both), I recommend it to you.

The stuff of life

Patrick, on alternatives to going grocery shopping tomorrow:
"Or maybe I'll just die. ... [getting a concerned look from me] No, no, not die, just ... um, nap."

Melissa Tavares (my awesome co-teacher!) and Javier (a 7th grader) on plants:
Javi: "My plant's crippled."
Melissa: "I'm sure it's trying its best."

The Power of Words

I found this lovely website for engineers, by engineers. There are a series of posts about unsuccessful brand names. The conversation about Amelia Earhart luggage is particularly charming, as one electrical engineer called "skogsgurra" takes quite a while to understand why there's a problem with luggage named after a disappeared pilot.

MintJulep: I swear, I am not making this up. There is actually Amelia Earhart brand luggage.
skogsgurra: This is probably very good. But I am totally lost. I know nothing about Amelia Earhart or why his/her name would be fun/shocking/terribly awful in conjunction with luggage. I guess that it is obvious to most of you, but not to me. Enlighten me, please.
anegri: I'm Italian and I didn't know about that name ... but after a quick research on the internet, I found that she was a famous American Aviatrix of the first decades of 1900 ... May be MintJulep finds it not much 'tactful' for the memory of the Aviatrix to use her name for a commercial brand ...?
skogsgurra: ... I still do not understand. A famous pilot's name seems to be OK on luggage. ...
MintJulep: Ms. Earhart's most famous accomplishment is disappearing without a trace. Not ideal properties for your luggage.
skogsgurra: Thanks ... I understand now.
BJC: MintJulep, they found Amelia Earhart on episode 20 of Star Trek: Voyager. ...

Oh, engineers!

There was also a Nissan model called "Cedric." Who knew? And a bath and beauty store called Eben Ezer.

Telescope game

Here's something you might enjoy.

http://www.dyson.co.uk/game/playgame.asp

It's a very classy game made by Dyson, a UK-based company that also happens to make vacuum cleaners. I think the game is supposed to be some kind of promotion--and I admit, it has given me a great respect for the quality and care that must have gone into the Dyson Telescope machine. However, I am not going to buy a $500 vacuum cleaner. I am just going to play the free game.

Graduation

I cannot wait for this day.

Sunday, June 12, 2005
At 9:30 AM, all the graduates from all the departments and all the programs will gather at the stadium. Steve Jobs and some other people will say a few words.
Then, at 12:15, the School of Education ceremony--where I will actually get my diploma--will begin in "a wooded glen" with which I am not familiar but which sounds very pleasant.

More detailed info can be found here: http://ed.stanford.edu/suse/commencement.html

There's no limit to the number of guests I can have, and you don't need tickets, so feel free to just show up! I don't really know what it will feel like: a huge step? an overrated but basically happy day? a sad day for parting with friends? a happy day to anticipate the future? In any case, it would be lovely to see your smiling face there. Let me know if you have any questions.

Allstar

Went to watch the AAA high school baseball championship at SBC Park yesterday. My cousin, Mike Eng (he also likes to go by "allstar" and "stud"), plays for Washington. He is pictured above in action, and below waiting for the game to start (#10). I think this particular pitch resulted in a foul ball that basically went right to my uncle--but a girl beat him to it. (At least he didn't get hit in the face, like that one kid.)

Good times. Wash lost 6-12, but the team is pretty young this year and should be really awesome next year. (The Enger himself is a junior.) I came away with a new appreciation for high school athletics. Those pitchers work really hard; the starter (Kenny Hwee) must've pitched over 100 balls before he got pulled out, and then he had to play catcher. Geez!

One thing I wish is that the concessions would've stayed open later. I got sooo hungry ...

Anyway. Thanks Mike, good game.

Washington vs. Lincoln at SBC Park

People of the future ...

Linda Woo, Lowell HS c/o 1984. Courtesy of the Lowell Alumni Asso.

So my question is, when the people of the future see this picture, what will they think we were doing??

Comments :)

Hooray for comments! It's like being a little kid and getting mail. (All I get now is bills and credit card offers. Boo.) Your responses are great. Keep 'em coming.

Not too much going on here right now. Just hustling to get my final projects in. I can't wait for June!!!

Porco Rosso

I was home last night for an early Mother's Day. Sat around with the fam and watched Porco Rosso, a completely enchanting movie from Miyazaki, who also directed Spirited Away. Porco Rosso is absurd and cute, and leaves just enough ambiguity to make you ask yourself what's important.

Basic story, as described by Netflix: After witnessing the horrendous deaths of his fellow pilots in action during World War I, an Italian pilot transforms into "Porco Rosso," a being that's part man, part pig. Under this confounding spell, Porco Rosso perseveres by taking odd jobs, romancing the ladies (humans, not sows!) and rescuing people in distress -- all the while looking for a way out of his porcine predicament.

The first dozen words outline a nightmare movie, but Porco Rosso (Crimson Pig) turned out to be a sweet little dream. Highly recommended.

Find the lizard!

I'm keeping a tally of the numbers of people who can actually do it without enlarging the image (which you can do just by clicking on it). So if you're one of them, hit "comments" below and leave me a post!

The picture is from Joshua Tree National Park, down south near LA. Patrick and I went camping there a couple of weekends ago.

Big news: I got a job! There's a link to the school, which I loved when I visited, on the right.

Why blog?

If you are reading this, you probably know that I'm moving to Chicago in August.

FAQ:
1) Why are you moving to Chicago??
The short answer is: To stay with Patrick. He's starting his PhD in Latin American History at the University of Chicago in September, with the ultimate goal of teaching university-level classes (he got sick of high school). Maybe there would also be opportunities to do government stuff, with the UN, ? Who knows?

2) How long will you be there?
Patrick's program usually takes people six years to finish (hey, it's shorter than neurosurgery). We wouldn't have to stay near the University for the last couple years, because he'd just be writing his dissertation (not taking classes or anything).

3) Are you coming back to the Yay Area?
I hope so. I left my heaaaarrrrrt ... in San Francisco ...

4) Why are you moving to Chicago??
The longer answer is somewhere in the next few paragraphs: I'm excited for the change, for one thing. I've never had that dislocation experience, I've always had my family and the streets I know and MUNI and BART and CalTrain, beautiful California weather and California culture. I think it's important for me to be able to empathize with all those people who move. And it will be neat (for a little while, anyway) to see autumn leaves, and snow, and spring will be that much more thrilling when it comes around.

It's also a big plus that Isabel, the friend I've had the longest if you don't count cousins, lives in Chicago now. Patrick has some friends out there too, and his mom is only 4 hours away (she lives in Iowa).

I'm excited about the job I might get, too. A couple of weeks ago, I had some interviews (while Patrick was apartment-hunting), and there was one school I really liked. Grades 7-12, 325 students. All girls but it's a public charter school. The atmosphere was fantastic; people are really friendly with each other, and teachers really support their students--and other teachers, which is going to be crucial for me as a new teacher in a completely new city.

5) Will you miss us?
YES! How can you even ask me that!?! I'm already nostalgic for those days when we played hide-and-go-seek (and I love watching Anthony and Joey and Allison--oh yeah, and Michael--playing now), and made forts out of the sofas, and tried to figure out if Ouiji (spelling?) boards really worked. Take-out was such a treat, and Auntie Lorna's soups! Or whatever was on the menu but always with Swensen's ice cream for dessert. Remember ice cream soup? (ew) How do you spell no mai fon, fon kei gnow yuk chow mein, laap cheung?

I will sorely miss the family that has always taken care of me. I'll be back, though, so you can reprimand me for eating the sausage in the sticky rice and feed me lots of jai (do they have that in Chicago?).

And my friends, my dear, dear friends. We are all scattering to the wind! Finally growing up, I guess.

To everyone: Come visit me in the Windy City. It's a cool place.

sf meets chicago

I heard this story on the radio about an American soldier in Iraq (streams online from www.onthemedia.org). He was talking about his blog (short for "web log"). It started as a way for him to keep in touch with folks at home, but it ended up being a significant commentary on soldier's life. A lot of other bloggers who write about war news and policy have started referencing it.

This blog will not be that important. :)