Insanity approacheth?

Is it possible for a person to go insane while doing the final (picky, picky, picky) editing on a 400 page textbook?

I’d say Yes!

Fortunately, tomorrow is a shorter work day and will be interrupted by mandatory-ish participation in an annual staff fun day!

Spring Breakage

It’s spring break!  And I’m writing to you from warm, sunny…

OK, I cannot tell a lie.  I am writing to you from home, having worked extra hours today at my other job, where I get no spring break (though I could have asked for the week off).  It’s an intense time at that job, as we are working on deadline to finish writing a statistics textbook that the publisher expects to have in hand in two and a half weeks.  Eek!  So, I was working on all the picky, picky, picky final formatting details today, and the last two chapters will hit my desk for text editing later in the week.  Busy times.

But, on a more spring breaky note, one of my students is in Italy!  She asked me last week if I’d have office hours on Monday.  I said, “Are you going to bring me to Italy with you?!!”  Alas, she meant next Monday.

Defining Ourselves

A few months ago, I joined a group that does social activities and projects together.  It’s been a good experience so far, but meeting new people always bring up something that I struggle with, which is when to tell them anything about my health.  I’ll mention that struggle to someone who knows me, and they’ll say, “Why would you tell them? You can’t let your illnesses define you” and then they launch into a lecture that completely misses the point.

When you have health problems that cause your behavior and choices to be odd (relative to your peers) at times, it’s a lot more awkward to say nothing than to just make a quick statement about the facts and move on.  I can’t eat or drink things that people usually would in social situations, and I don’t usually stay out late and am careful about how much I commit to because my energy isn’t 100 percent.  (I’ve mentioned this before.)  I’m not going to go around introducing myself as someone with health problems, but yes, in addition to all the other aspects of me and my personality, my life and my choices are affected by health issues.

Here’s a case in point of how readily people make assumptions if you are quiet:  I went to an event with this new group (who hardly knew me at all at that point), and I won a prize.  The prizes turned out to all be candy, something that doesn’t agree with my system in general, and in the case of chocolate, something I can’t have at all.  I chose the one non-chocolate prize, and someone said to the prize giver, “I told you she wouldn’t take the chocolate!”  Now, I’m not sure why they were even talking about that (or me) at all, but clearly, they had made some kind of assumption.  I hadn’t mentioned any dietary restrictions at that point, and that was the first event with them where food was involved at all.

So, should I really not tell people about my health issues?  I can tell you from experience that it becomes the elephant in the corner when it’s not mentioned.  And I sincerely believe that at the point where people are making assumptions about you, you have to say something.  A quick, “I have health issues and allergies that restrict my diet a lot” is simple and honest.  It lets them know that I’m not just being weird, and it hopefully limits their temptation to make assumptions (and maybe heightens their sensitivity to people’s differences…?).

I have a lot of friends who have health problems, and there’s not one of them who I would say was “defined” by their illness.  We do have bad days (sometimes bad months!), and our health issues are front and center at particular moments.  But we are whole people with big lives and lots of interests.

Calling all walkers and runners!

On March 24, there is a 5K walk/run in southeast Michigan to benefit the Hemophilia Foundation of Michigan’s summer camp program for kids with bleeding disorders.  The walk/run is open to all ages and they really need people to pre-register soon!  If you or anyone you know would enjoy doing the 5K thing, you can find more information here.

A lot of the kids at the camp have hemophilia and have to do blood factor infusions on a regular basis, have needed blood transfusions, etc.  Hemophilia is a much more challenging problem to treat than most other bleeding disorders.  This camp allows them to spend time with other kids who totally understand, which, as you can imagine, is a big deal for all of them.

Some days, it sucks to bleed

My Mom isn’t going to like that title (sorry Mom!), but that’s the truth and exactly how I felt yesterday when I missed work in the morning because my nose decided to spew blood in every direction and did not want to stop.  Rarely do my nosebleeds even slow me down, much less cause such a complete stoppage of my day, but this one did.  It was bad.  This has actually been a bad bleeding month altogether.

So, I’m off to the lab to get my blood counts checked.  Seems like as a mathematician, I ought to be able to count my own blood, yes?

Teaching Thursdays #24

There was a rebellion in my class last week.  I said that to someone afterward, and he said, “That must have been stressful!”  Actually, it wasn’t.  It was noteworthy (it doesn’t happen often), and it did catch my attention enough that I immediately started thinking about what I could have done differently, but that’s a good thing.

My philosophy about how to run my classroom is that I present a lecture, do some basic examples, and then give my students a worksheet or activity that pushes them to use the material I presented in a different way than the examples we just did.  And I walk around and talk to the students who are struggling and try to nip any harmful frustration in the bud, but I do let them get somewhat frustrated and go down wrong paths because that’s all part of learning and exploration.  I answer their questions with questions and often say, “Well, you tell me — will that work?”  I encourage them to talk to each other and debate their approaches.  That is probably my favorite part of every class period.

But sometimes, I do push them a little too hard and give them problems that are a stretch for most of them.  And I did that last week.  I can see that now.  I tried to sit down and talk through the problems with some of them, but that only seemed to offer them a bit of help and then they were back to being frustrated.  About half of them quit trying, which is the worst thing that can happen.  As a teacher, you never ever want to cause an environment where people just give up.  And that got my attention in a big way.

My first instinct was to say, “Next time, that activity will be worth points!  I’ll force them to do it!”  And that would probably work but for all the wrong reasons.  The problem wasn’t really that they were inherently unmotivated by the task but that the task was too hard given the tools I gave them.  If I had gone through one — just one — example of the more complex problems, the frustration level would have been much less and the task would not have seemed so impossible.  Over and over, they kept saying that they didn’t know where to start.  Giving them that starting point, a point of reference from a similar problem, would have made all the difference.  It’s days like that where they are truly the ones teaching me.

And to dust you shall return

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent which is the 40 day period before Easter (not including Sundays).  In the Lutheran church, Lent is less about giving up or sacrificing something, and much more about spiritual renewal and mission, perhaps taking on something new and reaching out.  My church is reading the book “A Passionate Life” during this time, and I’m finding it to be a fantastic catalyst for spiritual renewal.

We are Family

Some time ago, Katy said she’d love to know more about my family’s rituals and customs.  I don’t write much about my family, as most of them don’t choose to share their lives online and these are their stories as much as mine.  But, here are a couple of things that strike me about my family.

I have always been very blessed to live close to a lot of extended family.  Well, first of all, I’m blessed to have a lot of extended family (24 first cousins), and I even know my parents’ cousins and their kids pretty well.  When I was young, both sets of grandparents and many, many aunts, uncles, and cousins lived within 10 miles or so from our home.  And we’d travel up north to see the rest of the family — more cousins, including Amie and her siblings.  I have no memory of anyone but family babysitting us (though my Mom probably knows otherwise!).  I remember a lot of sleepovers with cousins and traveling to Florida with my grandma and aunts and cousins.  I have a great-aunt who made sure I got to art museums and the Nutcracker and the Messiah, and she gave me books about Picasso when I was still in elementary school.  My great-uncle wallpapered my bedroom!  There are so many stories, and it’s just impossible to imagine my life without this large, involved extended family.

One thing that always seems to surprise people about my Mom’s family (and always seems so normal to us) is the huge amount of cooperation surrounding travel and accommodations.  I remember several years ago, one of my cousins was getting married 500 miles north of here, and we all had different schedules we had to keep around work and other commitments.  I traveled up to the wedding with my Mom and back with my aunt, and my Dad traveled up with my brother and back with my Mom, while my aunt drove up alone and my brother came back alone.  And that was just five of us, but there have been situations when there have been many more carpooling “merry-go-round” situations.  And don’t get me started on how many people we had sleeping at my grandparents’ three bedroom farm house sometimes!  It always strikes me as so funny that people seem to think that every guest needs their own bedroom — I do like to have my own room at places I stay, but when I was a kid, it was fun to just sleep wherever (on the floor) because we had 18 people staying in one house!  That’s just how my family did things.  Cooperation and accommodation, even at the last minute, and even when it’s not completely convenient.  But it’s all normal to us.

What I Learned at Work Today

Today, I learned that if you want to build a really tall tower, the marshmallowy little animals called Peeps are not as helpful in that process as you would hope.

Quirkness

The 5 or 8 or 10 random/quirky things about yourself is going around blogville again.  I have done it before but I’ll do it again.  There’s really no end to my quirks.  So, here are five quirky things about me:

1. I sometimes wonder if our dreams are actually reality, and what we think of as our real life is all really a dream.

2. When I return DVDs to the library, I always check to make sure the DVD is in the case before I leave my apartment…and then I check again when I get to the library.  Do you think that I think maybe an alien abducted the DVD during my two minute walk there?

3. I am much less likely to read a library book if it is clearly old and kind of smells like the library.

4. I cannot write things in my checkbook out of sequence.  If I did a debit purchase at Target and then at the grocery store, I have to write it down in that order in my checkbook.  One day I almost wrote it backwards and it honestly freaked me out just a little bit.

5. I have a photographic memory.  That actually helped my team win ”Catcher in the Rye” Jeopardy in my high school English class.

Quirky enough for ya?