Ramblings of Lung Girl

My lungs are slowly getting better.  I was able to be at school for both of my classes today and made it through with just two doses of pain meds, so there is progress.  Not sure that I’ll be able to dance in my show on Friday — my teacher has been informed, and she said to just rest up and get well.  It’s a sentiment that I’ve heard often this week and is very much appreciated.

On a funny note (at least to me!)… Every time that I’m not feeling well, I have a strong urge to balance my checkbook!  I rarely have time to deal with my checkbook during the course of a normal week (or month…), so I just do my debits and write my checks, and sometime weeks later, I enter things and hope it balances.  But when I’m not feeling well, I have time on my hands and want to do something productive but not taxing, so I’m always like, “Aha!  I’ll balance my checkbook!  Great idea!”  However, as I found out twice last year, when I enter things in my checkbook when I’m not feeling well, I almost always write them down wrong!  And then sometime later, I am in a mess because I subtracted something twice, or subtracted it when it should have been added, or I transposed numbers.  My brain apparently doesn’t work so well when I’m unwell.  The last several days, I’ve thought about dealing with my checkbook at least a dozen times (Great idea!), and I’ve had to resist the urge!  For the sake of my future sanity, I shall not mess up the checkbook!  This is my solemn vow.  *laughs*

My classmates continue to feed me.  Today, one of them brought mandarin oranges in addition to baked goods to our class.  Yesterday, one of my professors actually brought me dried fruit — dried cherries and dried mangos! — when she brought everyone else chocolate!  They do spoil me.

So, in summary, I’m still alive and kicking.

The lungs

About a week ago, I was thinking about the fact that I hadn’t had any weird lung things going on this winter.  I usually get bronchitis every winter (but once got whooping cough instead — I’ve since been re-vaccinated for that!).  But this winter, other than a couple of weird days of random fever, I hadn’t been sick.  I was going to praise my dance classes for this feat — if you dance, you don’t get sick, right?!  Or maybe it’s the lack of chalk exposure.  But my luck sort of ran out.

Thursday, I woke up with what seemed to be a shoulder problem and thought I had just tweaked it in my sleep.  The pain worsened over the day, and by day’s end, I was inexplicably having a lot of chest pain when I was breathing.  Long story and a doctor visit and chest x-ray later, I was diagnosed with pleurisy, which is a painful infection of the outside membrane of the lungs.  And apparently, it often begins with shoulder pain, go figure.  The pain has been much worse when I move or breathe, so as I said to my classmates via e-mail on Friday, I was practicing my “extreme stillness skills.”  So I’ve been home and resting since Friday morning.  I’m feeling somewhat better but am missing church this morning.    I will head out to do a couple of errands later, a test run to see how my lungs are handling movement today.  I’ll have to decide whether I’ll venture to school tomorrow…and my beloved dance class.  Our dance show is Friday!

So that’s my medical adventure of this month.  Never a dull moment!

Grad School #31

(This post was delayed due to a couple of bad medical days…)

Three times this semester, I got to lead or co-lead discussion in my classes.  We got to choose the topics we wanted to lead from a list of possibilities, and my topics were:  communication in math classrooms, equity in math classrooms, and motivation (in education in general).  All topics near and dear to my heart!

I was thrilled to kind of get to teach — it wasn’t quite like teaching my own class (or teaching math!), but it was nice to think about planning for the topic, creating handouts, anticipating issues that would come up.  The hardest part was figuring out how much time to plan for each part because it was discussion and not lecture or Q&A, so I underestimated how much my classmates would have to say in response to each question.  (My classmates, as a whole, love to talk!)  The second hardest part was probably having to teach with someone else.  I’ve rarely had to co-plan anything, and we ran into some issues about differing priorities and such.  My co-leader for the motivation discussion actually said to the class, “Now for the boring part…” and I was like, “What a way to talk about motivation!”  (Half the battle in teaching anything is for the teacher to display enthusiasm — if the teacher isn’t enthusiastic, then you don’t have any hope of motivating the students!)  I can see advantages to co-teaching though, so it wasn’t all bad, but it requires a different set of skills — lots of negotiation and probably a conversation about teaching style and goals.

For me, the very best part of getting to teach was that our professors were finally getting a glimpse of who we are as teachers.  Even though very few of us ever taught any class that was primarily discussion based, they could still get a sense for how we prepare, how we handle a class, how patient we are, how we encourage the students (who are actually our classmates).  I feel very comfortable in front of a class, and it was nice for my profs to see that, especially in the classes where I am quieter as a student.  So, one of my favorite things about this semester will always be that we got to have some responsibility for leading our class.

Ways to make a grad student happy

This is an intense week at school as we have big papers due in the next few days.  So I will be deeply immersed in reading and writing in the days ahead.  But, our profs have made us happy during the last week by…

…postponing a couple of due dates on big stuff.

…taking us on field trips…two weeks in a row!

…announcing “this is the last reading response you’ll have to write for us this semester!”  Woohoo!

…saying “I’m not going to assign any new reading for next week!”  Wooooooooooohooooooo!

If you don’t have the power to make a grad student happy in these ways, showing up at the person’s door with a bouquet of highlighters would also work. 

Could tomorrow be the weekend too?

This was the second weekend in a row that I had a big event on Saturday that took up most of the day.  I went to a teaching conference about 45 minutes drive from here.  The very best part of the day was that I got to visit with my old teaching colleagues, who I adore and miss a lot.  But, I was so exhausted when I got home that I was pretty much useless as far as accomplishing anything else.  Thus, with only today to do homework, I am feeling woefully behind.  I just finished my homework for Monday’s class and have barely started doing the reading for my Tuesday classes.  Thus, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to request an extension of the weekend to include another day.   Just this once.  Pretty please?

March 20th

Happy Birthday to my Mom!

Happy Spring to the rest of you!

The daffodils are coming! The daffodils are coming!

Grad School #30

In one of my classes, we’re spending a lot of time analyzing text and transcripts from research studies.  In the text that people write (such as in a letter), we look at word choice and how the person is framing himself or others.  We look at how confident the person seems and how he is telling us what he knows.  With the transcripts, which are marked for intonation and pauses, we analyze those things to try to find additional meaning.  It’s extremely detailed.  And it’s totally messing with my head!  I’ll read something outside of school and think, “ooooooh, very interesting that she uses ‘a’ instead of ‘the’ there.”

(Really?  Is it that interesting?, says the non-school part of my brain.)

I’m hoping they give us a pill at the end of the semester to cure us of this microanalyzingness.  It could drive a person insane!

Tell me a story

My brain is completely fried and I’m exhausted, so I’ve got nothing.

What say you?

Grad School #29

I totally forgot to write my grad school post on Thursday, but now I can write about the Campus Visit Day for the next cohort of students, which took place yesterday.  (And yesterday was also Pi Day — belated Happy Pi Day wishes to all of you!)

Yesterday was the day that I was most looking forward to this semester.  I knew it was a milestone day for my cohort because the presence of incoming students means we are not the new ones anymore.  Most of us met each other a year ago today at our visit day.  And back then, we were all a little bit unsure and nervous and worried about what This was all going to be like.  Going into a PhD program feels like you are attempting to gain access to an entirely different orbit, filled with people who are not like the rest of us.  And in truth, it’s mostly just filled with regular people who happen to love school and weren’t quite willing to leave their questions about the world unanswered.  But it’s just school.  Most days, it doesn’t even dawn on any of us anymore that this is something Big and Scary.  We read, we write, we give presentations, we have many hoops to jump through.   We have good days, we have bad days, we have crises, we want to quit, we get excited about a study someone does, we want to stay forever!  And, it’s just school.

So, it was nice to pass along whatever wisdom we could.  I was a featured student in the session that is specific to my program, and then I was the leader for the general Q&A panel.  We answered questions about housing, about whether we have free time, about health insurance, about sporting events, and many other topics.  I hope it was clear to all the incoming students that we are surviving and energetic and here for them if they have questions or need us.  It was a good day.

If I had known it was purple…

Look what I finally took out of its box last night!

It is the iron that my brother bought me for Christmas in 2007!  And it’s lavender!  I was so surprised!!  When I looked at the box after I opened it, I realized the picture on the box showed it was lavender but I never paid any attention to that and assumed it was either white or silver.  Who would ever think that they make purple irons!

I finally took it out because we have a big event at school today, and I decided I wanted to wear a blouse and thus I needed to iron it.  I was relieved that the instructions for the iron were clear, so I was able to figure out where to put the water in and so on.  I think I’ve ironed exactly twice before — once in 1991, and then again in 1998.  (Laugh if you must!)  I had to laugh when the instructions said something about, “If you don’t use the iron every day…”  I’m like, how about if you use the iron every seven to eleven years?

After I ironed one blouse, I was on a roll and ironed another one — the second blouse was the one I wore on my first day of teaching (in 2004) and have never worn since because it needed to be ironed.  [I learned immediately that when you lecture with chalk, which ends up all over you, there is no point in wearing really nice clothes!]  I think it took me close to an hour to iron two blouses, and I realized halfway through the second one that I was on the wrong setting.  But overall, it went OK, and though the blouses aren’t quite crisp, they do look better than they did before I started and that was my goal. 

Next thing you know, I’ll be baking.  Do they make purple muffin pans?