11D

Bugs and Mugs

Cute local news reporter covers Jenna's wedding.

Green porno.

Tiny Graves

I'm not really looking at the pictures of the kids who have died in China.  I'm skimming through them quickly, but I can't pause and stare. It doesn't take much for me to imagine a little blond boy in the rubble, and then I fall apart.

It's actually easier to read about the vulnerability of schools in developing nations, because then it gives us something to do.

The Best Thing About Babies Is Making Them Play Air Drums

Daaaaddd... Stop messing with me.

Ten Ways That Technology Has Changed Parenting

When I'm not teaching, I'm parenting. Again, another occupation that's pretty much hands on. Can't really get a computer to potty train a kid. Though that would be awfully nice and I urge you geeks out there to work on such a program. However, there are still many ways that parenting has changed in recent years, too, due to the Internet and technology.

Ten Ways That Technology Has Changed Parenting:
1) Websites that tell you where the pervs are.
2) Parenting and special education list-servs.
3) Mommyblogs.
4) School comparison websites
5) Parenthacks
6) Increased school budgets for computers and teacher training for computers
7) Um.. getting stuck...

10 Ways that Technology Has Changed My Job

It's hard to imagine a more stodgy, traditional profession than academia. Tweed jackets with patches on the sleeves. Yet, our job has changed radically in the past five years due to technology.

Ten ways that technology has changed my job:

1) Job blogs and job wikis.
2) Laptops in the classroom
3) Powerpoint (more here)
4) Conference wikis
5) Rate My Professor
6) Journal blogs
7) Textbook blogs
8) Class websites
9) Academic blogging
10) Online classes

Here's a few more:

11) Endnote and .pdf files. Wahoo! No more file cabinets.

12) Google Scholar

Spreadin' Love

Fantastic hats that only live on the heads of women on the upper Eastside.

Former NIH director, Dr. Bernadine Healy says that the government is purposely not studying the connection between vaccines and autism.

Read what happened to Dooce on the Today Show.

(fixed the link, sorry)

People Are Weird

People are traveling to the house in Austria where the deranged dad kept his daughter and their children in a cellar for 24 years. They have their picture taken in front of the house or drive by in tour buses. Forget eco-tourism; ghoulish tourism may be the new trend.

People are travelling from neighbouring countries such as Germany and Hungary   to visit the street and have their picture taken in front of the house.

According to reports, the three-storey house facing one of Amstetten’s main   roads has also been put on the route of a sightseeing bus tour which now   routinely stops in front of it.

"It is bad enough that journalists and TV crews have beleaguered our town, but   now there is this ghoulish tourism with people coming to Amstetten just to   see the house in Ybbstrasse. It is appalling, we just want to be left in   peace," said one Amstetten resident.

Time to open a Jeffrey Dahmer museum.

Help After Kindergarten

Inside Higher Ed has a new group blog, Mama PhD. Wahoo! Most of the bloggers are fairly experienced and are starting off well. Many of the topics would well outside of academia, and I'll link to those broader interest posts whenever I have the chance.

Libby had a post last week that discussed the difficulty of identifying remedies to work-family balance problems as the kids get older. Kids and parents still have needs after kindergarten, but those needs may be less easily remedied by specific policies.

I appreciated that the survey had an option that read something like “I don’t need this, but we should have it,” and I checked it over and over again for the lactation room, the onsite daycare, the flexible scheduling, the help with caring for aged parents. But when it came to asking for what I really needed, I was stymied. Sure, after-school programs on campus would be nice for my younger child, as would summer programs (he’s doing two weeks of summer camp on campus already). There was some help available for the college application process with my daughter, though we ended up going it mostly alone. Could we have used more? Maybe. But the real demands of this period of parenting, as of this period in a career, seem to me more amorphous, less easily solved with one-size-fits-all programs and policies. Mostly right now I just feel as if I have to be paying very close attention, at all times, to everything — which means, no doubt, that something will inevitably give. Is just recognizing that enough?

My needs -- After school care that accepts kids with special needs and has smart people to help with homework. Libby has on-campus summer camp? Oooh, I want that, too. I still need flexible scheduling. Full time care when the public schools close for week long breaks.

Girls and Sports

The Times had a crappy article on girls and sports this week. The cover of the magazine has a picture of girl with her head wrapped in gauze getting bonked on the head with the ball. Ouch.

I skimmed through five pages of stories of how girls are getting terribly injuring playing sports. I was looking for the point somewhere. Way back towards the end of the article after it jumped to the page before the crossword puzzle, it said something about how coaches need to train girls differently than boys and then things will be fine. 

How many people read that article to the end to find that point? How many people saw the cover, read the first couple pages, and walked away saying "girls shouldn't play sports"?

The first paragraph of that article should have been a quote from one of the injured girls talking about how important sports were to her life and how she willingly put up with torn ligaments and stress fractures, because she loved winning games.

My knees are destroyed from running nearly fifty miles a week all through high school and into college. My back was so fucked up in my senior year that I could barely walk at the end of the cross country season. What did I gain from all that pain? A whole lot of self confidence. A work ethic. Leadership skills. It sure beat waving pom-poms around.

I have a box of medals up in my attic and two scrapbooks of press clippings. Each scrapbook has been carefully marked to note which races I won and which ones I earned a personal best. Twenty years later, I still remember my time for the mile, two mile, and cross country.

Warrior-girls rule, even if they limp a little.

Weekend Journal

The end of the semester is nigh. I'm proctoring my last exam tomorrow. I've got a stack of finals from last week sitting in a neat pile on the dining room table. I've got a ton of meetings this week, and I'm really not sure where I am supposed to be and when. The bookstore is demanding book order forms. A last minute recommendation. A book review. The end of the semester is nigh, but not nigh enough.