Moments in time according to Dalton and Curie

Yesterday: Anytime between birth and the last time he or she slept

This day: Today

Tomorrow: Anytime after the next time he or she sleeps

A long time: Anytime longer than 2 seconds

Too long: Anytime longer than 0.5 seconds

Yesterday a long time ago: Anytime between birth and about three weeks ago

Every day: Anything that has happened at least one other time that he or she can remember

A little while: As long as he or she wants to.

Veto

My kids vetoed the matching bug costumes I purchased and insisted on going as witches. I have boy-girl twins. They have not been introduced to the words "wizard" or "warlock" - hence they are both in dresses. It isn't the first time.

Update RBoC

Just a few things that have been going on while I have not been blogging:

• I've become addicted to PackRat on Facebook. It's Addy's fault, really.
  
  
• I've also become obsessed with RealClearPolitics. I have only myself to blame.
  
  
• My mother was quite disappointed Hillary did not get the Democratic nomination. I was worried she was going to vote for McCain. She lived in Arizona from 1976 until May of this year, and generally felt positively towards McCain. Sarah Palin took care of all that. Yesterday, my mom voted for Obama. In Florida.
  
  
• My conservative cousin who is turning 36 this month voted for Obama a few days ago. He has never voted before. Ever. He lives in Texas, though, so no help there.
  
  
• My mom is a victim of the mortgage crisis. More on this later.
  
  
• I went to a CUR (Council on Undergraduate Research) workshop as a member of a team from my institution. It was fantastic.
  
  
• We hired fabulous adjuncts this year. Awesome.
  
  
• Three comics I like about work, life and woo.
  
  
• A little vignette from my house, while trying to convince the kids to get dressed:
  
  

  
  Dr. H: Hey, who don't you both wear your kitty shirts? Then you can be twins!
  
  Curie: We're ALREADY twins.

  
  

  
  
  

It has been a long time.

Let me explain.

I unintentionally stopped blogging at the end of July because one of our cats went missing. I intended to write a blog post about it, but had trouble because we had no closure. I didn't want to write about anything else, because everything else I had to say was about something too silly (or required me to be too snarky) given the situation. I didn't want to go back that before discussing the cat. Anyway, I've been ready to write about it for awhile, but having been away for so long was a bit of a hurdle.

Three months ago was the last time we saw Alex. We have come to the unfortunate conclusion that we lost her to a coyote. Please, please, no recriminations about outdoor cats. I have two other cats that were indoor only cats for 12 years, and Alex was an indoor only cat for 3. We got Alex as an adult cat and she spent much of her waking time trying to get outside. Before she came to us, she was in a foster home which informed us she had belonged to a homeless person for the first year or so of her life. She wasn't fond of walls. We could only open windows about an inch - she was able to rip through screens in about 4 seconds. Once I caught her be her hind quarters as she tried to jump out of a second story window, having ripped through the screen in a window that a house guest had left open too far. Constant vigilance was required to keep her inside.

Then, one day, my children got big enough to open doors by themselves. And then all of our cats became indoor/outdoor cats.

Almost three years after making that decision, my worst fears about this materialized and Alex didn't come home one day. We canvassed the neighborhood, put up signs, checked shelters, called vets, called the people responsible for removing deceased animals from the roads - all the things one is supposed to do. The only news was this: at least two other cats went missing right around the same time and there had been some sightings of coyotes in the neighborhood. There are no outdoor cats in our neighborhood now.

Alex was the first cat that Dr. H and I adopted together. She was soft like a bunny, always had a wet nose, loved Cat Chow, didn't like cat treats or expensive cat food and was great at removing mice from basements. She loved being outside. She was also the only cat that got along with Dr. H's cat, who hated all other cats on principle. We don't know why. We assume Alex got along with her because she deferred to all alpha cats (my alpha included). She had the most trouble with my beta cat, until they worked out that Alex was, in fact, beta. (At the time, we had four cats. Dr. H's cat we lost to old age some number of years ago.) Alex was our most cat-like cat, but very friendly and great with the kids. When the kids were really young she often avoided them, finding their unpredictability disconcerting. However, in the last year or so, Alex started to bond with Curie, and I was sure Alex was destined to become Curie's cat one day.

One of the hardest things has been explaining it to the children. More on that another time.

She was a great cat. We miss her very much. I thought I had gotten to the acceptance stage of grief. But last night I had a dream she came home. Does that mean I'm in the denial stage, the bargaining stage or the depression stage?

The Trouble with ......

[My mom and I are discussing Star Trek (the original series):


My Mom: What were those furry things called again?

Me: Tribbles.

My Mom: Yes that's right! Gerbils!

RBoC in Pictures

• The garden is in bloom:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Cats are cute:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• We have a lot of weeds.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Dr. H. thought he wasn't allergic to poison ivy. He was wrong.
  
  
  
  (The picture is from a week and half later, a few of those days with prescription steroids.)
  
  
  
• Ugh, just ugh.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Fun in lab:
  
  
  
  
  

Another Chapter

In my last post I told a little story about my eighth grade math class. Let me tell a more positive math class story that may put the eighth grade story in context.

Fifth grade was fabulous. My teacher, Mrs. Plunk, gave me and one other student the math book, flipped a good way through it and said, "Start here." The starting point for each of us was the first section we didn't already have proficiency in. While she gave the rest of the class a regular lesson, the two of us were allowed to work on material chapters ahead of the rest of the class on our own. When I felt like I had done enough practice problems in a chapter, I went up to Mrs. Plunk's desk and she gave me a post-test. If I got a 100%, I moved on.

That year was the year I discovered I loved math. Everything was so new! So cool! So much fun!

When I finished our book, she went and got the sixth grade book, flipped through it to the last unit and again said, "Start here." I asked about the earlier stuff in the book and she said "You know how to do all that." I looked through it. She was right.

That moment is the moment I realized that all the math books I had used in that state started all over again with addition and subtraction. At the time, I thought this was incredibly stupid. Later, someone told me this approach to math is called spiraling.

In sixth grade, I moved to a new school in the same state. The year opened with us studying addition and subtraction all over again. I told my new teacher "I know how to do all of this already." She said to me, "What do you want? A brownie button?" I didn't say much after that.

In sixth, seventh and eighth grade, I sat through math classes, bored out of my mind. Occasionally, I refused to do homework in rebellion. You have no idea how happy I was to go to high school.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Mrs. Plunk changed my life. From that year on, I thought of myself as someone who loved math and was good at it. But that one year did have the side effect of making the next three years really painful.

Girls = Boys: Math is not Hard

In case anyone possibly missed the Tierney business last week, go read this.

Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about: "Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance" by Hyde, Lindberg, Linn, Ellis & Williams in Science, 25 July 2008: Vol. 321. no. 5888, pp. 494 - 495. This study, using recent data from 10 states, found no gender gap in math:

Effect sizes for gender differences, representing the testing of over 7 million students in state assessments, are uniformly <0.10, representing trivial differences (see table, top left, and table S1). Of these effect sizes, 21 were positive, indicating better performance by males; 36 were negative, indicating better performance by females; and 9 were exactly 0. From this distribution of effect sizes, we calculate that the weighted mean is 0.0065, consistent with no gender difference (see chart on p. 495 and fig. S1). In contrast to earlier findings, these very current data provide no evidence of a gender difference favoring males emerging in the high school years;

The author's suggest maybe earlier studies found differences in higher level problems because at that time girls took fewer and/or lower level math courses in school. (And I'm pretty sure that some dismissed this as a problem at that time, saying "See, girls are just more interested in people.") This isn't the case anymore, girls now choose these classes, and this may be why the gender gap has disappeared.

But wait! What about that variability thing? You know, the whole "it isn't that the boys are better on average, they just have more high and low achievers" thing Lawrence Summers spoke about? This study has some things to say about that too:

Data from the state assessments provide information on the percentage of boys and girls scoring above a selective cut point. Results vary by ethnic group. The bottom table on p. 494 shows data for grade 11 for the state of Minnesota. For whites, the ratios of boys:girls scoring above the 95th percentile and 99th percentile are 1.45 and 2.06, respectively, and are similar to predictions from theoretical models. For Asian Americans, ratios are 1.09 and 0.91, respectively. Even at the 99th percentile, the gender ratio favoring males is small for whites and is reversed for Asian Americans.

Did you catch that last part? In the 99th percentile, the ratio is reversed for Asian Americans. Interesting, no? On the Science website, the news note about the article mentions that Hyde (the lead author of the study) says this suggests there are complex cultural factors at work here. The study concludes:

Our analysis shows that, for grades 2 to 11, the general population no longer shows a gender difference in math skills, consistent with the gender similarities hypothesis (19). There is evidence of slightly greater male variability in scores, although the causes remain unexplained. Gender differences in math performance, even among high scorers, are insufficient to explain lopsided gender patterns in participation in some STEM fields. An unexpected finding was that state assessments designed to meet NCLB requirements fail to test complex problem-solving of the kind needed for success in STEM careers, a lacuna that should be fixed.

There is much more to the story and I recommend checking it out.

...

When I was in eighth grade, I was not permitted to take Algebra. Algebra was not offered as a formal class, but two students were allowed to study it with one of the student teachers on the side. I was not on of those students. This was not because I was a girl, but because of what happened during the free part of the math class period. You see, I was not one of the girls who went up to sit on the teacher's desk and giggle with him while he told dirty jokes. They got to take Algebra.

It would be nice if I were kidding. I am not.

Instead, I sat at my desk, wanting to stick a pencil into my eye to relieve the pain of doing 50 more math problems about something tedious I'd known how to do since the fourth grade.

My high school did not allow students to go directly into Algebra either. You had to get "permission" from your eighth grade math teacher. I brought him the slip. He looked at me, somewhat enjoying his little moment of power. "I don't know," he said, "this quarter you may be getting a B..."

Now, in fairness, I was getting a B. Why? Because I could not frigging stand calculating the area of a circle for the 121st damn time (by hand, this was 1981). So I may have missed an assignment or two. However, there was no frakking way this joker was going to prevent me from getting into Algebra. I knew it, too. I looked at him. I adopted my first and best ever Are you fucking kidding me? look. He looked at me for no more than a second after that and signed the paper.

At eighth grade graduation, he said to my mom, "I do believe your daughter was very bored in my class."

And that year we never got yearbooks. Something about my math teacher taking off with all the yearbook money. But maybe that was just a rumor.

Fortunately, high school was different. It wasn't all good, but at least it was different.

Going too far?

Is it bad that Dr. H and I change our facebook statuses so that our mutual friends will be amused if (and only if) they read both in their news feed?

Clearly I need to stop reading my e-mail...

Yesterday, I received a ton of bad news. None of it impacts me directly, but by the end of the day I was pretty depressed.

• A friend's brother-in-law just committed suicide. He and his wife have a two year old daughter.
  
• A good friend was on a cruise with his parents and in-laws. Everything was fine until his mother suddenly became ill and died. The whole thing sounds horrible.
  
• A colleague needs surgery for something fixable, but potentially life-threatening if not treated
  
• Another colleague (and friend and mentor with whom I work on many committees) just found out his prostate cancer has metathesized.
  

That will teach me to send e-mails. I may stop talking to people on campus too.

More Questions I Have Trouble Answering

From Dalton:

"How do girls pee if they don't have penises?"

[We attempt explanation]

"NO! There's no hole the pee comes out of, it comes out of my penis!"

From Curie:

"How did Dalton and I get out of your tummy? Is there a hole?"

[I attempt to deflect with description of how babies usually coming out on their own but sometimes a doctor does surgery to get them out]

"So, but normally there is a hole?"

[um, well, yeah]

"Do I have one? Where is it?"

[points to her bellybutton]

"Is it here?"

[uh, no]

"Well where is it?

[Starts looking all over her own body]

[time passes]

"Well?"

[Eventually come up with something brilliant about the babies being inside a uterus which opens up when the babies are ready to come out. Decide clarification about cervix versus uterus and details of the vaginal canal are not necessary to satisfy four year old.]

My Office

There is construction going on in the classroom across from my office. It is occasionally loud. The rest of the time, a religious radio program emanating from the boombox in the room is very loud.