mi familia

Stories can sometimes capture the essence of even the most complex human interactions. In the retelling, words can be changed, tone can be adjusted, and the original incident may depart from its reality. But technology can capture what might otherwise slip away: movie cameras, videotapes, and now, social networks. What follows is an unexpurgated exchange with identities obscured. Additional commentary and contexts appears immediately after.

Sister #1
So, I've worried all day that my vision was getting much worse. Just now realized I'm missing a lens from my glasses. What an idiot! Wednesday at 10:47pm via iPhone. Friend TN likes this

Friend ZZ
LOL!!!!!! I love you! :P Wednesday at 10:50pm

Friend JI
That is something I would do Wednesday at 11:30pm

Friend MJF
How much u been drinking??? Lol jk jk Thursday at 2:36am

Big Brother
OMG that sounds just like 200 or more professors that I know. Thursday at 7:06am 


Mother
Didn't you feel a draft on your lensless eye? Dad llost his lens at [Sister #2]'s last week - didn't know it, but I saw a lens on the carpet andd asked whose it was. Eye doctor is closed untill Monday, - luuckily has a second pair. Thursday at 11:59am


Sister #2
It was the heavy lense that Dad lost, so his glasses were pretty crooked while he was here. 3 hours ago

There is a lot happening here and not all can be fully captured in a way that won't exceed the reader's limited attention span.But here are some insights and insides:

1. The comments are from friends and co-workers of Sister #1 ... until Big Brother weighs in. Then once the family lumbers onto the scene, everyone else disappears.
2. Not only does Mother find a way to inflict a slight jab (didn't you…?) but then discloses that Sister #1 shares characteristics with her doddering daddy.
3. Sister #2 supplies the enriching imagery of said father walking around with droopy spectacles, presumably reducing what little correction would offered by the eye behind a heavy lens.

There is a lot happening here and not all can be fully captured in a way that won't exceed the reader's limited attention span.But here are some insights and insides:

1. The comments are from friends and co-workers of Sister #1 ... until Big Brother weighs in. Then once the family lumbers onto the scene, everyone else disappears.
2. Not only does Mother find a way to inflict a slight jab (didn't you…?) but then discloses that Sister #1 shares characteristics with her doddering daddy.
3. Sister #2 supplies the enriching imagery of said father walking around with droopy spectacles, presumably reducing what little correction would offered by the eye behind a heavy lens.

Little Brother is missing from the exchange. For his part, he shared a story of co-workers bringing in favorite Christmas photos from when each was young. Lil Bro had his picture taken seated in front of a Christmas tree weighted down by tinsel and bulky lights. He had good memories of all this. But then a co-worker asked about the packages in the background: "Did your family wrap gifts in newspaper?" Blind to that tradition, the scene was now one of shame. The only shining spot was that being cheap can also appear to be a environmentally-conscious lifestyle. No, there are no transgendering meanderings here. Just uncertain clarity and vision.

when I came to, I tasted wild berries

The college classroom is typically a place of great safety and over which the professor exerts considerable control. Violent events at colleges (Virginia Tech or Huntsville or UGA) are especially terrible because they destroy the general sense of calm and well-being we associate with campuses. Incidents in college classrooms are very rare — which makes the following story all the more unusual.

Dr. M has long experienced an unpredictable medical condition: his shoulder pops out of place. It would happen when he’d play pickup basketball. He even had to give up golfing because during big tee-offs, his shoulder would disconnect from its socket. His friends said it looked like he had been shot as he would swing and then crumple to the ground. There was only slight discomfort (aside from the embarrassment) and Dr. M could put the joint back into place. The ease with which it came out meant it could be returned without much exertion.

Given that in the past, a dramatic physical movement caused the shoulder to dislocate, it was quite unexpected when Dr. M felt his shoulder pop out while gesturing during a class. He assured his class that the shoulder would pop back into place in just a moment There was no need for alarm. But then he fainted and came to while on the floor. He tried to explain that the chair he was in had wheels and that was why he fell. As he got up to move to another chair that was more stable, he reiterated that his shoulder would pop back momentarily. And he passed out a second time.

As he awoke, Dr. M realized his shoulder had returned to its rightful place. But he was also struck by the smell and taste of wild berries. No, it wasn’t that he had struck his head and was having a neurological response. Because when he opened his eyes, he discovered he was face-to-face with one of his female students. She looked very upset although relieved her professor was alive. Apparently, when his eyes rolled back and he collapsed, this young lady perceived that he was having a heart attack and initiated CPR. The berries happened to be the flavor of lip gloss she was wearing, some of which was transferred while she performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Whether Dr. M actually had stopped breathing or not was somewhat immaterial because he was down before the lip-lock and he came to immediately after.

The class insisted that Dr. M remain on the floor despite his attempts to reassure them. The voice on the cell phone of the student who had called 911 reinforced the recommendation that he rest until the paramedics arrived. He checked out fine and acknowledged to the ambulance driver that he would indeed consult with an orthopedist about the shoulder. Presumably the interruption had broken the flow of discussion. Dr. M let his students leave fifteen minutes early. The balance of the semester proceeded without incident and Dr. M has resumed the weight-lifting routine that had been previously prescribed to strengthen muscles to avoid shoulder dislocations.

doing some busting

Maybe it is because we upgraded to more channels that I have noticed a lot of busting as of late. Of course, there's Mythbusters (which is rendered almost unwatchable by the college-aged sidekicks) and for some reason Ghostbusters is popping up a lot. While I missed my favorite scientist scene of all time, YouTube allows me hear it again and again. And I briefly entertained the notion of having a ghost containment box installed in my office, with a waiting smoking ghost trap occasionally propped on my desk. Alas, the plans online seem either too complicated or inadequate (e.g., no blinking lights). But how great it would it be to roll one of these babies near somebody who is running over their time at a conference presentation, or running over my tolerance during a department meeting. Sigh.

As the seasonal celebration of miracles, notably the Jesus/Santa combo, my textbook co-author and I foolishly discover how frantically we must work to meet our February 1 deadline. While I harbor reservations about doing so, the Nature of Science chapter has been elevated to Chapter 2. I have to make heavy edits because when it was Chapter 8, phrases starting with: "as we have already described…" made sense and now they would elicit scorn. Despite the tedium of such vigilance, this does afford me a return to some myth busting of my own with "the scientific method" as my favorite target. And in a new chapter on Experimenting, I was struggling to describe why "hypothesis" is such a contentious term. For some reason, I equated the adage that it's an "educated guess" with the myth that Eskimoes have a hundred words for snow. I discovered that a woman who led the charge to unpack this particular myth was an anthropology professor from Cleveland. Best of all was this list of snow words proposed by somebody who must annoy his spouse/partner and amuse his peers. Here's an excerpt:

ashtla          expected snow that's wagered on (depth, size of flakes)
huantla       special snow rolled into "snow reefers" and smoked by wild Eskimo youth
tla-na-na    snow mixed with the sound of old rock and roll from a portable radio
depptla        a small snowball, preserved in Lucite, that had been handled by Johnny Depp

We move forward in our lives, homes and courses, navigating between beliefs and evidence. Evidence can be turned onto beliefs, busting them to bits like a beer glass dropped on a stairwell. Miracles and myths would appear to be almost defenseless against the boot-kicks of empiricism. Nevertheless, we find ourselves clinging to beliefs and hopes in order to keep us moving along. Knowing that death is final and cannot be avoided by being good and doing onto others in a like manner, we deliberately advance into the dark and the cold in an effort to lead others to the warmth, light and comfort that comes from knowledge. Plans for a new course are infused with promise and possibility — and we believe in in the myth that ignorance is the enemy and wisdom will make the world a better place. We bust our humps preparing and worrying about the prospects for everyone this semester. Believers and skeptics lay awake the night before class, wishing for a miracle but preparing nonetheless (nice pants, neat syllabus, novel introduction) to make this course the one that changes the world.

anything is possible

I enjoy sports but only pay attention to those teams that are close to where I live. In Boston, we watched every Celtics game on the local Fox affiliate during the early 1990s. In Cleveland, we watched the Indians go to the World Series, and the Browns go to Baltimore. In Utah, we cheered the home team during the 2002 Olympics. And in Connecticut, without a single major league professional team, we follow UConn. The end of 2010 and the start of 2011 has been rough on our 3 biggest programs: the women’s basketball team ended an amazing winning streak, the men’s basketball team were proven to not deserve their No. 4 ranking, and our football team lost badly in its first BCS game. Somebody is bound to suggest that there is some connection to the revelation that we are hiring our first woman as president. Cause and effect or another sign of a loss for the institution -- I’ll let others weigh in.

The Fiesta Bowl is sponsored by Frito-Lay and features their Tostios chips. We compromised and munched on nacho cheese Doritos until we were queasy. (Not many know that the name of the chip comes from the Spanish “Doritos” which roughly translates as “salty, orange, triangles of cocaine-like goodness”). When I was a youth, college bowl games were named after naturally-occurring foods: Orange, Peach, Sugar, Rose, etc. Naming rights for a bowl have long been determined by who wanted to shell out the crazy amount of money. The same is true with stadiums and fields as the owners often have first crack at having their names over the entrance. Corporations can also spend enough to have that right. When the new Cleveland baseball park opened, it was named Jacobs Field after the owners. Now it is Progressive Field, named after the insurance company that also supports NORML legislation. What startled me while watching the Fiesta Bowl, besides the fact that no one had turned the facility into a giant bowl of chips with salsa in midfield, was the name of the place.

University of Phoenix offers online education for adults. Somehow they can issue education degrees which lead to certification. That doesn’t trouble me because I believe it’s on the schools themselves to decide whether they want to hire someone to teach children who earned their bachelor’s while at home, in their pajamas, and eating Doritos. Instead, I cannot quite wrap my head around that fact that the Fiesta Bowl was played at the University of Phoenix Stadium, an institution which has no intercollegiate athletic programs. Truly, my mind is so jolted by this that I am unable to think of a parallel that is equally incongruous. Okay, how about Freedom Mortgage Company’s name on a prison? Or BP’s name on a water park? Just goes to show about anything is possible in 2011.

reaching an end

Endings and beginnings are very odd pairings. In some cases, a beginning is loud and dramatic while the end is indefinite and discrete. Examples include human life (the screaming moment of birth and the quiet exhalation at death) and the calendar year (fireworks for January 1 compared to a flipped calendar page for December 1). We celebrate new arrivals and weep at the departures.

In other cases, the transition from start to finish is a crescendo with the UConn Women’s Basketball team as a poignant example. Under great national attention, Stanford ended the Husky win streak at 90 games. [It was surreal to watch Condoleezza Rice celebrating, maybe vindicated for her failed Iraq efforts?] In contrast, our local PBS station just re-broadcasted the first game in the streak from November 16, 2008. It was a very typical game with no one sensing where it might all conclude, and nobody imagining that it would almost 1000 days later.

Each year, the media lists the more famous who have walked among us but have died over the preceding 12 months: actors, scientists, artists, etc. Almost inevitably, we are surprised to discover someone’s passing. People like the woman who played the wife and mother on Leave it To Beaver have been such a presence over the years that it is almost as startling to realize that she is a living person as to simultaneously discover that she is, finally and forever, not. As struck as we can be by an ending this is often followed by the sense that things continue. Maybe we believe the UConn win streak would go on forever, despite the coach making it clear that someday it would have to end. We were fooling ourselves into believing that there might be a basketball doxology:

As it was in the beginning
Is now, and ever shall be,
World without end …

On the night of the famous loss, I went to bed heavyhearted with condolences arriving through the ether. And the next morning we realized we were going to be okay. The coach was quick to recover, quipping at the post-game press conference: “This losing stuff is getting old: I hate it.” Other basketball games are on the schedule and we have six pairs of tickets on the refrigerator waiting to be used — including the first appearance by the team after their spanking by the Cardinal.

What remains unclear is whether anything new really begins and if endings are especially final. Stephen Jay Gould himself charted this by examining time as an arrow or as a cycle. In relation to geology, he appreciated the dichotomy of the metaphors and praised the tensions it generated. And that worked well for Dr Gould in his professional life; in his personal life he has ceased to be. And yet, he persists in his works which continue to education and enlighten.

An acquaintance expressed astonishment that I was not regularly archiving my computer files. I discovered I had the software that just need to be reloaded. The hardware was already on hand but never put into automatic action. I also ran an anti-virus program as recommended and came back with a completely clean bill of technological health. Now I can virtually thumb back through several years of syllabi and manuscripts and conference proceedings. But Time Machine only looks backwards. On January 1st, it is all about possibilities. I am curious to discover a year from now what has been added and what is changed.

why educators make for bad epidemiologists

I have had the flu for about a week and I am ready to be done with it. Admittedly, I ignored plenty of opportunities to be vaccinated. I should know better. But then again, I am more of an educator than a scientist. It is quite comical that I rely upon the former as a resource to deal with the mess in my body.

When I google immune response flu virus, the scientific sites are full of useful information. For example, the flu virus causes cells in the respiratory tract to die which in turn causes “impaired function of the mucus elevator.” I will allow the reader to imagine taking that elevator to the conference space.

Many of us know the fallacy of the four humor theory of health. No, this isn’t a taxonomy of ways to be funny. But if it was, I would nominate the following: sarcasm, self-deprecation, word play and pratfalls. Instead, this ancient theory suggest that our bodies consist of four liquids that must be in balance. When they are not, that is when we are sick. Not sure why the Greeks were so into two forms of bile, phlegm and blood. All I can say is that using Nyquil to balance out the green humor is not really a cure.

My strategy has been to use educational principles to rid my body of this illness. In the process, I ignore the fact that viruses exist. Instead my own body is the student body. Yesterday, my strategy was to create stimuli that would make my body believe it was healthy. Rather than drag out of bed and mope about, I arose, promptly took a shower, got dressed and began typing. My intent was to switch off my body’s ill-behavior (including that cursed mucus elevator) by re-booting with a healthful, working routine. I was back in bed by 10:30 a.m.

Today, I went for the workingman lesson plan. First, breakfast: an egg and toast, orange juice, coffee, and a flip through the first section of the paper. Then, composing feedback and sending emails. It is working a little better since it’s almost 11 a.m. and I haven’t gone back to bed. Then again, I haven’t shaved and I’m still wearing the same clothes I put on after yesterday’s shower.

I expect I will continue with the line of treatment. This afternoon, I will venture out for the first time since last Friday. I’m going to the university to retrieve an interlibrary loan book. Maybe that will make my body believe it is ready to act like a professor on sabbatical. If nothing else, by keeping at this I am confident that eventually my educationalist ways will beat this illness.

Time tensions

A place with such ancient human history promotes reflective thinking. Walking among stone walls and thatch-roofed buildings stirs certain realizations that abrade against an American "can do" attitude. The ruins on the Aran Islands have names in a language that almost dissappeared. Those labels are certainly not what the structures were called by their original builders. This is because we are unsure who laid that first course or when that occured. To be in this place makes it obvious that this will be here long after I depart having already been here for millenia.

Meanwhile among my closest professional friends are individuals striving to improve the world. How strange it is to aspire to make lasting changes when the very ground I walked upon today indicates my pesence is barely detected. This produces a genuine tension ; the cliffs towering over the sea exist because those that were once adjacent have fallen and cushed into sand. In addition to a fear of losing footing and tumbling 100 meters into the surf, I should also accept the inevitability that this stone face will let go.

And yet there have been individuals whose actions have indelibly shape Ireland including St Patrick for his benevolence and Cromwell for his destructiveness. Maybe centuries is too clumsy of a measure of a persom's worth. Admittedly, a lifetime photographing pints of coder or stout might be inadequate. Yet somehow it feels both daring and proper to attempt to alter conditions for the betterment of those who will survive us.