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Maybe divorce is the answer… June 10, 2014

Posted by mareserinitatis in career, engineering, family, feminism, research, science, societal commentary, work.
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I think I am going to change my name.  It’s very annoying.

My last name, anyway.

If I had it to do over again, the one thing I would’ve done when getting married is to keep my maiden name.  Hyphenation was not the best idea by a long shot.

This has been an issue (a lot) because I worked with my husband for so long.  I suspect it will die off as we are no longer coworkers.  However, one of the most bizarre things that has come up is that I recently received some reviews of a proposal that we wrote before he changed jobs.  One of the reviewers noted that as a co-PI, I had the same last name as the PI and so a conflict of interest was a possibility.

Huh?

My university has a clear and very detailed conflict of interest policy, and I’m not clear how this applies.  As far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with conflict of interest as these policies are almost exclusively focused on outside financial obligations.  I checked with the funding agency, and that was all they had listed for conflict of interest, as well.

If he were supervising me or vice-versa (that is, one of us was a subordinate), such a scenario would violate internal policies to the university.  However, even if he is PI and I’m a co-PI, we both reported to someone else.  Further, a PI isn’t necessarily a supervisory role.  Do faculty members who collaborate on research supervise each other or collaborate?  (My experience says there are very few faculty who view their role as co-PI is that of being supervised by the PI.)

In any case, it’s a completely ridiculous comment to make on a proposal review because we could have been two completely unrelated colleagues who happen to have the same last name.  I can think about some of the areas of research I do, and I know of several groups of researchers, particularly in Asia, where many members of the team do have the same last name.  I never once jumped to the conclusion that there was a problem with this.

Of course, it’s obviously my fault for the name, so I should probably fix it.  Do you suppose it’s cheaper to go through the legal name-change process or to just divorce and quickly get remarried?

If you send your kid to public school, you’re a dunce September 1, 2013

Posted by mareserinitatis in education, homeschooling, societal commentary.
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3 comments

That’s a strong statement, calling someone a dunce because they allow their children to go to a school that’s provided for free and, in most cases, even required by law.  Why would anyone say that?  I’m not sure, but it was about as useful as the title of an article on Slate: “If you send your kid to private school, you are a bad person.”  Generalizations are, in general, pointless things, and they aren’t much better as titles.

The article itself, however, was downright appalling.  The author, Allison Benedikt, starts out by saying:

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental.

That’s probably the only point in the whole article I can agree with.  The whole thing was a judgemental screed against people who don’t send their kids to public schools.  None of it was backed up with evidence or even anything remotely resembling solid reasoning.  She discusses the fact that she attended public schools, and after reading her complete inability to form a cohesive argument, I dare say she made me even more convinced that our public schools have gone down the tubes.

She did have some reasons for her premise that those of us who send our kids to private schools are bad people.  She starts by saying that if everyone would send their kids to public school, they would improve…it would just take ‘a generation or two’.  You see, those of us who have the means to send our kids to private school are just supposed to sacrifice our kids’ and grandkids’ educational needs to meet some utopian goal that has a small likelihood of occurring.  It apparently never occurred to her that she has made exactly the wrong argument to these people:  people who send their kids to private schools may have several reasons for doing so, but I would guess that the main three are going to be that they strongly value education, they  strongly value the ethical systems taught at some of these schools, and they are worried about what I would generally call ‘status issues’ (things like who their kids hang out with and perception of their families).  Does she really think that parents who are that concerned about one or more of these three things is really willing to ‘sacrifice’ their kids?  That’s the whole reason they’ve elected to go with private schools to begin with: the sacrifice of large sums of money is less important than the sacrifice of their kids’ education (and the things that go along with it).  However, Benedikt wipes these issues away and says they’re not compelling.  She started her whole argument by finding the most compelling way to isolate her audience.

In fact, she starts belittling education and claiming that you really don’t need those things.  She is a perfect example, apparently, because her parents sent her to school and really didn’t care about those things.  That is quite obvious given her line of reasoning…and, as I said above, compels me to want to send my kid to private school even more.

Benedikt says school is really about is interaction with other people.  I won’t disagree that a large part of school is socialization, but I, of course, don’t buy this argument as I’ve written before about how public school is actually generally worse than options like homeschool when it comes to socialization.  Throwing together a lot of immature people to learn socialization from each other results in, surprise surprise, lots of immature people.  More adult interaction with those adults role-modeling mature behavior is a far better socialization system than the one present in most public schools.  Again, this is actually an argument against the public schools, in my opinion.

Finally, Benedikt says that if only we redirected our private school endeavors to public schools, that would make everything better.  Here, I can only assume she is incredibly naive on so many levels.

I will start by saying that I don’t hate the public schools.  The notion of free education available for everyone is most definitely a public good and vital to maintaining democracy.  However, I think that our public schools have some major problems.  As the political right wing says, they don’t work to educate children.  The structure is set up for teachers, not for students.  As the left wing says, they are underfunded and undervalued.  I think both sides have very valid arguments.  Schools have, for generations, taught children using the least effective methods, mostly by people who aren’t well-educated themselves (particularly in the grade school years).  They have a better handle on crowd control than educational psychology.  On the other hand, they have to because of they way the public school system ties the hands of teachers.

There are so many educational reforms that would make the schools *work* but people are not interested in trying them out or are scared that it may affect their job security.  Or they are just apathetic about education.  I’m not talking about things like vouchers or charter schools.  I mean things like making grade levels fluid, getting rid of grades, making the classroom a place where students are leading their learning and teachers are facilitators.  The notion of allowing children to excel in areas of interest and take more time in areas of difficulty is almost heresy.  In other words, what schools ought to be are places where kids really learn, where interaction provides useful feedback about knowledge and behavior, and where you’re not locked into doing something simply because of how old you are.  Education needs to be tailored to the individual student because teaching to the average is useless for everyone.

These are the kinds of reforms that would bring parents back from the private schools.  Simply saying that the schools would be better if all parents sent their kids to public school is naive, at best.  It is as blind a solution to the problem as just shoving more money to the schools, privatizing schools, or forcing kids to pray in school.  Almost every reform out there is completely blind to the fact that we are using teaching methods that actually fail to education children.  If you don’t change our fundamental assumptions about how to educate students, you’re not going to get any different results.

I will say that I agree that it’s sad not more people take an interest in seeing public education thrive.  However, part of the reason is that the way public education is conducted is virtually set in stone.  It takes a divine act for most places to change even the smallest things.  Too often, school teachers don’t have the time or knowledge to deal with individual students’ issues and the parent of such children is viewed as an enemy combatant.  My choice as a parent then becomes whether I want to devote my time to change the outcome for my individual child through whatever means I have (for instance, by homeschooling or sending to private school) or continuously shoving an immovable object.  If I had left either of my kids in public school, I wouldn’t have fought harder…I would have quit because of the futility in trying to work with most teachers and administrators who have no interest in seeing the system change.

A letter to the editors May 9, 2012

Posted by mareserinitatis in Fargo, feminism, societal commentary.
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This weekend, I saw a letter to the editors that was basically a “women should be kept in their place” sort of deal with a twist.  Apparently when women don’t stay barefoot in the kitchen, they are becoming tools to evil men in the world who are attempting to overthrow the traditional family.

When I get irritated with these things, sometimes I will sit down and write out a letter to burn off steam.  Usually, I don’t send these letters out, but this time I did.  And here it is, if you care to read it.  I realize it will not do anything to sway the original letter writer, but it sure made me feel better.

Don’t call me stupid! February 21, 2012

Posted by mareserinitatis in societal commentary.
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3 comments

I’ve been a situation where I’m having a discussion and I eventually think something along the lines of, “Either they think I’m really stupid…or they’re really stupid.”

What do you do in those situations?

I don’t think too much about this when I meet random people off the street.  However, when I meet someone who is supposed to have a particular competence, especially if technical, I’m always in a quandry.

First, I try not to make snap judgements.  Sometimes I’ve probed a bit further and either found out that the person was just unfamiliar with a particular area but may be pretty brilliant in another.  Other times, it turns out that they really are…ummm…undereducated.  I remember one person who, after ten minutes, had me convinced that finding their way out of a paper bag would be challenging.  Other people around me were willing to give this person more time to figure things out.  About a year later and many, many episodes of this person’s stupidity, people started saying, “You know, you were right about hir.”  In another situation, I began discussing my work with someone who smiled and basically said they had no idea what I was talking about.  Later I learned that while they didn’t know much about my work, they were pretty brilliant in their own field.  (I always appreciate people being up front about their strengths and weaknesses.)

But what do you do if you can’t probe further?

Another problem I run into is people being condescending because I apparently have an “I’m stupid” look on my face when they’re explaining something.  I admit that when people are explaining things, I often need some ‘offline’ time later to process all of it.  This is especially true the farther I get from my field.  I do try to ask questions as I think of them.

But there are some people who start explaining things to me, and it’s like they’re reviewing high school physics.  I feel like I’m ten steps ahead of them, but I can’t figure out if they’re trying to be helpful or if they don’t think I really understand.  In this situation, I don’t want to say, “Yes, yes, move along,” because they may not be able to…or they may think I’m rude.

So, dear readers, what do you do in these situations?  Put up with it or tell them to pick up the pace?  Or is there another option? Also, how do you avoid being the one that is condescending?

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