poverty or wealthy mindset?

The wealthy are minimalist. You can always buy another thing if you want it. Poverty is keeping everything you were ever given because you don't know if you could afford to replace it in the future.

The wealthy are eating higher-quality food because they can afford it. Poverty is eating a greater quantity of lower-quality food because your next meal isn't guaranteed.

MAHA won't work if we eliminate SNAP, WIC, and programs that offer housing security. It will drop those on the bubble between housed and unhoused, fed and unfed, educated and uneducated.

Who benefits from less access to education, safe housing, and healthy food? Certainly not our armed forces. Who will have the skills to keep our country safe from cyber terrorists if nobody learns how to code?

Playing on ignorance. Preying on people's fears. Stoking the fires of hatred, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. It's the whole playbook. Keeping people in line. Locking people up. Silencing the opposition. Defunding initiatives that level the playing field. It's oppression 101.

Hoarding is a poverty mindset. Keeping literally everything. Extreme cheapskates. Finding joy in getting an extreme deal. Going to great lengths to do so. Willing to suffer in an extreme way to save a few pennies. You're not seeing the big picture. You'll never win in the long game. There is no clear path to transcend poverty and achieve the upper middle class. That is a myth.

Because your parents only taught you how to suffer and survive in a poverty mindset. You don't know how to function as a healthy, successful adult. You don't keep healthy, mature boundaries. It's okay, but you're passing that along to your child unless you can find a way to break the cycle.

As satisfying as it is to see all the No Kings protest signs... It would be even more satisfying to see Trump behind bars. And every day that the conservatives are in power gives me a feeling of dread because it's bad and getting worse.

Even though my pay is going to be cut soon, I'm trying to live my wealthy life by purging junk from our house. We have removed most of the books from our library. We got rid of the items in our kitchen that we no longer use. I want to do the garage and bedroom closets next.

women's history month

I am sitting here in office hours and before this I was staring at my reflection in the mirror and I was struck by how I don't look like a professor. I mean, when I think of a professor, I think of someone wearing a tweed suit with suede elbow patches in an imposing leather chair. But I'm wearing jeans, sneakers and a lularoe shirt. Partly because I live in California, and I don't think tweed is something that gets worn here ever due to the weather being so nice. But partly because the dress code here at CSUN isn't a thing. Some people dress like they just rolled out of a dumpster. Which is fine by me. 

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Pinterest thinks my fashion style is Dark Academia, which I didn't even know was a thing. But it is kind of how I picture a professor dressing.

When I worked at Claremont, I did wear clothing that could be classified as Dark Academia, but it was certainly more colorful than this. I don't wear muted colors very often.

I'm thinking about Women's History Month and the contributions of women to academia and STEM fields. I'm thinking about why more women don't want to enter academia or if they do, sometimes how they get pushed out. I'm thinking about my own biases and concepts of what a professor should look like and how it causes me to feel some cognitive dissonance when I AM a professor but my reflection in the mirror doesn't look like what I think a professor SHOULD look like. It's a mind trip!

I'm thinking of classism, sexism, racism, homophobia, and wage gaps. I'm thinking of how teachers are expected to make teaching their vocation, excluding any possibility of having a life outside of work. How we are expected to work all the time, making it difficult to balance raising a family and maintaining friendships.

https://www.cta.org/about-us/history

Expectations of society: You may not dress in bright colors, dye your hair, or wear short skirts. You must clean the schoolhouse. You can't leave town. You can't go on dates or go downtown. You have to go to bed early. You can not have a spouse. Yeah. I've read that teachers were once highly paid, but then someone got the great idea to let women do it, and the reason was that women would do more work for less pay than men.

I'm not even sure what the point of this blog post is, but I know I watched the movie "Nyad" last night and it was so powerful. She was so determined and didn't accept that she wasn't strong or young enough to do something that had never been done before. And she was willing to fail hugely before succeeding even though society wasn't very supportive of sponsoring someone her age.

I just have to remember that I AM MAKING HISTORY right now. By existing as a woman in STEM. By wearing bright colors as a teacher. By providing an alternative to the pale male and stale professor tropes for the next generation, to possibly see themselves in acadmia. Like Diana Nyad, I'm doing it.

Back to School COVID edition

In a normal back-to-school frenzy, I would be stressing about my teaching assignment and preparing documents like syllabi. I also have a tendency to stress about all the things I put on my summer to-do list that I didn't finish.

This year I have a baby AND there's a raging epidemic in our country. How that changes things is that my department has posted the teaching schedule about a month earlier than usual. This is great because I can start working on my Canvas sites weeks before classes start rather than days. This is particularly great with my baby because I have to work in small (~15 minute) chunks rather than in marathon sessions like I used to.

Due to COVID, my students will only meet me via Zoom. I will have to go to campus for my lab, which meets from 5:30-8:20pm on Tuesday and Thursday. I will be teaching CHEM 100 lectures (introductory chemistry) from home on Monday and Wednesday from 4:30-5:45pm. I will be teaching SCIENCE 100 lectures (Freshman Seminar) from home on Tuesday and Thursday from 2:00-3:15pm.

I have been using Zoom all spring and summer with my family and mom fitness group. I feel confident that I will be able to run the class. Here are some recommendations that were compiled by exit interviews with ~350 students.

1. Discuss class norms on day one

2. Email students regularly

3. Send motivational messages via Canvas Insights

4. Use images or videos on slides instead of text

5. Give a 5-10 minute break in a 75 minute class

6. Make Zoom link easy to find on Canvas homepage

7. Have Canvas page populate gradually. Seeing the whole semesters content is too overwhelming 

8. Use the whiteboard feature to show problem solving

9. Use polling for student engagement but do not use too many different softwares

10. Consider Zoom breakout rooms and Google docs for groupwork

11. Record and post class meetings

12. Be flexible with exam times

13. Consider "Remind" app for students to communicate with each other outside of class

14. Build in social-emotional support. Let them talk off-topic in breakout room for a few minutes before diving into material. Tell jokes and give motivational pep talks. 

Yes, I could have cut and pasted these, but I wanted to type them out and paraphrase in hopes that the message would penetrate my brain more deeply and permanently.

gender is a construct

Women vs men is irrelevant. Now I would divide humans into "has carried a baby in their body" and "has not." Does this make me a TERF? TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist.” I think J.K.Rowling was turned down a lot with young children in tow, she was also the victim of sexual and domestic abuse, which has led to her becoming an aggressive biological essentialist.

My friend who is a stepparent said that if you truly accept your parental role, stepkids can pierce your heart as deeply as babies you have carried in your body. I can't speak from personal experience on this topic, but I trust her. The Netflix documentary "Babies" has an episode on changes to the parent's brain. If there is a heterosexual couple, generally the mom's brain is the one that changes. If there is a homosexual couple, one partner's brain will change. I can say that I know my son has irreversibly changed me.

http://www.thecourieronline.co.uk/a-thorough-analysis-of-jk-rowlings-bigotry/

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkeynz/jk-rowlings-transphobia-wasnt-hard-to-find-she-wrote-a-book-about-it

https://www.vogue.com/article/jk-rowling-transphobic-tweets-harry-potter-franchise

Becoming Nicole

https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/jk-rowling-trans-tweets-nicole-maines-supergirl-harry-potter-1234632167/ 

Professor Ruth Feldman

https://ruthfeldmanlab.com/people/

Fertility Part 1

I've undergone a transformation such that I almost don't recognize myself. The priority for this year is above all, create human life. We're in the midst of fertility treatment.

I've written on this blog about fertility and advanced maternal age in the year 2012. It's hard to believe it's only 7 years later and we weren't trying to have a baby but we weren't trying not to have a baby and the time just flies by. I was a lot more self-involved 7 years ago. Now I think I spend more time genuinely thinking about other people. Being happy for them. Thinking of how I can be of service to others.

I wanted to write a post in February but that month is so short, it has already flown by. Mid-January we went to an informational session on the fertility treatments. Early-February we went to our first consultation appointment. The transvaginal ultrasound was uncomfortable but not painful. It reminded me to stay humble and not to be shy about letting a medical professional do their job. I went at the end of that week on a Friday to give blood for the Ovarian Assessment Report (OAR)™ and the results came back on Tuesday saying that I am borderline fertile/infertile and that there's a chance of recovering 5 eggs.

Dear husband went in the following week and gave his sample, which was tested according to Reprosource advance semen report (ASR). The clinic is giving us some special attention since we work in a chemistry building and are surrounded by chemicals all the time and have been for the past several decades. They called us this week and let us know that they would be using a microfluidic device for sperm sorting.

I've been watching this show on hoopla (free from the Los Angeles Public Library) called "The Baby Makers" and the cool part about it is that they show embryologists and how they manipulate individual sperm, a technique called Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI). One sperm is manually inserted into an egg using a small needle.

During Early-February we were given a laboratory requisition for infectious disease screening and genetics. I thought we had to take that to our primary care doctor and have that person order the tests in order for it to be billed through our insurance, but the primary care doctor said that we could have taken the requisition directly to LabCorp diagnostics.

I just created a login to browse my own test results, so cool! Everything is normal except my Vitamin D is "insufficient" but not a "deficiency." I guess I should be more regular with taking the Ca/Mg/VitD supplement. Or maybe just get a VitD supplement by itself.

So I guess the next step is to sign the papers for the loan.

Victory for Safe Streets

I could do with a longer holiday break. If I had to go back to work next week, I could. But I don't want to. Luckily, there are still two more weeks.

The problem is that there were a litany of action items that I wanted to work on over the break. Maybe it would be helpful to write out an exhaustive list below:

clean the closets
clean the garage
create some paintings
do some sewing
tie-dye some fabric
go for walks/bike rides
go swimming
lift weights @ home
lift weights @ gym
do some sit-ups
dance @ the disco
rollerskate
hang out with friends
hang out with family
shop for a new laptop
plan for classes
write reflective reports
write a scientific paper
write poster for a meeting

Some of this we did. Some of this will not get done. With only two weeks left, I have to be strategic.

Yesterday, we went to a meeting of Los Angeles Neighborhood Councils where a few people had tried to pass a motion with the following text

Meeting of 12/01/18 WHEREAS, after two and a half years it is clear that traffic calming modifications to highways, roads, and streets within the City of Los Angeles, as being imposed under the city’s Vision Zero initiative, are public safety hazards, WHEREAS, such traffic calming measures include, but are not limited to, “road diets,” which involve narrowing roadways, replacing traffic lanes with bicycle lanes, and installing physical barriers, WHEREAS, these traffic calming measures pose a litany of safety, health, and environmental hazards, including but not limited to: Violations of state, county, and municipal fire codes as well as California case law, including but not limited to: Sections 503.4 & 503.4.1 of the California Fire Code; Section 21101 of the California Vehicle Code; Sections 503.4 & 503.4.1 of the Los Angeles County Health and Safety Code; Sections 57.503 of the Los Angeles Code of Ordinances; and City of Hawaiian Gardens v. City of Long Beach (2d Dist. 1998) 72 Cal.Rptr.2d 134. Increased emergency response times as a result of impeded fire apparatus access roads; Dangerously narrowed emergency evacuation routes; Increased emissions due to cars idling and stopping-and-starting; Increased pedestrian fatalities and overall accidents, according to the city’s own statistics and available California Highway Patrol data; and Violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the LANCC demands that the city enforce the laws and within 30 days of our demand to start the process to remove all traffic calming measures, including but, not limited to road diets, from: Current and former state highways; Designated emergency evacuation routes; Thoroughfares that qualify as “regionally significant streets or highways”; All thoroughfares that have seen an increase in accidents since July 2015; and All thoroughfares with two or more lanes of travel in both directions. with a presentation by Chris LeGras, Keep LA Moving

Thanks to the efforts which I suspect went on behind the scenes the language that was officially adopted is the following:

Meeting of 01/05/19 The Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition (LANCC) (XXXXXX Neighborhood Council) takes the position that there shall be no blanket prohibition of road diets or other road calming measures. Communities that will be impacted with a potential road diet or other road calming measure, including neighborhood councils, shall be consulted extensively about public safety and other important issues both before the road diet is proposed and after it is implemented. where a presentation by Aneesa Andrabi and Wajenda Chambeshi, Great Streets did not happen

I'm not saying that it was any action on my part that precipitated this shift, but I'm super happy about it. A few observations from the meeting are that there was:

lack of engagement (only 15 votes from 96 councils) 

lack of representation (few women and people of color in the room)

lack of information (people struggled to define the terms "equity" “road diet" and "traffic calming")
That's like saying the opinion of 3 people represents the opinion of 20 people. I think it's particularly pathetic that a group of old white men thought that they could remove and prevent future safety infrastructure. The majority of traffic deaths are happening in neighborhoods of color.

3. Here they are overlaid on one another: the overwhelming majority of pedestrian deaths are taking place in formerly redlined neighborhoods. pic.twitter.com/4merNp8DII

— LA Bike Dad (@LA_Bike_Dad) January 4, 2019

This is definitely something to consider.

7. Are our actions going to show that we value those lives more than we did in past? @bikinginla @lacbc @LosAngelesWalks @laura_nelson @StreetsblogLA @LADOTofficial @VisionZeroLA @gilcedillocd1 @KeepRowenaSafe

— LA Bike Dad (@LA_Bike_Dad) January 4, 2019

Feeling Flaky

This semester is nearly over. We have just a few precious hours for missing, late and just completed work to be uploaded to our learning management system (LMS) Canvas. It has been a difficult week to say the least.

We were under threat for a mass shooting, and the reaction of our students was such that they called off just one day of finals week. Sometimes a word pops into my head to describe how I'm feeling and then I look up the definition of that word and it is actually perfect.

Our reaction as a campus community to racist graffiti and a subsequent handwritten note has been flaky. I know people are still feeling uncertain about their safety. It has been a challenge to reassure our students and ourselves that the campus can protect us.

I feel my patience is thin and breaking into small pieces. But on the bright side, our department pot-luck is in just 30 minutes. I made mini-quiches that have a flaky crust. I made cupcakes for dear husband's birthday but messed up the icing recipe by adding all the ingredients at once.

Luckily, I was able to salvage the messed up frosting and make a gingerbread bundt cake. But I flaked out on that and forgot to add the molasses, so I hope it tastes OK. I restarted a second batch of icing and that one came out well, but I forgot to bring it today.

I bought all the ingredients for the salad but forgot to pressure-cook the pinto beans. Luckily, I made lentils and rice yesterday so I just used that instead. I also forgot to bring the onion and cheese that I bought over here to school. I just had so much on my mind!

I used to get disappointed about these things and dwell on negatives, but I have been practicing letting go of perfection and focusing instead of making the best of things and adapting and NOT stressing over what could have been but instead celebrating and elevating what IS.

I am so grateful that I made it a point to include redundancy and multiple feedback loops into my course this semester. It made it much less stressful to adapt to shifting circumstances. I am also grateful for technology, having many assignments in the cloud was a godsend.

If there is anyone out there that can suggest a winter training course (bootcamp) for Google Classroom, I would be interested. I appreciate my colleagues that helped support me during this time. The strategies that helped me diffuse negative energy: yoga, coloring mandalas, metta meditation.

On a very bright note, my students delivered their Pecha Kucha presentations in a way that was completely unexpected and a joy to watch. Giving the students the classroom space and technology, while assisting them by putting their content into a timed format, was just the right balance.

It's hard to set goals for next year since I don't have any idea what I'll be teaching. But I know I did some things very well this semester and I am extremely proud of the progress that I made. I know I don't want to travel or be wild over break, I just want to stay home and get centered.

Mid semester Report

Changes are afoot here. The season feels like fall with a Santa Ana wind. The low relative humidity has the air very crisp, and the winds have revealed the mountains that are usually hiding in plain sight behind a curtain of smog. And I've overhauled CHEM 101.

Lecture is 75 minutes twice per week, Discussion is 50 minutes once per week

I've been trying out a new paradigm in my CHEM 101 class. During "lecture" we are doing POGIL-type activities and we are doing them in groups. Students take photos of their Contribution Form and upload it to Canvas. I've used the Objectives feature of Canvas to create rubrics and track alignment of assignments to topics covered on the exams. Grading by Objective and turning on a feature called the Learning Mastery gradebook gives students a way to guide their studying on things they need to work on while leaving those topics they've already mastered alone.

I've flipped the classroom to lecture only briefly (20 minutes every other period) during "Lecture" and even more briefly (20 minutes every period) during "Discussion." I thought students may feel more comfortable asking questions in "Discussion" because it's a smaller class size and a more intimate classroom setting (as square footage goes).

The rooms are so full, there's no way to collect/pass back papers so students turn in everything electronically, with the exception of the exams. I can give feedback electronically. For group work, the comment (typed once) is sent to all members of the group (3-4 students). For individual assignments, I can identify misconceptions and send corrections and suggestions to students one-by-one.

The groups have been assembled to mix over- and under-prepared students, I used an alphabetical system based on plants/names/colors. I got the idea staring at a box of crayola crayons. I made this random group picker wheel to call on groups, but I haven't used it yet.

I've been using Sli.do to capture anonymous feedback. The types of questions I ask this way are regarding Did you read? What are your fears? Suggestions for the course. Anything I think students wouldn't want to admit to. They can also ask questions of me and I can answer it online.

In the open-ended portion of this survey, one student wrote
"Didn’t know there were KEYS for discussion"

On a recent survey regarding Exam 3, 63% of respondents said that if they had more time, they'd come to office hours. In addition, 50% of respondents said that if they had more time, they'd meet with their group to study AND make chapter outlines for the chapters covered by the exam.

I've been using PollEv to capture non-anonymous content knowledge. The activity is NOT worth points but it gives me an idea of what they are already understanding and what I need to plan to teach them that week and the next week.

I chose to use an OER, called OpenStax. It's something a colleague suggested to me a few years ago but I didn't feel secure enough in my job to do something like that unilaterally. Now, I feel more empowered to do what is best for students regardless of how my colleagues may react. So far, I like the change. The quality of the book is equivalent. There's no free online homework, but as part of the "flipped" model, I'm having students do problems DURING class instead of at home. The book (online or offline in .pdf) is FREE for the students.

Creative Exercises started out as an in-class exercise but have become a take-home assignment. Students are practicing showing their work, making their thoughts easy to see, writing down everything they know about a writing prompt. This goes together with one of my goals for the students which is teaching them about "Writing to Learn." In the process of writing down your thoughts, you can teach yourself things, which is why I strive to maintain this blog. Maybe in the future, I will have them upload their Chapter Outlines.

There's a YouTube playlist where students can go and watch the lectures that I would have done during class. I learned how to put hyperlinks in the video description so that students don't have to watch the entire video, they can skip ahead to topics that they want to know more about. I'm not sure how this is going, most of the feedback says that the videos aren't helpful.

The exam involves re-working. The in-class exam time is for students to show what they know in that moment without any help and with only a small set of reference information. Then they have a few weeks to revise their work and resubmit. This revision is submitted online. I'm giving 6 exams instead of 3 exams and 3 quizzes. The last two exams are comprehensive, with the idea that the first one will prepare them to do better on the second one.

Everything is available online to print and turn in. The due dates aren't rigid. The groupwork allows for flexibility if a person misses one class here and there. I've had a much easier time accommodating students who miss class for a religious holiday or doctor's appointment. Students perceive me as being more understanding, but in truth I just have a more flexible approach to assignments.

I also don't feel pressured to grade all 75 at once. I can sit down and grade for 10 minutes, then walk away. This takes the pressure off of me to do "marathon grading." Clicking the rubric is pretty effortless and then I can type comments faster than I would have been able to write them. I feel like having a rubric removes some of the bias. Also, since students upload their work, they aren't writing their name on it. I could do anonymous grading in Canvas to further remove bias.

Clearly there were other topics I thought about writing about: transportation, chemistry, climate change, community, Metrolink, politics, weight loss and vitamins. There just isn't time now. But seriously, GO VOTE.

It's taken me a long time and a lot of soul searching to get to the place where I could overhaul my CHEM 101 course so dramatically. I've been attending a Faculty Learning Community about taking an equity-minded approach to course design. What I can see is that these changes have had an equalizing effect on my class. I no longer penalize students for what they can't do. Instead I enable them to do more.