09.10.06
Posted at 4:07 pm by Becky
As you may have guessed, I have been a bit busy for the past few days. 
School started on Tuesday. The day started as my past two first days have (including student teaching)–with a hazelnut latte! It reminds me of the wonderful people who taught me to teach. The first day, while somewhat exciting because you get to meet your new class, is also rather tedious with all of the forms and procedures and such. The kids were on their best behavior, which is delightful. I had a 3-hour chunk of time in the morning to fill, which was rather tedious when it was all “here are the procedures and rules of the room, blah blah blah.” I have about 5 kids who don’t really understand me, so I will be glad when the bilingual program is up and running!
For the rest of the week, I started reading Phineas Gage to them (subtitle: A Gruesome but True Story about Brain Science–it’s absolutely disgusting, but the kids love it), started in on some new stuff in math (my additions to the school math program–Math 4 Today and Fraction of the Week–more goodies from student teaching!), have planned almost a day ahead most of the time, discovered that being on the same floor as my grade-level colleagues is a blessing and a curse because I socialize too much after school, given tedious handwriting homework in an attempt at behavior modification (it’s worked so far–three paragraphs on “how we walk through the halls” copied on one’s best handwriting will make a kid behave, apparently), started reading workshop (which I am SUPER STOKED about. Really. It is seriously awesome. Any upper-elementary and middle school teachers should try it!), and had a delightful feeling of “I’ve done this before” competence. We’ll see how long it lasts.
Now that I have all my posters up (thanks to Jamie and his parents coming to visit my room!), I’ll try to take pictures soon.
Speaking of Jamie and his parents, Carl and Donna were in town! We had a delightful visit including lots of food (which I enjoyed cooking and I hope the rest enjoyed eating), picking up our new kitties, playing games, and seeing “Wicked”. I highly recommend the show. The score is great, the plot is intricate, and it is in general a delightful experience. We had a good, though short visit. It’s always fun to show people our life in Chicago.
it was rather serendipidous that we went to see the show this weekend, as we discovered that our kitties (who came pre-named) got their somewhat strange names from the two main characters in the show: Elphaba (Elphie) and Galinda (Glinda). It’s been fun to see how the cats’ personalities actually mirror the characters’. Glinda is the perky, friendly one, and Elphie is more reserved. They both have interesting hobbies. Glinda likes to try to climb the walls, and Elphie likes to run around the flat, then race for under the bed as soon as you approach her. Neither of them really like posing for pictures, but Jamie tried to take a few anyway. I’ll leave their posting to him. A funny kitty-related conversation:
B: I can tell you’ll be a really good dad because you’re so gentle with the kitties
J: Yeah, but I probably wont’ be able to make the babies jump as high (the kitties have a feather toy that in pursuit of which they will jump in the air)
B: And you won’t try.
So, in summary life is good. I’m relaxed (mostly) about school, though I look forward to coming home to my hubby and kitties at the end of the day.
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09.08.06
Posted at 8:23 pm by James
Earlier today we brought home two little bundles of joy - 5-month-old cats named [edit: Elphie] and Glinda. They are sisters, though they look quite different. Ally has a black and brown tortiseshell pattern with a white spot on her chest, and Glinda is almost completely white with a tortie tail and a few other random streaks. They have been a little crazy and quite skittish but appear to be warming up to us and the house quite nicely. Mother and father are doing well and looking forward to lots of play time, snuggle time, and taking cutesy pictures.
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09.04.06
Posted at 2:45 pm by Becky
And I am so excited. Really. We’ll see how I feel at this time tomorrow, but right now I’m very excited and feeling competent and ready to go.
I spent Wednesday through Friday at school setting up my room (I know I said it was done, but then I went to my study group on Wednesday night and got more good ideas for my room!), going to mind-numbing meetings, and getting to know my fellow teachers better. I should post pictures of my room before the kids trash it… On Friday we had a potluck lunch. I was all excited to make something yummy, but the only thing left to sign up for was pasta salad. Sigh. However, I was glad I hadn’t tried to make something special and yummy, because it would have been overshadowed by the CHOCOLATE FOUNTAINS!! Indeed, there were not one, but two chocolate fountains at the potluck, with various yummy things to dip into them. Wow is all I have to say. If only school could be a bunch of grownups hanging out and eating chocolate and making cute posters all the time…
I spent Saturday doing my lesson plans for the next week and taking care of some last minute details. Sunday we went to church and cleaned the house, and today I made cookies and Jamie and I went to Starbucks to relax and talk. However, loud people made that impossible, so we went for a walk on the lakefront. And now I feel a little bit like a kid waiting for Christmas to come… I want it to be tomorrow so I can get things started!
Here is the recipe for the cookies I made: Chocolate Coffee Toffee Oatmeal cookies Read the rest of this entry »
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09.02.06
Posted at 6:55 pm by James
I guess one of the nice things about a couples-blog is that you have fewer dry spells with both writing. At least that’s the theory. I’m sure I’ll be a hobo-blogger myself sometimes, but for now I’ll tell you “up to what i’ve been” lately at work.
My thesis direction (it’s not a topic until I actually do the formal proposal process) has shifted in the past couple weeks. Before, I had vague designs on exploring self-modeling and emotion. I was having trouble coming up with something that was bounded, testable, and fit in with our project. What does fit in, though, is the design and production of an argumentation environment that actually understands and reasons about the arguments being constructed. It’s not something I’ve dreamed about, but sometimes one must take the opportunities that arise.
Let’s clarify that a bit more. Though yes, I am learning how to argue well (I’ve told Becky she doesn’t need to be too worried ), the primary focus of this project is to assist in reasoning (a lot of the time via comparison), making connections, and finding examples. Computers can’t make claims and support their arguments. People can. The thing which my software will do that no one’s ever done before is this: When the person creates a claim “X is true of Y” and goes about diagramming the support they have for making that claim, they may use argument schemes like analogy or causation. “X is true of Z and Z is similar to Y.” My software will help the human judge how similar cases are, find other probably-similar cases to consider, and perform validity checking on the argument structure as well.
The field where people might actually do this regularly is intelligence analysis; indeed, the government is the funder of our research. (Why, the National Science Foundation, of course. Why would you ask that?) Analysts must document and cite evidence for their conclusions, and this is exactly something that they need (and two steps up from what they have). I’ll go into more detail about our whole project, the Situation Tracking Testbed, another time if anyone’s interested.
So it looks like I’ll be working on argumentation for the next two years. Maybe I’ll just call it ‘reasoning’ to those it won’t matter to. I’ll work on creating Data one day, but I guess it’d need to be able to argue.
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