икона за подаръкIt won’t surprise anyone who knows me well, or who has known me trivially for very long, or even just read the archives here for reasons that may or may not include a sugarbuzz, that there are a lot of things I’d do differently, the main one being — also no surprise — my undergrad major.  Meant to be Elementary Ed, turned out Interdisclipinary Studies (spelled that way on my transcript and everything).

Even if it had gone the way I meant for it to go, it still might be, at this point, pretty much ruining my life.  Elementary Ed is useless for getting into anything else, and rightly so: no one should hire me to do anything important just because I can make sticker bingo boards.  Looking back, the only classes I enjoyed on an intellectual level were the ones that weren’t “designed around the needs of education majors.”  Frank’s Face Science was a joke.  Don’t start me on the five terms of ed majors math.  The ones that were actually interesting?  Biology (not with Dr. Frank).  Linguistics.  History.  Spanish.  Things where we mixed with people who were serious about the subject, where the class had to be planned for competence rather than familiarity because some of the people there might need to know the stuff later.  Especially few of these after I transferred “up” from community college.  I’ll rephrase that for clarity: my most interesting and rigorous coursework came in my first two years, at a lower-level school, not after I got into majors classes.

What if I could change that?

Well, I fell behind. Not because of the course, because of Other Life Stuff. As a result, the deadline for week 3 made a nice whooshing sound as it went past and I’m scrambling to try to beat the deadline for week 4 (about 8 hours from now).

Cramming is really really really the wrong way to do this.

ХудожникSomeone please explain to me why spammers keep clustering around my anti-spam posts. Do they do some kind of a keyword search for “spam” to find places to spam? And if so, WHY???

Yesterday turned out to be incredibly useful.  I got all but one of my five lesson plans written up and formatted, and finished the second unit of CS101 over at Udacity.  (WAY higher level than the CS101 I took in undergrad, which was basically “Class, meet Microsoft Office.”)

Today…not so much.  I got a bit done on the new Udacity unit, but nothing to write home about, and nothing on grad school.  As far as I can figure, the difference between the two was that I worked from the library yesterday.  No cats asking for attention (or needing watched outside).

To the squirrel on the trunk of the tree, less than ten feet away:

This window is open.

The creature on the windowsill is a cat.

You are made out of meat.

How do you think this is going to go?

If you don’t know that this country is collectively having kittens about who should be paying for contraceptive products, you must live under a rock, and I envy you.  Yet, with all the spouting off on both sides, I haven’t heard of a political figure or major commentator looking at the issue from the perspective of the economics of insurance.

To insurance companies, birth control is several orders of magnitude cheaper than the alternative — STDs; pregnancies, abortions, or even miscarriages; extra Covered Persons.  Anyone can see this just by doing some basic math, and no one talks, except as the most ridiculous joke, about how much money they saved on condoms by getting pregnant instead.  When a Covered Person wants to avoid incurring these expenses, an insurer would be stupid to not help them.

Since it makes sense economically for insurance companies to help people prevent increasing their medical expenses, it is counterproductive for insurers to refuse to pay for contraceptive products.  Therefore, simple self-interest should be all it takes to get insurance companies to cover contraception, for the same reason they cover vaccination.

Surely any company that lives by dollar signs and percentages can understand that covering contraceptives is a good return on investment.  In fact, it doesn’t even make business sense for them to offer policies that don’t cover birth control.  It’s true that getting all Covered Persons to “keep their pants on” would be even cheaper, if it were possible, but an insurance company just doesn’t have that kind of control over its end users’ lives (and we would be pretty freaked out if it did).

So, since the insurance companies’ bottom line really wants people to not be making extra babies, why are we still arguing about regulations?  Financial motivations, and maybe a little education from consumer or activist groups, would be expected to lead insurance companies to cover birth control, without any need for regulations.  If people want to convince their insurance to cover something like this, they should lay out the facts and figures, not argue about whether spawn prevention is a basic human right.  Insurance companies don’t give a crap about basic human rights, but they do like money.

So, really…why is this line of reasoning being ignored, and why are we still talking about this?

It’s the first of the month.

My term break is over; I’ve logged in, enrolled for the semester, agreed to pay tuition, etc.

I’m committed for the semester.  I’m going to knock out these last few assignments for my final project and degree.  After all that’s happened, I am so ready to be done with this, and in six months or preferably less I will be.

And then…the physical existence of a master’s degree with my name on it will be hard to argue with.  The meaning thereof is still way up in the air.

For those who aren’t familiar, which is still almost everyone, Udacity is a new site offering free online classes on computer programming.  I’m a huge supporter of at least an exposure to programming for everyone who uses a computer, since knowing how computers “think” makes people better at using them; obviously, though, not everyone has the time, money, or inclination to sign up for a conventional programming class, and not everyone can self-teach a technical subject from scratch.

Having tried out the first week’s materials of their CS101 class, I feel justified in suspecting that this may be what fills the gap.  Their videos are clear enough that a very beginner can get it; while the people behind Udacity refer to the courses as university-level, a bright high school student or advanced junior high kid could be expected to get it.  (For the advanced course, appropriateness for a particular student would likely depend on their programming experience rather than age.)  At the same time, because the courses are designed for adult learners, they’re free of “talking down to the kiddies” type stuff that can be a turnoff for any adults who try to use the materials because of being at that level — and for that matter, for the kids too.

There are needs that this course won’t fill, too.  Inherently in the free-choice learning model, people have to be self-motivated to get much out of it, and probably even to finish.  Especially in a tuition-free class, there just isn’t the enforced commitment level that you see in paid, grade-bearing college coursework.  This concerns me because if the effectiveness of the course were measured, it will not probably compare in average achievement per enrollee; however, more people are able to at least get an exposure to programming because of these classes, and many people who would never have signed up for a conventional programming class will enroll and learn something significant.  If the inherent differences in retention are controlled for, I believe free-choice learning will blow models based on compulsory attendance, and to a somewhat lesser extent those based on financial and grade incentives, out of the water.

You might have gathered that I’m a huge supporter of approaches to learning that put the student in charge.  You might think this is to be expected for a homeschool graduate whose parents’ teaching approach was to set me loose on the library.  However, if I were the first person to think that the extreme opposite, “forced learning,” is ineffective, there would not be a saying about leading horses to water.

Another limitation to online computer science education is you really have to know the basics going in.  Not about programming, but about computers.  I expect something to pop up to fill this gap, though not through Udacity as their focus seems to be on higher-level material.  The necessary material, such as video tutorials, largely already exists; collecting it would be an organization rather than content-creation project.

Unit 1 of Udacity worked for me well enough that I scored full points on their “homework” quizzes and projects.  Not definitive proof, but it certainly doesn’t rule out the possibility that they’re on to something.  If you have a chance, it’s worth checking out.

With apologies to the cuss-sensitive people who may see this, anxiety and depression are a bitch.  Apologies to female canines as well.

Yesterday was, up to a point, decent.  I typed up a couple proofs, got a bit of grad school stuff done, and earned about $15 on Mechanical Turk.  Nothing to write home about, but not bad as a run of the mill day goes, and with a persistent case of depression that’s not trivial.  With very little structure in my life right now, which means very few motions to go through on most days, I don’t get enough days like that.

Then…dinner.  Usually this isn’t a major ordeal because, even if I don’t have an actual plan, I do at least know what’s available.  However, we’re out of town for a few days, so “what’s available” does not consist of the usual options that I know well.  There was a plan at one point but this crappy town we’re staying in caused that plan not to work, so we tried to adjust it to ordering pizza, and I got into a tailspin trying to figure out what to order because I couldn’t see a way to get something I would actually like without running the total up to $30 for one stupid meal.

I spent an hour trying to figure this out and getting more and more stressed out, to the point of tears.  I know it’s just a pizza but it’s also money we don’t entirely have and anyway even if it’s OK to spend more that doesn’t help me narrow anything down because it’s also OK not to.

Have you heard that the fastest way to ruin an 8-year-old’s day is to ask them what they want for breakfast?  That’s somewhat exaggerated, as many kids have a favorite that they can easily default to (when adults do this it’s called “the usual,” which is my most reliable strategy), but choice overwhelm is a real phenomenon — this is why, in apparently every “family” restaurant in the civilized world, the kiddie menu has fewer options.  Having depression and anxiety is kind of like that, with the addition that one’s personal preferences, which “normal” people rely on to choose between nearly equivalent options, seem to be the least important consideration.  Behind price, nutrition, and whether the meat is humanely grown or the vegetables are a good use of farmland (I’m exaggerating, but less than you think if you’re “normal”).

I know it’s just a pizza but it’s also the process by which I choose a pizza, and when I’m locked up, “whatever you want” isn’t a process I can run because not only are there too many variables, I’m pretty sure the wrong ones are being emphasized.  I can’t use that, it doesn’t help.

So what does help?  Not to exclude other strategies, or other ways of representing sequential decision making, but in the interest of a good example that most people have head of…flow charts are awesome.  They reduce big complicated decisions, processes, or classifications into a series of simpler ones with, usually, two or maybe three options that are clearly and obviously different from each other.

Ordinarily, I’m good enough at the kind of thinking represented in these charts to come up with something in the moment — finding a book on BASIC programming when I was about 10 saw to that, as, though I couldn’t quite get arrays at that age and from that book, I managed to grasp “if…then” and “goto.”  If I put the effort in it either at once or over time, I can even come up with something reusable.  But when I’m locked up, if I don’t already have a simplification strategy, I can’t make one up; making a strategy is even more abstract than making a decision.

Without a way to figure things out, I progressively fell apart for an hour.  We ended up not getting pizza anyway because we then found out that the restaurant doesn’t deliver in this stupid crappy town that we’re going home from today, which you’d think would be a good thing because of getting me off the hook at at least into a fresh scenario that I wasn’t already locked up about.  Depression and anxiety weren’t done being a bitch yet, though: stress doesn’t just let go of me like it does for “normal” people.  I was tense all night, couldn’t get to sleep and then couldn’t stay asleep, and now I’m tired and still mentally scattered.  My experience of an otherwise good day was wrecked.

I know it’s just a pizza, and I know now that the pizza was doomed to be purely hypothetical, but it’s also my ability to feel like I had a decent day and to be OK for the day or two afterward.

A former student commented on a picture of a friend’s new, still-fishless, fishtank.

This came to my attention on Facebook, which is apparently making stalkers of all of us whether we mean to be or not, but that’s neither here nor there. Clearly I was required to post the following in a comment: