Blessed by the Potato

I went to the Superstore today to get some sub buns, and also hope that they had restocked the bottles of Coke Zero that were on sale last week, but which they ran out of in the first day (so I have a rain check for them). I should also note that I’ve really wanted subs the last few days. I went on Wednesday and they did have some sub buns, but they were already a day or two old, and they’re only good for 2 or 3 days, so I figured I’d wait. I went back yesterday, and there were no sub buns, so I just got some pasta and cookies (which were on sale — a terrible idea I’ll get to in a bit. It should be illegal to make cookies that delicious that cheap). I’ve been eating a lot of pasta and soup and KD (by which I mean PC deluxe macaroni and cheese) because I haven’t been able to get sub stuff this week, and that’s a lot of pot washing and I was frankly getting sick of it.

So today, I’m there, and there’s no sub buns. What the fuck? I even went there kind of early (but not so early that I might have risked being there before the sub buns came out). They had fields of panini buns, but the panini buns don’t make particularly good sandwiches. I mean, you can put some garlic and cheese on them and throw that in the oven for a pretty decent garlic bread, but a sandwich? Nuh-uh. The RCSS here in London has the best sub buns — obviously I think highly of them if I went to the grocery store three days in a row to try to get some.

In the end I just grabbed 6 cases of Coke Zero and went on my way.

As I was explaining this on the phone to Wayfare, she asked “Why couldn’t you just get some wraps? You can put all the same stuff in it, and have wraps for lunch.”

And here’s the thing: on a scale of one to wraps, the best a wrap can ever hope to do is wrap. A sub, on the other hand, is like Chuck Norris round-house-kicking you in the mouth. It’s an awesome flavour parade that has incredible flexibility to be toasted, panini-pressed, or eaten just the way it is. Plus, the texture is just so much better: a wrap is basically just packaging for the sad little salad you’ve made yourself, whereas a sub bun is a major player in its own right (and Wayfare of all people should know that since she often has those sub buns all on their own without toppings). It’s an adventure into a mythical land of bready bubbles that you only get to swim in after crashing through that hint of a crust. And the RCSS sub buns are so good that, in my own home, I can make a sub that’s better than anything Subway or Mr. Sub can offer, that’s also healthier and less expensive. It’s just that variety of awesome that I was looking for, and was denied.

So at the bottom of the receipt was that invitation to go take a survey with them, and I was all like “Yarrr! I’m-a gonna give your bakery manager guy a bad review and let you know how very disappointed I was about my three trips specifically to get your sub buns that ended in disappointment!” Yet much to my surprise there was no comment field at all where I could start ranting at these clowns, so I had to settle for putting down “very unsatisfied” with the bakery department and hope they figure it out.

Then it was time to work on reanalysis. People don’t understand the importance of the re in research. There’s a lot of re going on.

So as I’m analyzing I’m feeling you know, a little stressed, a little dumb, a little bored even, and I’m trying to focus and not make mistakes and most importantly just get it done.

Then I started to wonder: what if I become an evil mad scientist when I get my PhD? Would my effort to hurry up and finish actually be to the detriment of mankind? Would my mind-controlled zombie minions overthrow the world hegemon we suffer under today, only to replace it with an iron-fisted rule of my own making that was even worse for the everyman? Perhaps procrastination is the only thing standing between my genius maniacal lust for power, and the safety of all living things?

No, no, that’s just the procrastination talking, back to work.

Now, as a scientist, I can recognize a pattern. Mostly. Anyhow, when I last finished a graduate degree, I got really, really fat. I was really, really sick through a lot of that too, so I have excuses and doctor’s notes and what-not, but the fact of the matter is that I gained 40 pounds in a really short, intensely stressful period of time, and despite my (best isn’t the word I’m looking for here, so let’s say:) incredibly average efforts, I only ever managed to lose 10 of those (many of which, I gained back this winter). I did get in much better cardiovascular shape, which I’m moderately proud of, but it’s still been a long-term goal to get back to my mid-MSc weight. I consider it a bloody miracle of self-control that I haven’t turned into a minor planetoid and haven’t even re-crossed that high water mark, so feel free to leave me encouraging accolades in the comments section, but nonetheless under normal* amounts of stress I haven’t made much progress, so I’ve decided that I have to be especially careful as I get into the intense writing-up-and-defending portion of this degree. So I’m thinking about what kind of exercise regime I should try to set up to stay in shape and how strict of a diet I should attempt to stick to, all while I’m doing analysis. I’m even starting to think about how awesome I’ll look as a slimmer Dr. Potato.

Of course, as I’m doing said analysis, I’ve got the box of on-sale cookies beside me, nomming away as I edit these files. It’s just go-go-go-go-go over here, I’m totally in the zone, backspace backspace, add 5, retypte, nom nom, down two lines… next thing I know it’s 1 am and I realize I haven’t had a meal for like 12 hours and I’m not the slightest bit hungry.

Then I realize I just ate nearly 400 g of cookies, roughly 1900 calories worth, while I was doing my thing. Damnit, this “watch what you eat during the high stress time” is going really, really poorly to start with.

Wayfare’s on the phone and I’m relating my day to her, and wondering if I should maybe go throw up a little because that surely can’t be good for me. Except that I worry that that may be the first step to a rather serious eating disorder. “Oh, it’s no surprise you feel sick if you ate almost a pound of cookies!” she says.

No, no, I don’t feel sick at all. I feel abso-frigging-fan-tastic. Think about eating a cookie or a half dozen cookies. You feel pretty good, right? They’re cookies, you had some, life is good, the universe is far more balanced with the cookies inside you rather than inside that stupid box where they weren’t doing anybody any good.

Now think about how good you’d feel if you had 72 cookies.

Yeah, it’s a party in your mouth, and your brain’s all tingly on the glucose and happy hormones. For the short-term, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this scenario. You could race a goddamned horse and ride a tiger into battle and analyze the ever loving hell out of some data. YEAAAAH!

“You don’t feel sick to your stomach at all?” she asks.

“No,” I say, apparently really quickly, like one of the Gilmore girls, though it really doesn’t sound all that fast to me, “I’ve been trained from a very young age to be able to digest intense amounts of junk food. I’m like a samarai, or a cookie ninja, just that kind of lifelong, total dedication to intense training that produces a level of total awesomeness that’s hard to look at directly. I mean, if the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters were to come into our plane of existence and try any shit in this day and age, let me tell you, I’d handle that situation. That’s the kind of digestive system I have going here.” I’m sure you’ve seen examples of it elsewhere: my supervisor has been eating so many hot peppers over his lifetime that at this point he can basically consume fire. I’m like that, but for sugar and starches.

She giggles for a bit “Oh, I wish I was recording this right now.”

Anyway, on the subject of talking to Wayfare via the phone, the other night she says to me “How is it we’ve been going out for almost 9 years and I never knew you could draw??”

“I what? I still don’t know that I can draw, what are you talking about?”

“Your post, you drew! I’ve never seen you draw before!”

“That? That’s not drawing, it’s just a quick sketch, and it’s not very good. I’d do stick-people, but then I’d be ripping off Randall Monroe.”

“It’s pure great! It even kind of looks like you!”

“Ooookaaaaay.”

Finally, “disappointment” is a funny word. You’re never appointed with something, are you? I mean, you can be appointed to something, or appoint a room with some froody furnishings, or have an appointment for a colonoscopy, which you can then be disappointed in, but it’s really not the same thing.

* normal for graduate school, which is intense for all you sonsofbitches in the “real world” who think you have it so much tougher just because you can get fired at any time and have to be “productive” and pay taxes and don’t get to play frisbee on Wednesday afternoons just because it’s so fucking gorgeous outside that it really is a sin to stay in and look at the computer screen when spring is in the air…

Exactly zero people have helped out with my “Very Quick Experiment” post. For that reason I shouldn’t tell you why I was asking.

But, I have a weakness for ranting, so I can’t help myself.

Please let me know what your head size is. You can measure your head size with a tape measure, going around the circumference of your head, just above the ears.

Those (what I hope were) very simple, very straightfoward instructions are sent to potential research subjects for my study. The issue is this: we have two EEG caps — one small, one medium — they are very expensive, and after cleaning them in the disinfectant, they take a while to dry. So we can’t afford to buy more, and we can’t really use them more than once a day. However, we want need to scan approx 10 subjects per week, which means we need to try to get in one person with a medium-sized head, and one with a small sized head on the same day at least a few times a week. So when scheduling people, we need to know their head size. Since we schedule by phone or email, we need people to (at least somewhat accurately) measure their own heads.

Wayfare said that would never work as soon as she found out about it. No way were people going to be able to follow simple instructions and measure their head size. I figured that it can’t be that hard, especially since most of our volunteers are university students; science undergrads for that matter.

Well, either Wayfare was right, or we’ve got some extras from Beetlejuice coming in to volunteer.

Dear readers, please indulge me. Follow these instructions, and post your results (anonymously if you wish) in the comments or by email:

“You can measure your head size with a tape measure, going around the circumference of your head, just above the ears. ”

It shouldn’t take you very long.

Many years ago, when first starting my MSc, I signed up to be an Online TA (OTA) with Brainmass, an online tutoring service. At first it was fantastic: students would post questions, and bid credits to have them answered. The credits were worth in the neighbourhood of $3, and the guideline was to bid about one credit for every 15 minutes it should take the OTA to answer the question (80% of what the student paid went to the OTAs, the rest was kept by Brainmass for admin and advertising). I got an email whenever a question was submitted in my area of expertise, and could log on and sign out the problem if I liked it, or leave it for another OTA if not. Of course, some students — rather than try to get help with a concept, or the outline of a solution without the final answer worked out, or just have someone to double check their work or just with one tough problem — would submit whole problem sets and try to use Brainmass as a homework solution service rather than as an aide. The guidelines were pretty strict, and students posting that sort of thing would be asked to refine their question so that it wasn’t like trying to just pay someone to do their work for them. I really liked the project and got involved near the beginning, even writing a piece for the news and inspiration section.

For a while, it worked great. I could work for an hour or two per week from home, and pull in $50 every two months or so ($50 being the minimum payout), which was decent pizza money. The experience was also rewarding: I recall one student in particular who had some real doozies of questions in genetics that required a few follow-up postings to get fully answered. That student wrote back a few weeks later “[Thank my OTA for me], I am pretty sure I aced my quiz this week!” which is one of the great emails in my archives to go back and reread when I need a pick-me-up.

Unfortunately, things started to go downhill. It is, as you can see, a pretty sweet deal for grad students: the potential for pizza money with no real commitment. The number of OTAs quickly grew while the number of students submitting answers did not, at least not anywhere near the same rate. Soon enough, rather than having a few hours or a few minutes at least to read over a posting before deciding if you wanted to sign it out, it would be signed out as soon as it was posted, before the email even percolated out to alert the OTAs of a new posting. Some OTAs just camped on Brainmass all day long, practically turning it into a full-time job. I don’t want to stereotype too much, but being a globally accessible service there were a number of OTAs from well-known off-shoring countries who were more than willing to answer nearly any question for a single credit. That lead to credit-bidding deflation, and different student expectations: if you answered a problem by telling them which physical laws to use where, and some hints and insights into why the answer would work out the way it would, but didn’t actually calculate the numbers to hand them the final answer on a silver platter, you were rated poorly. It became somewhat of a problem-solution clearinghouse. And with the intense competition to even sign postings out in the first place, I quickly stopped seeing the point.

Of course, I didn’t quit. I still have my account there, and every now and then log in just to see if there are any interesting problems. Plus one can get residuals since problems you answer go into their library, where they can be purchased at a discount by other students, rather than getting a custom solution and paying for the OTA’s time. Now that the library is getting huge (over one hundred thousand solutions), the posting volume has started to drop off, since almost all the common problems have already been asked and answered. That means that the problems that are up for custom solutions tend to be different or off the wall. Unfortunately, I’m finding that they’re getting to be too specialized for me to answer(!), and the ones that aren’t 4th-year essays are still students looking for complete problem set answers. They don’t even add any commentary like “please help me with this” or “I don’t understand” or anything, just a list of questions, sometimes scanned right out of the textbook. I haven’t answered a question in over a year…

Anyway, I don’t want to sound bitter, because I’m anything but — it’s a good service, and the admins do what they can to try to root out the “answer service” issue. It’s just hard because they can really only do enforcement from one side. When the students come in expecting to just pay for answers and not caring about learning, and when they’re the ones with the money, it’s hard to slap them on the wrists to change those expectations… Sure, they can send them copies of the policy and ask them to resubmit their question, but beyond that there’s not much they can do to change the mindset of someone willing to pay to not learn. Even if they did manage to drill the basic concept into a potential student/customer’s head, there seems to be an endless army of lazy students behind them looking for easy answers, who can’t be bothered to read the ToS or pop-up windows that it’s not a homework-answering service…

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Margaret Wente is a columnist for the Globe, so she doesn’t tend to do as much research as a journalist would (which, as you know from my disdain for the quality of mass media reporting, I don’t hold in especially high esteem either). So usually I don’t bother commenting on her mistaken ideas in the columns she writes, but this week’s missive on why professor’s don’t teach hits a topic that’s close to the heart, and also contains some really questionable logic.

“[Professors] can make $125,000 a year, with a good pension and six months off each year to do as they please. Their duties include sharing their research at conferences in Italy or Mexico, whose popularity hasn’t waned despite the advent of the Internet. Meantime, what many of their students need most is remedial instruction in basic composition. But there’s no future in that.

Setting aside the fact that no professor I know gets six months off per year, or that going to a conference is a sweltering, stinking mess of networking, politicking, and shameful self-promotion that is just about the opposite of a beach vacation as the article implies… setting all the nonsense in that one paragraph aside, how can it make the remotest bit of sense to have a professor making 6 figures teach remedial composition?!

I agree that the quality of teaching in universities could stand to be improved, and that teaching should be a higher priority in universities, and that professors should be held to a higher standard of interaction with their students. But the issues that many people are hanging onto with the problems in undergraduate education are really problems in high school education. Remedial composition, seriously? A university-bound student that can’t write an essay is an issue; a university graduate who can’t an even bigger one. However, the universities can’t really be expected to do the hand-holding and remedial stuff that shouldn’t be getting through the cracks of the high school system in the first place. I’ve long believed that Ontario went the wrong way in trying to save a few bucks by eliminating grade 13. The labour of graduate students is nearly free, certainly cheaper than a certified high school teacher, but nonetheless, these general education issues that are not degree-specific should be handled in high school where they belong. It’s unfair to the students to make them pay tuition to learn what should have been covered in their basic, government-provided education; it’s unfair to society to misallocate resources so badly that people that are specialists, even world-experts in their field, might be expected to teach basics and hand-hold students that don’t even want to be there. Of course, many universities (including UofT and UWO) do have classes for things like how to do research in the library, how to write an essay, how to make a CV/resume, how to do remedial math, etc. It’s just not part of the “curriculum” — it’s up to the students to seek out the help from the various workshops. And again, it’s not high school: a university student is expected to be moderately capable and self-directing.

Beyond that, teaching is considered a little more highly than her column indicates: at both UofT and Western, every student evaluates every instructor (and TA) for every class. Those evaluations are looked at, and serious issues are dealt with. Beyond that though, the question is raised: what metric tells you it’s broken? How do you know when a professor is not doing a good job in their role as a teacher? Students will beat up a “hard” professor in those comment forms more than they will one that can’t teach! The article quotes one professor who says that his departmental head never came to watch him teach — and that is probably true for many professors. However, if the departmental heads did pay attention to teaching, and sat in on a few lectures, how would that make things any better? Professors don’t have to take “how to teach” courses, and perhaps some do need that sort of help, but departmental heads don’t take “how to evaluate adult education” either. They don’t have to take on large courseloads as part of their job. Indeed, universities are very research-oriented, and despite the masses of undergrads taking up space on campus, they’re a bit of an afterthought in the whole system. It’s just where we get the next generation of grad students from. Maybe it would be nice if professors could opt to take on more teaching loads, and get just as much compensation and job security. That would require more money though — all sorts of organizations, from government to private industry provide funds for research (and here I’m focusing on my own area of the sciences), but you can’t get salary support for offering to spend more time teaching. It’s publish-or-perish (or perhaps more exactly, land-grants-or-perish) out there, and only a change to that method of employment incentivisation will allow for a change in teaching philosophies to take hold.

I’d love to see that, personally, for a number of reasons. As I pointed out a long time ago when discussing women in science*, the typical professorial life is very hostile to making a family: long hours, an encouragement to move between cities to stay at different universities, and basically zero job security until one gets too old to bother with children. Focusing on your teaching is similar: it just doesn’t lead to making your career as a professor any better (except for the warm feeling that you helped your unappreciative bratty students).

We just don’t incentivise teaching, and maybe if we did it would make for a better university system, and at the same time might fix the “women in science” problem. If there was the option for a professor to spend 80% of their time teaching and only 20% doing research, we might get better teachers, and more women in academia.

As someone who’s thinking of going into academia, I’m also 100% in favour of Margaret Wente’s dream world of six months off every year off to do whatever I want along with a 6-figure salary and a pension, and where the classes I do teach don’t require any prep work. Sounds almost as good as being a newspaper columnist: spend 20 minutes a week hacking out a column, send it off to the editor to fix, and then sit back on the deck of the cottage and wonder if you should have done some research on researchers first. Plus the only qualifications are an undergrad degree that you can acquire while stoned!

* – I know I discussed it at some length somewhere, but I can’t find it in the blog archives to link to. Maybe it was a comment on someone else’s website?

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