Mission Ridge at Night

Thanksgiving night. The air is crisp up in the mountains. I'm at a friend's house for Thanksgiving, since Jen is out of town. Our friend lives in East Wenatchee, up at the base of Badger Mountain, maybe at like 3,000 feet. There are some remnants of last week's snow in her front yard. (It only rained in Wenatchee.) In the darkness, our friend points to the mountains on the opposite bank of the Columbia, barely visible in the dusk. She points at a rectangle of lights, seemingly floating in space. From this distance it looks like Christmas lights on junipers in front of someone's house.

"The ski resort is lit up on Mission Ridge," she says. "They must be getting ready for tomorrow," when the season opens.

This tiny rectangle of pin points hovers in the surrounding darkness of the mountainside like a constellation. Below is the neon, argon, xenon glow and hum of Wenatchee, stretched out the length of the valley, all of it visible from this height, pale yellows and ivories polkadotted with pinks and blues and magentas. And above it all, nothing but darkness, where the mountains block out the fading sunset--a visible demarcation between "civilization" and "wilderness." All except for Mission Ridge.

Waterworks and Warm Smiles

It was good to go online today and visit the blogs of my friends. I needed to see their smiling faces, if only in pictures, and hear their voices, if only in text. Nikki's excuse for not being able to give her kitties a bath ("can't, I'm pregnant") and her decision to see how Brian would manage on his own made my day.

I made a student cry today. Which is why I'm a little gloomy and why I'm searching out happy faces. Well, I guess I should say that the grade I gave her on an essay made her cry. But still, it kind of ruins your day. Her essay was okay. So she received an "okay" grade. It was a research essay that nicely summarized her research. However, she didn't do much research, and she didn't do a very good job of citing the research in her paper, and she really didn't privilege her own thoughts and ideas on her subject. They were there in one paragraph near the end, but that's about it.

When I suggested that she reshape her essay using her response to her research as the essay's main idea, she wasn't too happy with me. I can't say this for sure, but I think she felt like I was punishing her ("marking me down," "making me rewrite my essay," "making me write something I don't want to write," "making me correct my mistakes"--all her words). Writing as punishment... Of course that's not the case at all.

I tried to let her know that I wasn't punishing her by asking her to revise. I tried to tell her that this was a good thing: she wrote this draft to help figure out what she wanted to say (writing to learn). And now that she knew what she wanted to say, it was time to reshape her draft based around those ideas. I tried to tell her that her grade was not determined until the end of the quarter and that taking this revision opportunity was the way get a good grade in my class. That didn't help. She was angry, and I understand that. I can see it from her perspective. Revision is a lot of work. It makes writing extremely frustrating, especially when you can't understand why something isn't working.

We talked for a while, which didn't seem to help. I tried to meet with her later today so that we could further discuss why I had given her the grade that I did. But she couldn't meet.

It reminds me of another student I once had, who wrote a quick discovery draft with a very straightforward research question, something like " what are the effects of alcohol on the brain." In the draft she effectively summarized alcohol's effects on the brain, based on some preliminary research. I suggested to this student that since she had answered her question, it was time move on in her research process, to refine her research question so that she could investigate another more interesting and unique aspect of her topic. She responded, "so by answering the question in my draft, I just screwed myself."

What? No! In fact the opposite. You're learning. This is what writing is. Showing that you're willing to investigate new ideas and showing that you realize that writing projects evolve over time will improve your grade. This is exactly what you should be doing in this class. Writing is discovering new ideas, trying on new perspectives, investigating thoughts and theories, figuring out what you think, articulating what you think. Writing is learning, as well as communicating with others. To not revise or to refuse to investigate your ideas beyond a basic level would screw yourself.

The question is, how do you say that to someone who only sees the grade and compares it to the grades she received in high school ("I always get A's on my writing")? How do you tell that student that it's time to start thinking about writing differently, now that she's in college? You can say those things, but most students don't quite understand what you mean, until they experience it for themselves. Students seem to hear such comments as, "You're wrong. You must do it over." Many times, though, frustration is the last barrier to this problem. It's a sign that students are ready to try something different, even if only because they're pissed off. Perhaps if we talk some more, and perhaps if she revises--even out of anger at me--something will click, and she'll begin to see writing in a new way. I hope she does...

New Snow

Snow on Saddlerock last night. That means it's getting low, around 1000-1500 ft, maybe. It was a neat experience, playing soccer in the rain and looking up through the clouds' misty veil to see the mountains sprinkled with white. It makes you think about heat a little differently. There we were standing in a cold rain, when less than a mile away it was snowing. It's almost as if you can see it change gradients, the higher in the atmosphere you go. Snow line. There couldn't be a more appropriate name. We stopped playing for a second and stared at the hazy hills.

Everyone here gets excited about the snow. Because that means fresh powder on Mission Ridge. There has been snow on Mission for a few weeks now, maybe since the middle of October. But it hasn't opened for the season yet, and every snow fall brings opening day one step closer. Now it's a waiting game, the excitement building, as post-Thanksgiving plans are made to hit the slopes hard.

Judgments about simultaneous events

I've been planning out a new post for a few weeks now. However, it's going to take some time to finish. It's kind of a scholarly thing. But I guess that doesn't mean that I can't post in the meantime, right?

I read a fun little article today, an article on methodologies in cognitive linguistics. Sounds fun, right? It actually was a good read, not just interesting but actually fun. It's not often that you run into those in academic prose. I don't remember the title off the top of my head, something about empirical and introspective research in cognitive semantics. It's by Dirk Geeraerts, and it's publised in the book I mentioned earlier in this blog. The article is a mock conversation between two cognitive semantics researchers, moderated by a venerable old teacher, who falls asleep at one point due to their arguing. Basically, the essay's argument is that cognitive semantics is at heart a heuristic discipline and that all forms of semantic research require some sort of linguistic interpretation, though that which is interpreted and the style of that interpretation are heavily disputed in the field.

The essay also does a nice job discussing paradigmatic shifts in methodology, based on the example of light as a wave/ light as a particle debate in physics. It uses experiments to prove that there is a universal ether analogous to water, through which light travels, a medium for the wave pattern. The essay discusses experimental designs to try to prove that light travels faster through this ether when it is travelling toward from earth than it does when travelling away from earth. The interesting thing about this example is that the scientists received negative results from their experiment. But to them, it didn't disprove the assumption of an ether. Instead, they took it as a sign that the experiment was flawed. It wasn't until Einstein posited a different physical theory--based on different assumptions, mainly that the speed of light is constant--that new and different experiments could be run. It should be noted, though, that, in true Kuhnian fashion, the scientists experimenting with varied speeds of light, were unconvinced by Einstein's theory and continued their research with the assumption that the ether still existed.

Now physicists posit that light exists both as a particle (a photon) and as a wave, depending on how you attempt to measure it. That is, light is a wave when we choose to look at its wave-like qualities, and light is a particle when we choose to look at its particle-like qualities. Further, the way scientists measure light as a wave or as a particle actively prohibits them from measuring the other set of qualities. In other words, both sets of assumptions about light cannot be measured simultaneously. This new theory recognizes the role of the observer in taking the measurement, what Einstein called "a judgment of simultaneous events," where the thing being studied exists only in a simultaneous relationship to the observer.

Bloggin' Blues

I don't really have anything "bluesy" to talk about. I just liked the title. :) So why not write about how the "sky is cryin'" and "heartbreak hotel" and how "old friends meet on Basin Street?" It always seems to strum a base chord in my gut--a low C, I think.

Is there anything bluesy you want to share? If you do, you need to share it in ABABCB rhyme scheme and with two repeated couplets to begin:

The sky is cryin'
Can't you see the tears roll down the street.
The sky is cryin'
Can't you see the tears roll down the street.

I've been looking for my baby
And I wonder where can she be

I don't know if this is by Stevie Ray Vaughn. I think he covered this song, which is actually by another artist. This is just the first verse of course.

Methodology, here I come

Okay, the time has come. The time is now. I just got a book in the mail yesterday that should help me with the methodology section of my dissertation. A few weeks ago, I sat down to write that section, and I realized that I had no clue what my methodology was. You know? I had this intuitive idea of what I should be doing, but there was really no clear process there.

So I did a little digging, stumbled across the Cognitive Linguistics listserv (Cogling, as in "Dear Coglings..." How clever is that... Love it!), and found a description of this book. So I ordered it straight away. The book is called Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope and Methodology and was recommended in the Cogling archives. It has articles by Langacker, Fauconnier, and some other heavy hitters.

I do need to remember, though, that once I get into actually writing my dissertation, I will need to adapt, explain, change the terminology that I use. Thanks for reminding me of this fact, Will. As a whole, I would say that Rhet/comp-type people are not familiar with the discourse of cognitive linguistics, even though these ideas are becoming pretty mainstream and most are familiar with cognitive linguistic authors like George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, etc. After Will responded to a post on another blog, I realized that I would need to tap into some discourses that Rhet/comp-types are more familiar with, if my ideas are going to be accepted. That could be why I've been having trouble getting some conference papers accepted recently: a complete and utter misreading of my audience. I was also reminded of this fact during my proposal discussion. But somehow I found a way to ignore it.

So instead of talking about cognitive frameworks, I should perhaps be talking about "epistemologies." Or at least, if I want to talk about cognitive frameworks, I'll need to make the links between these two systems of thought a little clearer.