Hat almost done

I'm up to the point of doing the decreases for the top on the baby hat. (And yes, using smaller needles and a tighter gauge worked much better).

And it's a good thing I'm nearly done. My parents called last night, and partly through the call, my mom said, "Oh, caller ID shows your brother is calling" so I rang off, expecting it was a "the baby's coming" call.

Well, not quite. Or, it was a "the baby's coming but not immediately" call....the baby might come today, they might decide to make the baby come (induce) today.

I never really contemplated having a child myself (lack of a husband being a big part of that, but also I have one particular health issue that might have made having a child difficult), but I never really contemplated until someone close to me was having one, just how many risks are involved in having a child...even before the child is born. (They are talking about inducing because of concerns about blood pressure).

I mean, I know women have been having babies since there have been women, but it does seem there are a lot of potential risks. Far fewer now than there once were, but still.

Hopefully by tomorrow I'll have a niece. A healthy niece, and a still-healthy sister-in-law.

No, I haven't heard any speculation as to names yet, and I'm not going to pester. My sister-in-law said her mom kept bugging her (this was early on, before they knew the sex) and she finally said that if it was a boy, she was going to name it Ulysses Grant....oddly, her mom didn't get the allusion (that that was a president, and Union general (my sis-in-law's mom is, I think, distantly related to Robert E. Lee....)

***

The meetings yesterday were....well, they were meetings.. Not much was solved, but the thing is, they were devoted to a problem that may not be solvable. And there's no amount of Faculty, Be More Better! that can solve the problem so we were mostly off the hook for being nagged at, which is something I hate having done to me.

I will make a couple observations:

- the speaker didn't run down lecture as a teaching technique; she acknowledged that it had its place and that many students actually learned best and most efficiently that way. That actually surprised me because the general trend since I've been a TA was "lecture is uniformly bad, you must do discussion, yes, even if the students have little background in what they are to discuss." There was an understanding that one-size-fits-all means everyone is fit badly, and I appreciated that.

- We're going to be dealing with Millenial students and the "typical" Millenial attitudes until 2020. That in itself made me want to go curl up in a corner and rock back and forth a little. Don't get me wrong: we do get a lot of younger students with their heads screwed on straight, but it's the 10% or so with massive entitlement and massive "give it to me on a silver platter" issues that make me bonkers. And we're already seeing some of the fall out from the NCLB teaching-to-the-test methods in the earlier grades.

- In the small group discussion, I almost broke out laughing. We were discussing student attitudes that might hinder their ability to succeed in their first year, and talk turned to partying and frat rush, and one of the CS faculty spoke up: "Did you know there's this thing called 'Thirsty Thursday,' and that's why Friday morning class attendance is so poor?" I almost laughed, as I said, because she can't be more than 12 years older than I am....so she's not the sweet little 85 year old lady prof who attended an all-women's Bible college in a tiny town where curfew was at 10 pm. I mean, I didn't drink in college - I never went to the bars - and I knew of the existence of Thirsty Thursday (though at Michigan, most of the kids called it "The Start of the Weekend.")

(And if they're really first-year "true" freshmen, they have no BUSINESS at Thirsty Thursday, because they are still under 21. And yes, yes, I know. I remember all of the fake ids and borrowing of older dorm-mates ids that went on when I was a student. But still.)

(A big reason I didn't go to the bars was that I didn't drink, but a secondary reason was that in the first week I was in college, one of my friends went out to a bar with friends and some random guy vomited on her shoes.)

- I will also observe that it was interesting to see the kind of "spin" that was put on the things we brought out in the small group discussion when they were presented to the faculty (and administrators) as a whole. It was enlightening for me. I'm not good at spin or polite diplomacy: either I say just what's on my mind, or, as is more likely, if I know what I have to say will be upsetting, I keep my mouth shut and let someone else say it. It's just....interesting....to see how comments get massaged. 

***

It's supposed to be in the 50s and rainy on Saturday. I approve highly of this.

I am planning to stay home Saturday and do some of the research reading that's been piling up, and that I've been eyeing nervously while I scramble to write exams and do the "urgent" stuff that tends to push out the "important" stuff.

I also am seriously considering getting a ticket for the Saturday night performance of As You Like It. I've kind of slacked in my plan to Read All The Shakespeare! and I didn't go to this summer's production (Romeo and Juliet, my least favorite of Shakespeare's plays, at least of the ones I know even a little about). They're doing it tonight, tomorrow, and Saturday. But tonight I have AAUW, Friday night I just kind of want to stay in and have an early night....but Saturday would work, if they still have tickets.