Things I've learned

1. When I get out of bed at 4:30 am to do my workout (leaving enough time to wash, dress, pack my lunch, eat breakfast, and squeeze in 20 minutes of piano practice), it is not helpful to me to calculate how many hours it will be before I have some free time/can get back into bed. (17 for today).

2. It's really discouraging, while working out, to go over the exam you wrote yesterday in your mind and realize it lacks ten points, that you have to write another ten points' worth of questions.

3. (This was a long, long time ago): When writing a statistics exam, you need to work all the problems as you write them to be sure they work out the way you want, and that they are workable. This was not learned from personal experience but from taking a stats class where the prof DIDN'T, and who wound up giving us a take home with one (high-points) problem on it that COULD not be worked. So we spent hours grinding away on it, and even broke the code of silence (First rule of take home stats exams: you do not talk about take home stats exams) in my lab to see if ANYONE had succeeded. No one had. And then later the prof confessed that he screwed up and the problem was unworkable. (See: "If you can't be a good example, be a terrible warning.")

4. It's mentally exhausting to write, research data for, and solve stats problems.

5. But I do it because I get e-mails from, and have talked to former students at meetings, who tell me that their graduate-level stats classes are comparatively easy for them, thanks to the preparation I gave them.

****

I'm also stressing about my talk on Friday. I keep telling myself it will be fine but I worry about the spectre of someone who Knows More About The Situation (in this case, some of the locations we sampled) Than I Do and decides it's a good time to "mark their territory" by making the presenter look stupid. (I have seen situations like that at meetings - never been directly involved in one, but watching them is ugly and painful even if you're just an observer. I find it especially painful when I know the person being "taken down a notch" is a grad student making a first meeting presentation. Sometimes people do deserve to be taken down a notch, but in a lot of cases, the person who decides to do the taking is doing it to someone who isn't over-endowed in the self-confidence arena to begin with).

I mean, it's all well and good to have problems with someone's methods or conclusions - but I tend to think it's better to catch them AFTER the presentation, if you can't be courteous in your questions publicly.

I'm going to be really burned out by the end of this week.

(One of my colleagues is having a pre-meeting social at his house. Starting at 9:30 pm the night before. I strive to be ASLEEP by 9:30 pm these days. So no, I don't think I'll go.)

***

I finished the first of my handmade Christmas presents last night: a scarf. I always wonder at how scarves are promoted as a "good first knitting project" (as compared to, say, a hat). Yes, they do have the benefit of not requiring shaping, and gauge is a bit less critical. (But if you're going to become a knitter, you quickly need to learn how to get gauge, and you will need to learn shaping). The big drawback to scarves as "first knitting projects" is that they take FORever to complete, and it's easy to burn out on them - and I suspect a lot of beginning knitters did. And a lot of would-be knitters have a scarf stashed away somewhere they never finished, and decided knitting was not for them.

I think if I were teaching someone to knit, depending on who they were, I'd start either with a simple hat (one that could be knit flat; I do think knitting circularly is maybe a skill to add a bit later) or a dishcloth/washcloth. I know, dishcloths sound terribly mundane, but they ARE useful (the knitted ones, if you use the right kind of cotton yarn, you can even boil them or bleach them to get them clean, and they do work very, very well). They're time-limited - you can knit one up in an evening or two if you are a fast knitter. And if they look a little wonky, that's fine, they will still work.

I also think the thing that some grade schools that teach knitting do - where you knit a square and then sew it up and manipulate it a bit to make a small stuffed toy (a sheep or a dog or a lion - those are some of the ones I've seen) is another good beginner-knitting project (Especially if you are teaching a child who likes animal toys. There is something magical, when you are a child, in being able to make your own toys. I say that from experience - I learned to sew at about 6, and very shortly after was making my own stuffed animals. Heck, I still find it somewhat magical at 42 that I can make my own "mascots." (That's what I call them, I think. "Mascots," not "toys.")

But scarves as the classic beginner project, I don't know, unless you're someone with boatloads of persistence as a beginner. (I know I didn't have it. Though my first project WAS a scarf, it was a scarf for my Kermit the Frog doll. After that, I learned how to do the little toy-sized sweaters that were in one of the Erica Wilson books, and only after that did I graduate to trying a full-sized scarf. And even then, scarves kind of burned me out on knitting for YEARS - it was really only when I was in my 20s, and learned how to do knitting-in-the-round (my mom taught me how to make mittens), that knitting "clicked" for me.