Look At Me Still Talking When There’s Science To Do
In Grand Rapids… thinking about Barrow (among other things)Archive for data entry
I didn’t want to say anything, but it kind of freaked me out.
Warm-and-enthusiastic girl is in my Thursday seminar, of course, and no one is surprised when it is her turn to finish the sentence “If you really knew me, you’d know that…” and she says, in her Tour Guide Barbie voice “…I just love teaching. I love it. I mean, I know that’s why we’re all here [... ] but I really really love it. And I don’t even care what I teach! I’d teach anything.”
When it was my turn I said something trivial that I’ve forgotten already, but it was not “If you really knew me, you would not ask me to complete this statement, and if you did, you wouldn’t want me to share it with you or the class. The statement would be snarky and uncomplying with the cheerful expectaion that I enjoy my classes and this environment. This exercise is prepared for people who are willing to participate, share, and maybe even cry- students who have been anxiously anticipating their first week of student teaching all summer. And if you expected and were prepared for me to answer truthfully and candidly, you would find out, to our mutual detriment, that if you really knew me, you’d know that I do not want to be a teacher, even for a minute,” which is what I wrote in my notes when he first introduced the activity.
My classes continue to progress about as well as one would expect (see above), but I did finish my data entry for everything but point framing, which is the binder that Jeremy handed to me when I showed up with the other completed files.
Despite the work that it is going to be, I love holding the point frame binder- but of course it only made me miss Barrow some more. Papasaurus and I had some time wallowing in nostalgia in the lab yesterday, which is probably unhealthy. I also made him a little ill at ease, since I didn’t take time to change out of teacher clothes before I went to campus. Yesterday, teacher clothes was a skirt. This does not comply with the image I created for myself in Alaska, and Jeremy only knows Alaska Jenny.
Of course, Michigan Jenny doesn’t really wear skirts, either, but sometimes things have to change.
There’s no sense of ha-ha there.
I spent the whole morning trying to memorize the face I was making so that I could return to my cluttered new apartment and recreate the face accurately in the mirror. Sitting in a 10th and 11th grade English classroom of Unnamed Local High School, I couldn’t tell if the face reflected bemusement, indifference, distracted annoyance, rapt attention, enthusiasm, or my typical standby face…… tired. Who knows what kind of first impression I made on seventy-three students and my teacher? (The latter I had met before, but that didn’t stop her from being 85% befuddled by my presence.)
Since my program requires that I return to this classroom every school day until early December, I will have to work on both my face and my social skills. It occurred to me, as my teacher was manipulating the students into liking her, that I do not care what the students think of me, and I have no interest in beginning a career that requires validation from teenagers. (Therefore I’ve also called Simon Cowell to say that even though I’d spectacularly nailed the audition, I just can’t be a part of American Idol this year. Thanks, but no thanks.)
When I was in the field in Atqasuk, the satisfaction of completing work on a single plot would often not be enough for me to be able to move on to the next plot. You know, psychologically. At times like these I would make a deliberate check mark on the page in the folder. “YES!” these check marks say. “YOU’VE DONE IT THIS TIME, JENNY! THAT PLOT IS TOAST.” There’s no spot on the paper designated for pat-on-the-back-check-marks, and they keep turning up in unexpected places as I flip through and transfer the important numbers.
From the dead mosquitoes in the data folders (and, naturally, the check marks) I get all the validation I require.
Go on until you come to the end
All those days that we were out in the field this summer we were armed with colorful folders containing pages and pages of spreadsheet printouts to fill in. All those days I recorded point framing data I was charged with the care of a two-inch three ring binder that simply could not hold any more pages if you put a gun to its head, er… spine. Our madcap total season days produced four completely new folders in the space of thirty hours, not counting the four folders that the Barrow team toiled over.
We ran all these folders through the copier before we left; one oughtn’t to leave such things to chance, and any number of scenarios could have separated the folders from the trusty research assistants who transported them in their carry-on luggage. Then what would we have to show for our ten weeks away?
What, indeed. The actual copying took forever, since weeks of tundra exposure left even the all-weather paper curled and cranky. In the case of the Atqasuk folders, the copy machine would only accept so many dead mosquitoes before it became cross and finicky. In the end, however, we had a delightful pile of shiny white data, suitable to shipping back to the lab in Michigan.
The point is that the data is more or less useless in binder form, and the computer has been hungrily accepting the efforts of the ITEX team as we try to transfer everything into the electronic versions of the spreadsheets. This takes much more time and patience than one might imagine, and is the reason that I haven’t unpacked everything in my apartment as satisfactorily as I might…
