Stress of Parenting

I haven't talked here much about the stress we have being going through lately, but we've certainly been feeling it.

Kasia

As I related earlier, our 15 month old daughter, Kasia has reflex anoxic seizures. This is in itself extremely stressful, since having your daughter's heart stop beating, her breathing stop and her eyes roll up into her head -- for all intents and purposes dead for three or four minutes -- is terrifying, even knowing that the condition has never proven fatal and that there is (apparently) no long term damage to heart, lungs or brain. But in testing to determine that diagnosis she also turned out to have fairly serious anemia. When that did not respond to aggressive iron supplements, the doctor started testing her for Thalassemia, a process that took weeks and left us terrified by what we had read up on that genetic condition. The tests eventually came back negative, but we still don’t know if the anemia was just a blip, or a symptom of something even scarier (everything on the list after Thalassemia is mind-numbingly scary.)

When Kasia was first diagnosed with the cyanotic breath holding, we were grateful she didn’t have the even more frightening pallid attacks; when she developed the pallid form as well (our pediatrician didn’t know it was possible to get both kinds in the same patient before meeting Kasia, since they are different mechanisms – but apparently a very small percentage do get both), we could at least take solace that the condition is not life threatening (as long as appropriate precautions are taken). And after all the tests Kasia has had, the doctor was able to rule out epilepsy, so bad as the seizures were, they weren’t that.

So then two weeks ago, Kasia had her first grand mal seizure. I was surprised at how calmly I was able to deal with this, though later Mary reminded me that I am used to dealing with Portia, our epileptic dog, so perhaps the familiarity got me through it. Nevertheless, I called for Mary and we got Kasia to the hospital in under three minutes, which is pretty good since we live about 10 minutes from the hospital. (The doctor subsequently told us that we should always bring Kasia in after a seizure of this type, but next time to drive slower.) Our pediatrician happened to be on call at the hospital that evening, and after observing Kasia for four hours concluded that this seizure was not part of the reflex anoxic seizures we had already been dealing with but something new and different. We waited for him to tell us that these new grand mal seizures were also not life threatening, since we know our dog is fine and just requires some comforting to get her through it, but he unfortunately could provide no such assurances. He also told us that 80% of such seizures are never diagnosed and that we may never know what caused it, but that we would have to re-run all the tests for epilepsy and tumors etc that we had already been through before.

Currently, our best case scenario is that this was a severe anoxic seizure -- though Kasia’s color was wrong for that diagnosis – since a percentage of those with the pallid form do also suffer convulsions. But there is really no way to know in the short term, and the uncertainty is eating away at us.

Tigana
Meanwhile, our six-year old daughter was having ongoing problems at school with bullying. Mary and I had tried several times to get the teacher or the principal to take the matter seriously, but we found both to be more defensive then helpful. I understand that it is difficult to take the problems of six year olds seriously, especially if you have not witnessed these incidents with your own eyes, as we had on several occasions, but it seemed obvious to us that Tigana’s schooling was suffering. For example, when Tigana started her writing portfolio in September, there was an outpouring of productivity; indeed, I had wanted to use her portfolio in my assessment course to demonstrate how successful these techniques could be. But all of a sudden, Tigana's entries just stopped. The last two entries are the one reproduced below (with the student names whited out for obvious reasons), and the final one that says: "I think I have a problem."

The illustration shows a tiny, intimidated and weeping Tigana, while a giant rival laughs and points at her. The object on the left is the tire swing on the school playground.

The problems kept escalating from there until last week when Tigana's nemesis approached another child on the playground to solicit her help in planning how to kill Tigana. When that child told Tigana what had been said, we again took it to the classroom teacher who again refused to accept the word of a six year old witness, or that there was a significant problem. Mary appealed to the Vice Principal, who ensured that a counselor was brought in. His initial belief (framed by his briefing from the school) that it was a very minor problem changed as he listened to our concerns, and later when he actually talked to the students involved. Although he appeared to make some progress with the children, we felt it was too little too late and pulled Tigana out of that school.

I must confess that I was concerned that we might be over-reacting, since that was the message we kept getting from the school. So Mary and I went to two of my colleagues (a psychologist and an elementary education specialist), whom we trust, and asked for a second opinion. Listening to what we had told the school, they both independently recommended pulling Tigana immediately.

When we broke the news of our decision to Tigana, her overwhelming reaction was one of immense release. It was only seeing how relieved she was to be leaving her old school that we really appreciated how much pressure she had been under. Of course she is sad about leaving her friends and a classroom she knows, and nervous about the transition, but she is also extremely excited.

Tigana's new principal immediately impressed us with his attitude and professionalism. And from all accounts, the teacher to whom he has assigned Tigana is a pretty good fit for our daughter. (As soon as we mentioned her name to another parent, she told us that last year that teacher had invited her grade 1 class to her wedding and set up a table of activities for them. Any teacher who would think of her "kids" on her wedding day is okay by me!)

We are doing what we can to ease the transition, and since her birthday comes exactly in the middle of the move, we've told her she can have two parties: one with the friends she's leaving, and one with the girls in her new class. (Since we didn't think it appropriate to have kids bring presents to a child they had just met that week, we're going to do a gift exchange for the second party where everyone brings a gift, and then some sort of game that assigns the gifts randomly so every child leaves with a present. And we're taking the girls to the local rock climbing wall which we hope isn't an idea that has already been done to death in her new school. Hopefully the party will be a good way to meet the other kids and parents in Tigana's class.) Tigana has a few friends who attend that school already, but it remains to be seen if any of them will be in Tigana's class.

So, on the bright side, we are cautiously optimistic that we have taken the appropriate action to address the problems facing Tigana; on the down side, there is little we can do about Kasia's health problems but wait to see what develops and what diagnosis we're handed.

Bus Book

Coming back from my Mom's, I had an 8 hour bus ride. This gave me a chance to read a book I have had on my shelf for a couple of years but hadn't had a chance to get to before now. Michael Paterniti's Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain is a "road book", a subgenre of travelogue that I have sometimes written, but seldom read. In this case, the external journey across America is paralleled by Paterniti's internal search for the meaning of life. Paterniti's midlife crisis manifests itself as a generalized restlessness, culminating in his offer to drive Thomas Harvey, the man who autopsied Einstein and kept his brain, across America to show the brain to Einstein's grand daughter. Paterniti intersperses analysis of Einstein's life (the genius); Harvey's life (keeper of the relic / reflected glory); and his own (search for purpose) with set pieces in various locales as they cross the nation. It is a fascinating read, alternately hilarious and profound; sociological and psychological; biographical and reflective; American and universal.

The book came at an excellent time for me as I dealt with my own mini-midlife crisis, as Mary and I strive to cope with Kasia’s ongoing health issues, problems with Tigana’s school, and various other family stressors. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Paterniti provided any answers for me, but I did find that my reactions to the various character biographies provided an excellent backdrop against which I could formulate, and to some extent resolve, my own issues. Coming to grips with the fact that I am a minor academic (no Einstein! – but no Thomas Harvey, either…) approaching the final years of his career, I find myself taking much more meaning and satisfaction from my family life than from my academia. I still love my job and gain great satisfaction from it, but I find my self image as ‘academic’ increasingly taking second place to my role as ‘Dad’ and ‘husband’. When Mary wasn’t sure she would get a permanent position at the UofL, I started to apply elsewhere just in case, and was surprised to discover that I was not only okay with moving to support Mary’s career, I was actually starting to look forward to the change. Mary made the comment the other day that a common fantasy for people like us is to be able to ‘start over’ without making any of the mistakes that we made getting to here. The “if only I knew then what I know now” syndrome, but of course it doesn’t actually work out that way – there are always new mistakes one can invent. [I actually did try starting over once, recreating myself in my subculture by using a (still undiscovered) pseudonym, determined not to make the errors that had brought the real me so much unnecessary controversy, but quickly discovered that my new persona, although the antithesis of the old, garnered just as many detractors – I came to see that conflict is to some extent unavoidable, and that it says as much about the others’ issues, as about me.] But all things considered, I have a great life and have nothing to complain about. Reading Paterniti helped me see my own journey in perspective, and be content.

All that aside, I really liked Driving Mr. Albert as literature, and highly recommend it.

A Visit to Mom

Spent Reading Week visiting my aging mother, now 96, blind, and victim of a failing memory. I found my visit depressing, as her health and quality of life go into decline. She had recently hurt her leg, making walking painful or impossible. Unable to continue working out on the condo’s treadmill, she is rapidly losing circulation in her feet and legs, crippling up completely; and her neck and shoulders are another source of constant pain as she attempts to compensate for her weak leg by holding herself up in her walker. She needs a hip replacement, but at 96, I’m doubtful she could survive the operation or that she would have long enough to benefit to make the recovery period worthwhile. But without it, I can see only further rapid deterioration in her condition.

Equally depressing is her loss of memory, and frequent disorientation. Being old and unable to sleep at night, she often falls asleep at the kitchen table. Being blind, the line between waking and dreaming is often blurred. Whereas the rest of us wake up, look around, and say, “oh yeah, I must have fallen asleep in the kitchen” or “Oh yeah, I’m at my Mom’s this week”, she has no visual cues to her whereabouts or time, and the best available references are in fact the dream images that thus persist into her initial waking state. Consequently, my brother has frequently found her wandering her apartment looking for her baby, a recurrent dream responsibility now 50 years out of date. Even when fully awake, her memory is so impaired that at times she cannot remember what was said only moments ago. I have to tell her that my wife Mary has gotten her job/promotion to assistant professor perhaps 16 times in three days: indeed, often by the time I had told mom something or answered a question, she would forget what she had asked and would ask the exact same question over again.

And she would repeat the same story about my Dad over and over – obviously their divorce much on her mind as she evaluates her life and weighs its meaning, but even with repeated opportunities to try different approaches in response, I find it an awkward subject to address. Each time she tells the incident, she expects me to be surprised by this ‘revelation’, but I’ve heard the same story now 20 or 30 times in the last year alone, and had first heard it maybe 25 years ago, so it feels inauthentic to feign surprise yet again.

I try to change the subject by asking her questions, but her answer to any query about family history is always “I’m sorry, I don’t remember anymore.” And indeed she doesn’t, telling me, for example, that it is too bad that she never met my brother’s wife, though of course she has hundreds of times. I’m frustrated by the impossibility of fetching my brother’s family portrait from the sideboard in the next room and pointing Joan out to her, but of course she there are no such easy referents for the blind. Somewhere in her closet lies a bin of family photos going back two generations, but none of them are labeled, and as Mom is the last surviving member of her family, there is no one left to identify the group of Englishmen in top hats and tails posing stiffly in front of the ancestral home in…wherever that is.

I regret now not taping her family stories while she still retained them. I can feel a huge chunk of my own past, my own formative years listening to family history and absorbing the implied life lessons and family identity, slipping away as I lose the source that could once have verified the details of my childhood recall – and ensured that I passed on the stories correctly to my own children. I see my children do something and I wonder if I did that or was like that when I was young, but there is no one left to ask.

Most of all, it saddens me that my Mom will never be able to see Kasia, or hold her, or know my second daughter as anything other than a passing wail. Tigana looks nothing like the toddler my Mom met before she went blind, and my daughters’ memories of my Mom will be of a shrunken arthritic shell, too fragile to hug, rather than the dynamic, inventive, principled woman who raised me.

Still, the visit was important to my Mom, even if it only existed in a brief, momentary ‘now’ that was forgotten soon after I left. I imagine her complaining to my brother that I haven’t been to visit for a long time, and that he’ll tell her again that I was just up last week, and that I’m coming again, this time with the family, at Easter. But that’s probably an exaggeration; she probably knows that I’ve been and that I love her. And that’s maybe enough.

Baby to Toddler

Our 14 month old has been toddling around for about six weeks now, but has only been walking with assurance for less than two weeks. But, for me, the entrance into toddlerhood is less about walking than it is the way in which she interacts with others. In the last couple of weeks she has started to say ‘Hi!’ to people she passes in stores or on campus, and grins happily when people respond and make a fuss over her. The change from inert baby, sitting watching the world go by, to an active individual interacting with the environment is fascinating. Suddenly Kasia is no longer a baby but a tiny person.

But the defining moment came this weekend when I was watching Kasia in the kitchen with her older sister, and Kasia took off down the hall. I gave chase, afraid that Kasia was going for the ladder to her sister’s bunk bed (her current favorite hazard) or the stairs or etc. But turning the corner from the kitchen to the hallway, Kasia was already gone from sight. Not seeing her in the hall, I hurried to Tigana’s room to check the ladder, and called for Tigana to come help find her sister before she got into danger. I don’t like Kasia to get out of sight even for a moment, since she is a master of finding choking-size items to insert into her mouth, or sharp objects to poke herself with, or etc., even though we are constantly policing the area. As seconds stretched into a minute and more with neither of us finding her, I started to get a bit frantic, and re-searched the rooms I was just in, knowing she could not have gotten that far in just the few seconds she was out of sight. Finally, Tigana caught Kasia peeking out of the darken doorway to the bathroom, the opposite direction in which we had been looking. When Tigana ran over and turned on the light, and shouting “ah ha!”, Kasia literally fell on the floor and rolled back and forth in hysterical laughter. She had consciously tricked both of us into running right past her, and the more frantic our search, the funnier she thought it had been. Tigana and I sat down and laughed with her, relieved she was safe, but also surprised and delighted that she had tricked us! Clearly we had passed a milestone – we were no longer dealing with a reactive baby, but with a thinking, planning, individual. It’s great when your baby first smiles, then laughs – but the first practical joke suggests an entirely different level of humor – and personhood.

Car Books

I'm reading a particularly enjoyable car book at the moment, so thought I would recommend it to others.

By 'car book', I am not of course referring to a book about cars. I've only ever read one book about cars, and that was a sociological analysis of the history of cars by the Montreal Museum, and was really about sociology of design, not cars per se.

No, by 'car book', I mean those books one keeps in the car in case of emergencies, since it is unthinkable to be caught for any extended period without reading matter. I learned this from my older brother, Doug, when growing up. We'd get stuck in a traffic jam and he'd calmly open the glove compartment, pull out a book, and start reading. While all about him the other drivers were getting frustrated with the delays and suffering rising blood pressure and declining urban lifestyle, my brother would be contentedly reading. Similarly, if called upon to drive a family member to an appointment, instead of relying upon the reading material provided in the doctor's sitting room or pacing impatiently, he would simply retrieve his car book and read that as time pleasantly evaporated.

Of course, the one flaw in this approach is that one has recourse to one's car book at random and often widely spaced intervals, so it is often difficult to maintain continuity. Novels do not make good car books because one ends up having to re-read the early chapters to remind oneself of what's going on, and progress is often so slow as to seriously impair enjoyment. It is hard to relate to a character one encounters only briefly at random intervals, and even harder to follow any kind of complicated plot developments. One could, of course, simply take one's current reading with one in the car, but I have found this just means that I am frequently caught short as my current read is left in the car when I need it in the office or at bedtime, or it's on the bedside table when I need it to be in the car. No, one needs a designated car book to keep in the glove compartment which can be read in parallel with one's regular reading.

My brother's book was Max Weber's Capitalism and the Protestant Work Ethic, which I believe took him the better parts of two decades to finish. I generally prefer something a little less demanding, and more easily divisible into bite size chunks. I have therefore consumed several popular culture books, on the history of cinema, for example, where one can easily read entries on a particular year or a particular director in a single sitting, put the book away for several weeks or even longer, and pick it up again at the next entry without any loss in continuity. The only trick was to have two distinct bookmarks – one for me and one for my wife – to tack where we are, since opening it to where it was last read can be confusing when there are two of you practicing car book reading.

Since the birth of my second daughter, I have had occasion to make heavier than usual use of my car books, since often the only way to get Kasia to sleep is to driver her around until the car noise and motion knocks her out. I then find myself at some random location in the city with nothing to do until Kasia wakes, unless I have had the foresight to bring my iBook, and that is not always possible, since Kasia sleep emergencies arise suddenly and unpredictably.

In any event, my current car book is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything which is the most enjoyable history of science I've read in years. His is the perfect balance between tracking the flow of ideas and biography of the various cranks, egomaniacs, and eccentrics who originally came up with them. I recognize that the stereotype of the absent minded professor or the eccentric scientist is perpetuated in popular culture as one way of diffusing public resentment against people who are clearly smarter than ourselves, but Bryson's parade of annoying or bizarre personalities does seem to lend support to the view that brilliance and madness are often separated by a vanishingly thin line. And the scientific themes are equally engaging, since Bryson is embracing the really big questions: how do we know how much the earth weighs, how old the universe is, the origin of species and so on. If it were up to me, I would toss 99% of high school science curriculum and replace them with this text. I no longer remember, and do not greatly care, how to balance a chemical equation, not being a chemist, but I do care about the implications of chemistry and the other sciences, and books like this one would go a good deal farther, in my view, towards increasing scientific literacy in our culture than our current approach.

Getting my stuff done....

Here is the link to a funny short video about procastination which hits a little too close to the mark... From Derryl via Randy.

Interfaith Holiday of Chrismukkah

See Chrismukkah. So, they're kidding, right?

Reflex Anoxic Seizures

Wednesday morning I had just entered my office before setting out for my 10:00 AM class when the phone rang: Kasia, our 1 year old, had stopped breathing at day care and was being rushed to the hospital.

Mary and I raced to the car; Mary used her cell to call around to various colleagues to arrange coverage for my class, mostly to distract herself while I drove. I had gone into standard male denial mode, so I was okay to drive: Kasia had previously been diagnosed with Cyanotic Breath-Holding, so I assumed this was more of the same, though there was the nagging doubt that the day care workers had dealt with that before and not freaked, so perhaps this was something else.

The Breath-holding incidents were scary enough: something would upset Kasia (a bump or poke; taking something she was trying to put into her mouth away from her; sometimes nothing at all that we could recognize as the initiating stimulus) and her crying would quickly escalate to the point where she would be unable to catch her breath between screams, would hyperventilate, and then suddenly she had stop breathing, turned blue, and passed out. On other occasions she would skip the crying stage altogether, and simply stop breathing, turn blue, and pass out – a process indistinguishable from a child choking to death.

Indeed, we now realize that Kasia's first spell was one we had initially interpreted as a chocking incident one weekend in Costco's food court, in which it appeared that Kasia had only survived thanks to the timely intervention of a nurse seated at the next table. I remember having been appalled at how fast Kasia had started to turn blue – I had just started to say, "I think there is something wrong with Kasia", when a woman at the next table called out, "She's choking!" For the first time ever, Mary froze as Kasia's eyes started to roll up; when a another woman stepped forward, identifying herself as a nurse, Mary thrust Kasia into her arms. The woman whacked Kasia on the back a couple of times as she yelled to her husband to call 911. I had a sinking feeling it was too late to call for an ambulance, as Kasia was already blue, and we were a long way from the hospital. But suddenly Kasia was crying, and the woman was pointing to a piece of chicken that had popped out of Kasia that looked about choking size. In retrospect, it now seems more likely that this was her first full blown Cyanotic spell, rather than choking, but we spend the next month breaking Kasia's food into microscopic crumbs before putting them on her plate…..

The next incident a couple of weeks later sent us rushing to the hospital, where the doctor diagnosed a Cyanotic Breath-holding Spell. The doctor emphasized that this was a genetically determined physiological response, and not willfulness. Mary immediately researched the syndrome through the internet and discovered that these spells occur in a small number of children after 6 months of age, peak at two, and are gone by age 6. Although terrifying for parents and bystanders, they are essentially harmless. After reading through the literature, I came to see it as a kind of "reboot" mechanism -- having reached a level of hysteria from which Kasia could not regain control, the system shuts down, reboots, and returns the child to normal crying.

After our experiences with these initial episodes, we had briefed the day care staff, and a few days later, Kasia had inserted her finger in the mouth of another daycare baby, who had promptly clamped down on Kasia's finger with her new teeth, and Kasia had had a spell. The day care staff told us that they now appreciated what we had been talking about / going through, but basically they had too coped.

Wednesday was different. One of the workers had taken a toy away from Kasia, which Kasia had coped with, if somewhat grumpily. A second staffer, however, had taken a second toy away when she spotted a piece of tinsel wrapped around it. This had proved too much for Kasia. She had become hysterical, held her breath, gone rigid, and passed out. The staffer was prepared for this... except Kasia did not come round. Instead of starting to cry, she remained non-responsive, and did not resume breathing. The worker called for, Jan, the head of the day care, who immediately decided to transport Kasia to hospital. Jan made the conscious decision not to speed and to wait for traffic lights, on the reasonable grounds that an accident would not help. (She did, she said, use the horn.) She drove while the other staffer held Kasia...who by this time was limp, her eyes rolled up into her head, for all appearances dead. Fortunately, the day care is not far from the hospital, and they made it to Emergency in literally 2 minutes.

One thing we will say for Lethbridge is that we have always found the Emergency room staff to be very responsive. When the day care staff came through the doors carrying a limp baby, a group of doctors and nurses immediately took her to the back and began undressing her and attaching her to every device known to modern medicine. Total elapsed time since start of the incident: 4 minutes. At which point, Kasia began to cry.

Mary and I arrived about two minutes after that. I dropped Mary at the door, and parked the car. I followed less than a minute later, running into the day care workers, coming out. They stopped and briefed me in detail, so I could tell the doctors later. (They had of course also told the triage nurse everything.) I was immensely impressed with how well they had coped with the emergency. I have the greatest respect for the head of this day care, a professional of the first order, and a take-charge personality if ever there was one. I can think of no one I would rather have in an emergency such as this. Just the fact that she had the presence of mind to note the times at each step so she could tell the doctors, was indicative of her calm and efficient response.

I then went in to join my wife and daughter, having been listening to the reassuring sound of Kasia screaming her lungs out the entire time I was debriefing the day care staff. While Mary reassured me that the doctors had said Kasia would be okay, and my briefing her on what the day care staff had told me, the day care owner's twin sister showed up. I confess I hadn't realized at first that it was the sister, since they are identical twins, but it eventually penetrated that she had left her day care to come and support her sister, Jan, in what everyone had supposed was the death of a child in her care.

Eventually the doctor showed up and after speaking with us, arranging for a follow-up appointment with our pediatrician (no mean feat in a city where there are too few pediatricians for the population), he sent us home with the diagnosis that this had likely been an extended breath-holding incident, and implied that the day care workers had perhaps over-reacted. "You probably wouldn't have brought her in had it happened when she was with you." I personally doubted this, knowing my own levels of terror and the calm professionalism of the day care people, and especially given the strong sense from the staff that this had been something new and different.

As an aside, the doctor mentioned that the blood tests had come back showing Kasia had anemia. When Mary got on line, it became immediately obvious that anemia is highly correlated with both the Cyanotic Spells and with a rarer second Pallid form. The more we read about the Pallid form, the more obvious that was what Kasia had had. Including the inconsolable crying that lasted for hours afterwards....reading the symptoms on these sites was like listening to a replay of the Day care staff debrief....

The next development came when Mary phoned her folks with the news...and they talked about her attacks when she was a child. Of course, in those days people assumed that the spells were the result of willful behavior and sibling rivalry (her sister being born when Mary was 18 months) or, eventually, of epilepsy. Mary's attacks had been frequent enough to label her a "difficult child" but not so frequent that the family ever got used to them… This is somewhat reassuring, since it suggest Kasia's spells might also be relatively infrequent, say, once every couple of months. In contrast, the websites report that some children have Cyanotic spells four or five times a day; and some children with the rarer and far more frightening pallid form suffer episodes as often as twice a day.

When Mary read out the description of pallid form to me, my "oh-well,-they-are-just harmless-spells" attitude collapsed. Apparently, the heart actually stops, the lungs and brain shut down, and it is only when the fail safe mechanism kicks in to restart the heart that the child comes out of it -- to cry for hours and then sleep....

"The heart stops?!" I demand.

"That's what leads to the paleness…there is no blood circulating."

A knot formed in the middle of my stomach that hasn't yet dissolved. I am definitely not okay with my daughter's heart stopping, albeit briefly….

We haven't seen the pediatrician yet, so our self-diagnosis is necessarily tentative --- hopefully, we are not dealing with something worse! But the symptoms match very closely, including the genetic component. And of course, it is all very frightening. The fact that Mary suffered from the same condition as a child and is a here as an adult validates the various websites insistence that the condition is not fatal, poses no threat to, or strain on, heart, brain, or lungs, etc., but such rational considerations do not hold much weight in the face of one's child turning blue or remaining unresponsive for minutes at a time, as you wait to find out if it is just another spell or whether you've just sat there while you child choked to death on a piece of broccoli. The spells may not place any strain on the child's heart, but let me tell you, it sure as hell strains the parents'.

References:

http://www.pediatrics.emory.edu/NEURO/breathho.htm


http://www.mcg.edu/pediatrics/CCNotebook/chapter2/breathholding.htm

www.ankara.edu.tr/rectorate/kutuphane/ tipdergi/eng/03_2002ing/03_01ing..pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11219911&dopt=Abstract

http://www.postgradmed.com/issues/2002/05_02/jennette.htm

Big Fat Obnoxious Boss

I have just watched the second episode of this bonzo series and fallen off the couch laughing. I had a lot of problems with the previous series, "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance" because it messed with family relations and people's lives; but somehow it doesn't bother me to see a group of greedy suits getting conned.

The series is a hilarious take off of the Apprentice. The actor portraying the billionaire mentor dispenses completely random and ridiculous advice and assigns completely pointless tasks to the competing teams. The series cuts right to the heart of what is wrong with Trump's series...his sexism, his lack of ethics, his pretentious business advice that represents all that is wrong with rapacious American capitalism. Above all, watching these supposedly top candidates perform like a group of monkeys that any of my undergrads could have out performed. All of these elements are crucified in this satire.

In the opening episode, for example, the group of apprentices is taken to an impressive venue and given what appears to be a banquet fit for the billionaires they aspire to become, but the food in fact is cheap crap -- the paté is baloney ground in a blender, the champaign is the cheapest rubbish they could buy, but of course they are told it is $100 an ounce and $1000 a bottle, and they of course totally bought it. Every working class stiff watching who believes that the rich really have no taste and that upper class food is about pretention not food, has their beliefs confirmed by this series. Watching these apprentices buying into the patent nonsense spouted by the actors playing the bosses is abosultely hilarious, and a shot at Trump and the entire upper class. Having the actors gloating off camera how they managed to get these supposedly top business people not only believe that the game is real, but manipulate them into ridiculous behaviours without ever questionning whatis going on... it is absolutely priceless.

Highly recommended.

Sorry Americans

http://www.sorryeverybody.com/

Take Your Daughter to Work Day

Yesterday was take your child to work day in Alberta. Strictly speaking, it is supposed to be for Grade 9 students, because the Grade 9 curriculum deals with career choice, but we dislike such careerism... Tigana had been asking about what we actually do at work, so we wanted to afford her the opportunity to observe Mary lecturing. This quickly evolved, however, to her providing a 'guest lecture'. Mary is doing her dissertation on work-family balance, and has often told Tigana that Tigana has taught her everything she knows about the importance of family. Consequently, Tigana volunteered to teach Mary's class on Social Responsibility about "why kids are more important than work."

Tigana spent several evenings writing her report, which she read out to Mary's class:

Why Kids Are More Important Than Work

by Tigana Runté

1. When your kids are sick, stay home and help them feel better.
   
   
2. When someone is mean to your kids, help them learn what to say and stand up for themselves.
   
   
3. We would rather have you spend time with us than have lots of money for toys.

This report was well recieved by Mary's two classes; Mary and I were extremely proud of how Tigana was able to overcome her nervousness and read out her report to a room full of adult strangers. I'd have to say that her presentation was as clear and coherent as about half of those by my student teachers.

Problem with Comments

I've have a number of posts half finished and stored as drafts, but I've been ill off and on the last few weeks and have just been able to keep up with the day job, so no time to do any serious blogging. But I have noticed a problem with my blog, which is that the comment buttons insist on reading "zero" comments, even when there are half a dozen comments. I'n not sure where the glitch in my html is -- the code all looks good to me-- but I'm afraid to tamper too much to try to fix it, because the last time I upgraded the comment function, it erased all the comments accumulated to that point. It is a quandary.

Stupid Questions

As an educator, I have often told students that there is no such thing as a stupid question; that if they are wondering about something or don't understand something, there are probably others in the class with the same question. Even if there is not, I would rather they asked, even if they feel a bit foolish, than miss some fundamental concept that would thereby undermine their learning. Most of the time, their embarrassed questions often brings up a key point, and I am glad of it.

On the other hand, it has occured to me lately that there are indeed stupid questions -- questions that ought never be asked of one's prof. A couple of my favorite examples are (a) the student who emailed my wife asking what the textbook for her course was the night before the final examination (so much for having done the readings for each class, eh?) or even better, (b)the student who emailed the classlist the night before the group project (worth 45% of the course grade, and the subject of group worksessions every class for the whole of the semester) "Hi, my name is Doug. Does anyone know what group I'm in?" At the UofL, signing your name to a project to which you have not contributed equally constitutes academic dishonesty, punishable by expulsion from the program, but this idiot thought he could show up the night before and get "his" group to add his name. Astoundingly, the group went for it! Needless to say, my wife struck his name off, gave him the boot, and put the fear of god into the rest of the group, since allowing his name on the report also constituted academic dishonesty on their part.

My absolute favorite, though was the series of emails my wife received over the course of a weekend from an increasingly angry and desparate student. Friday evening, 9PM, the student emails a question about an upcoming assignment. An hour later, she sends a second email saying, "I haven't received a reply from you yet and I can't start working on my paper until I hear from you, so can you PLEASE answer my question?" I'm not sure what astounded me more, that she thought my wife should be online ready to answer student questions, 24/7, or the completely unprofessional tone of a follow up email less than an hour later. The student emailed again at midnight, then several times the following morning. By the Saturday afternoon, she was nearly hysterical in her demands for an answer to her question, pointing out that she only had one evening and a day to do a heavily weight assignment -- as if it were my wife's fault that she had not started the paper earlier. My wife hadn't answered initially because she hadn't been on-line, and by the time she did check her email, she was quite put off by the series of rude and demanding missives from this student. Particularly since my wife had addressed these very points in several classes, which this student had elected not to attend. Finally, sunday morning, she gets an email from the student which said, in effect, "Oh never mind, I looked the answer up in the course outline."

Okay, is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture? In my day, we would never think of bothering a professor outside of class time for information that we could obtain any other way, and certainly not information readily available from the course outline. Email has made it too easy for students, sitting at the computer as they work on an assignment, to shoot off a rapid fire set of questions to their instructor as ideas pop into their brains. There is often no attempt to look anything up themselves or to think something through for themselves first. Why bother, when you can just ask? I get the same thing from my six year old who finds it easier to ask "what does this say" or "how do you spell..." rather than bother to sound it out. And just like I always say, 'sound it out" to my daughter so that she will learn, I am not interested in answering hundreds of emails from students about questions already answered in the outline or class discussion.

My wife encounters many more of these sorts of stupid question than I do, since the education faculty here is an after degree or codegree program, so my students are in their third or fourth year of university, which means they are both more experienced with academia, and that they are the survivors of the screening process -- I only get my wife's successful graduates. By contrast, my wife teaches more students straight out of high school or transfer students from the local college program, which is in some ways worse for this. A latent dysfunction of the high levels of support that college students receive from their instructors (it is routine, for example, for LCC instructors to devote classtime to working on assignments, much like high school, and these college instructors have no research requirements, so are available to students whenever they are not in another class) is that these students expect the same level of handholding at university and are shocked to discover that they are supposed to be able to work more independently. (The university instructors for these transfer students often suffer on their course evaluations as these students crucify them for "not being available outside of class tome" because the instructor hasn't answered an email at 3AM the night before an assignment was due.... My wife has had the experience of students trashing her on the eval and then coming back a year or so later to apologize for ever thinking her unsupportive, once they realize what university norms are.)

So I am thinking of doing a stupid questions web site that would have advice to students about things never to say to your prof. Like the student who complained to my wife about her 'unrealistic' workload for her course: "This was supposed to be my fluff course, but this would be as much work as a real course." Or, that common loser query: "I skipped class last Friday because I was just way too hung over. Did I miss anything?" (See Tom Wayman's answer to that one.) I would start by pointing out that teaching is only 40% of the average professor's workload (considerably less for the Big Name researchers); that the average prof at UoL teaches five courses; that if your look around the class you are in and count the number of your fellow students and figure that marking and class preparation (lesson planning, powerpoint prep, etc,) takes about an hour for every hour of classtime, then they have enough information to do the math for how much time a prof has for their questions:

(40% of 40 hour work week) minus (9 hours of teaching plus 9 hours of marking/prep) divided by x number of students per class times number of classes = a number far below zero for advising

Bathroom Cabinets

Well, we had the baby gates installed on our various stairs a mere week before Kasia started to crawl; I got the toilet locks in place the day Kasia discovered she could reach the flush handle and I found her poised over the bowl holding her hated bottle of baby Advil; didn't quite get to the bathroom cabinet locks in time....

kraft ride quartz teach deprivation

Although I cannot know for sure, short of coming out and asking the chief suspects, I'm pretty sure today's title illustrates a conspiracy.

In a previous post, I had described my attempts to analyze visitors to this site and what was bringing them to me through use of extreme tracker. I was particularly fascinated (okay, appalled) by the Google and other engine searches that resulted in "unique" (i.e., one-time visitors) to my blog. People would type "boring" and "family photos" into Google, and somehow end up at my site. (Well, I have "boring" in the title, and "family photo" in one entry, so...)

Then things got weird.

I started seeing these really strange search terms turning up -- things like today's title -- that made my brain hurt. What possible interest could cause someone to come up with that list of terms? Were these people with really bad search skills, or was I somehow attracting a lunatic fringe interested in ... well, what the hell would "kraft", "ride", "quartz" "teach" and "deprivation" have in common?

Turns out, Neo-Opsis editor and practical joker, Karl Johanson, had taken it upon himself to organize a conspiracy of about half a dozen people to read my blog, pull out random words, then do a google search on them. Of course, the result was dozens of totally bizarre word combinations that defied analysis.

Fortunately, Karl confessed before I went completely nuts.

But now, I'm thinking, this has got to be a reusable practical joke. Who do I know who regularly looks through their tracker's to analyze search engine referrals?

Or, is there a company out there we want to mess with? Some company that deserves a boycott? Instead of stop buying stuff off their web site, we could just organize a couple of hundred people to scan the site for a combination of words that when strung together out of context, would make their CEO nervous: say, "international" from their marketing page, "criminal" from their ad saying, "prices so low it's criminal" and "organization" from their description of their organizational chart, and then some fairly unique word from their site, say, "Kumquat" that would put the whole combination high in a google search to make it easy for the conspirators to find it quickly when scanning the search engine results page. So at the end of the month when marketing has to report what the number one search engine result was for their storefront, the report goes to the CEO that folks are hitting on the site looking for "international criminal organization Kumquat". Would make for an interesting board meeting with the guys from marketing, eh?

Just a thought...