Ahlan wa Sahlan

Hurray! I'm in Jordan.

After one of the longest (and best) vacations of my life, I am finally here. I am very excited about my classes and the host family I have been matched up with. I have a couple of days of orientation with all my program mates here in Amman and then classes start.

I think I fully grasped for the first time that I am really in Jordan as I walked the streets around our hotel with some new friends this evening. I am in a whole new place and it is good to be here.

TLTOE and The Ethnic Theory Behind Plane Crashes

Hey guys - I haven't finished either book yet but I am about halfway through both. I have to admit that I'm having a hard time getting through TLTOE, and recently it's become even more difficult since I started reading Gladwell's Outliers.

The first half of The Last Town on Earth has seemed rather depressing to me (and this isn't to say that it shouldn't be - clearly it's a novel about a flu epidemic during war time), and I agree with Ruth that there are definitely parallels to the war today. I find it interesting that the feeling of fear that Mullen creates affected me the same way as some of the characters. Like some of the characters, however, I'm getting a little bit restless and impatient with the book and the quarantine, and waiting for SOMETHING interesting to happen. I feel like I could summarize the plot of the 200 or so pages that I've read in a few sentences. However, I do appreciate the way that Mullen created a moral dilemma for the characters that I felt carried over to the reader with the "interaction" of the first soldier. Without giving too much away, this conflict inadvertently reminded me of conversations that I've had with others regarding capital punishment and the central question, "Do you have the moral obligation or right to kill a person if their being alive threatens the lives of others?". Regardless of your answer to this, going even further with this question, I wonder if I personally would take someone else's life if I was in this situation. This could be politically shaky ground to cover with residents though, and I'd be curious to know how you all feel. From what I've read so far (and from what I've heard from others who have read the book), TLTOE is much more about the internal conflicts of the characters than about the plot anyways, and so I'll read on with this in mind.

When I turned to the chapter "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes" in Outliers, I was almost too engrossed in Gladwell's arguments about everything I had read so far to think about the fact that I was on a plane flying over the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately, I was not flying Korean Air, so I read on.

I think that the idea that conflicting cultural norms are partially to blame for things such as plane crashes AND the idea of low and high power distance index are both really interesting and definitely seem valid. One other example of this that I thought of was being a backseat driver. My grandmother, for example, who is 88 years old has the opposite problem of many other elderly drivers. You would probably never sit behind her on the road wondering if your speedometer was broken because it was registering so low. She speeds around the country roads of New England where she's lived for over 60 years and generally stops a little too far into the intersection (past the stop signs or into the crosswalks) than I'm comfortable with. Being 69 years her junior, however, I generally feel uncomfortable saying anything about her driving, and just sit and grit my teeth.

This may be a bit of a stretch, but do you think that a similar idea can be applied to the teacher-student relationship? For example, I came from a school system where I would rarely be expected to call teachers Mr. or Mrs. I'm not sure if it was a direct result of this, but I always felt like I had a close relationship with them and was comfortable asking more questions or debating points that they may have brought up. I saw my teachers more as classroom discussion facilitators than lecturers, which I personally liked. Do you think that the teacher's choice to go by their first name allows a closer connection to students and allows more participation and/or discussions and a stronger professional relationship, or does it simply show a lack of professionalism on the teacher's part and a lack of respect by the student? Just curious.

Touching Base

Hey all,
So I just noticed that no one has written in a while and am wondering where everyone is in the books. What do you think about The Last Town on Earth? I found that parts of it remind me of things going on with our own war today. Thoughts?

Just How Useful is the SAT?

Although Gladwell focuses on the IQ test in his third chapter, he does mention the SAT as well, and the SAT seems a much more appropriate example for those in our position. While there has been a definite trend to focus on more well-rounded aspects of a student's academic career during college admissions, the SAT still plays an enormous role in determining who is accepted into a school and who falls short. I think it is obvious that the SAT is a useful tool, but if it is overused or used ineffectively, in what ways could it be improved?

The largest problem with the SAT may be its only goal - to assess pure intellect. How well it achieves this can also be argued, but more importantly, a sharp intellect is not the only part of the whole mental capacity. As Gladwell mentioned, creativity plays a part, and in my opinion so does communication. In a society as dependent on interactions as ours, the ability to effectively transmit ideas and theories is just as crucial as having a solid theory in the first place.

If these three 'categories' are used as the basis for mental capacity, what methods are most useful for aptitude tests? I feel like there is no easy way to test for all three in one shot, and instead there need to be various ways of determining the entirety of a student's capacity.

The 10,000 hour rule

In my previously life, one of my student-athletes (who was undergoing an extensive rehabilitation and thus spent a ridiculous amount of time in the athletic training room) busied himself by trying to estimate the number of ankle tape jobs I had completed during my career as an athletic trainer. The easiest starting point was my first year as a graduate student at Ohio State. I worked pre-season football. Most Division I programs carry approximately 135 players. For easy math, let's say that each day of pre-season, 100 athletes suit up. At Ohio state, this amounted to 100 players getting two ankles taped, two times a day, 6 days per week, for about 4 weeks.

100 * 2 * 2 * 6 * 4 = 9600 ankles taped during pre-season. Divide that by the number of ankles tapers (n=10), and each preseason I probably taped 960 ankles in a four-week stretch. I was at OSU for two years (x = 1920). I worked every home game for two years (n=9), so taped about 180 ankles in that stretch. In two years of football alone, I taped 2000 ankles. I worked the rest of the year in one of the other busy training rooms, so in an average week, probably taped 25 ankles * 30 weeks of school * 2 years = 1500. The summer between my graduate school years, I worked 6 weeks of football camp. Although we didn't tape all of the campers, we did tape a bunch of them, so maybe 10 kids per week = 60. I learned to tape ankles when I was a first-year student at Whitworth. I then worked for three years as a student athletic trainer. On average, I probably taped 10 ankles per week for 30 weeks for 3 years, accumulating about 900 tape jobs under my belt. Add that to 15 years of athletic training at Whitman, with a conservative average of 50 ankles week * 30 weeks of school = 22500 ankles. So by the time I left for sabbatical last spring, I had taped nearly 27000 ankles.

As a result, I can tape ankles blindfolded just as well as I can tape them with my eyes uncovered. On an average day, I can tape an ankle in just under a minute. I guess that is what I have to show for 27000 practice attemps.

What have you done in your lifetime more than 10000 times? Or for more than 10000 hours? What have you done that you can look back on and to which you can contribute some of your skills as a SA?

The Birthday Phenomenon

So after I read the first section of Outliers, I could easily relate to the age for sport context. My own kids are either advantaged by this (in baseball), or subject to this (in soccer). Although the oldest in their school classrooms, in sport it has the potential to create challenges. For my oldest son, he will have to move up to U-15 soccer next fall; no bigger than his 3-years-younger brother, he will be playing with other boys potentially 4 years senior. It is unlikely he will play; rather, he is likely to play fall baseball, where his age is an advantage. But how does the birtday phenomenom affect academics? As discussed at a recent SA traing, all the current SAs and this past year's spring SAs all have birthdays that fall between the last two week of January and the first two weeks of September with a disporportionate number falling in the second quarter of the year (April, May, June). Why is that?

Welcome to the SA blog

Welcome the Whitman College Student Academic Advisers' blog!
It is our hope that this space will be used for the following purposes:
1) connect current SAs with one another over the summer;
2) provide a forum for pre-discussion of the summer reading assignments; and
3) explore blogging as a medium for connection, communication, and collaboration.

Happy blogging!