Meta Blogging

In September, I started a series of blog posts on college courses that I've taken. I wrote a post every day and got through about four or five semesters' worth, depending on how you count it (one year was quarters, plus some AP classes from high school). I haven't stopped but have slowed way down. Between not wanting so spam my (3) loyal readers and not having the time to keep up a post a day, I couldn't maintain that kind of production.

I don't know how the NaNoWriMo people do it. Well, I do know that of the hundreds of thousands of people who sign up, the average number of words written per person is just under 15,000. They're supposed to write 50,000. About one in five finish, which means about two in three write nothing.

I did write a post for every day that one month, which is something I wanted to try, and I have kept up my streak of at least one post a month for the past four years. Interestingly enough, I pulled in a little over 15,000 words in September, which means I beat a lot of NaNoWriMo people.

Something else I have let slip is my RSS reader. I had close to a thousand unread posts in there from all around the web. I unsubscribed from the feeds for a MOOC I stopped participating in, which dropped a few hundred unread posts off. I marked the posts from the You Are Not a Photographer blog, because everything is in there twice and they keep doing weird things with their feed that makes old stuff I've already read show up as unread again. I may end up just unsubscribing, since it looks like they stopped including the picture in their RSS feed, so you have to actually visit the site to make fun of how bad people are at photography. I've been considering unsubscribing from the Freakonomics blog for awhile now, but every once in awhile a post comes along that makes it all worth it.

I finally unsubscribed from Larry Ferlazzo's blog. I'm sorry, Larry. I tried to keep up. I really did. I subscribed when I found several interesting posts related to Bloom's Taxonomy, which I was reading about at the time. Seven posts a day is too much for me, especially if I get a couple days behind. To give you an idea of the volume here, he has well over 500 "most popular" posts. I have no idea how many unpopular posts he has. I was going to maybe suggest that he try Twitter, since his blog posts are mainly lists of interesting site related to teaching a given topic, and Twitter is great at sending out links to people. Of course, I should have known; he's got more than 30,000 tweets. That means that over 3 years on Twitter, he averages 27 tweets a day. Given an average of about 12 words per tweet, that's almost 10,000 words per month, so he's not much off the NaNoWriMo average and doing better than most would-be authors just on Twitter.

One thing I do need to do is go back and fix the pictures in my September posts. I didn't add a picture to every post, but for the ones that I did, I got lazy. I just randomly googled images and grabbed stuff wherever I found it. Normally I use photos licensed with Creative Commons on Flickr. When I use their photo, I will link back to their Flickr stream and leave a comment on the photo I used with my thanks for their sharing and a link to the post where I used it. The bus up there is just a random openly licensed photo I found that kind of popped out at me. Thanks for sharing but not sharing too much.

photo by didbygraham

Business Communication

Business Communication was a great class. I enjoyed it and still use things I learned in it. One great thing about it was that it was a night class taught once a week. I like the extended time less often, because it seems that you can get into deeper conversations given the extra time. I like night classes a lot more than early a.m. classes, since I'd rather stay up late than get up early.

The content of the course was useful. We learned a ton of grammar, which I really appreciated. My spelling and grammar have always been pretty good anyway, but there were things I learned in this class that I had never grasped before. I do purposely break certain rules for various reasons, but it always is for a reason when I do. I do occasionally start a sentence with "And" but almost exclusively on my blog and only for added emphasis. The unfortunate thing about this class is that they have since removed the grammar component. Given my AP and ACT scores, I'd have qualified to skip the grammar pretest and never had to learn any of the rules that I actually appreciate having learned in this class.

A couple examples:

When using conjunctions such as and, because, but, and or, you only put a comma before the conjunction if what follows the conjunction could stand alone as a complete sentence. I raked the leaves and emptied all the garbage cans. No comma since "emptied all the garbage cans" is not a complete sentence. I had previously always used a comma before a conjunction.

You can tack two complete, related sentences together with a semicolon and no conjunction. I will pick up dinner at Pizza Pie Cafe on my way home; they are having a sweet sale right now.

Something I'll always remember about this class was the overhead slides. No, the weird part isn't that the professor used overhead slides instead of computer-based slides, although that was a little strange, too. This was and is one of my favorite professors of all time but for whatever reason had a strange method for displaying the overheads: lay slide on overhead, turn on overhead, talk about slide, turn off overhead, lay slide on overhead, turn on overhead, etc. The overhead projector was turned on and off for every single slide. I remember joking with my classmates that any electricity savings from the two seconds it was turned off while picking up the next transparency off the pile would surely be lost by having the replace the worn out power switch before its time.

I also recall that the final paper for this class had to be cancelled. It was supposed to be a research paper, which we'd write with all our new-found communication skills. The problem was that when you do research, you have to get IRB approval, even if it's a simple survey to ask people about their parking behaviors, which ours was. IRB approval usually takes months, and while there are provisions for blanket IRB approval for class-based research projects in certain situations, it was too late for that process as well. Being the go-getters that we were (and since I was writing a paper about the same topic in my English class the same semester), we already had our research collected by the time the sad news was delivered. We ended up writing and turning in our paper anyway for extra credit. The extra credit should have been reversed, since we threw a bunch of screen beans into it, and that flies in the face of any kind of professional communication which we had been learning about. It's too bad I couldn't have taken some of that extra credit and applied it to the grade in my English class, for which I was using some of the same content.

Microeconomics

A strange turn in this class I took was that I had one professor for the first half of the semester and another for the second half of the semester. The first professor delivered a baby halfway through, so they assigned someone else to teach after her baby was born. C'est la vie.

While Macroeconomics is more about a top-down look at the economies of countries across the world, Microeconomics is about the choices of individual companies and people. They are highly related, since government tariffs and quotas obviously affect the motivation of individuals to produce or cut production of affected products.

For example, Haiti used to be a rice-exporting nation. It was their main product. Their people have always been poor due to the policies of foreign governments, corruption of their own government, and frequent natural disasters. But they always had rice. At a macroeconomic level, you could look at the amount of rice they sold to other countries and the policies of various governments that facilitated that. In the 1980s, cheap (or sometimes even free) rice from the U.S., AKA Miami rice, flooded our island neighbor to the point where it was no longer profitable to grow rice. Macroeconomic conditions led to the overabundance of Miami rice. Microeconomic principles led to individual farmers halting production of Haitian rice.

An interesting topic they talk about in Microeconomics is one of monopolies. A monopoly, of course, is a situation where one company controls the supply of a particular product or service to the point that they can engage in unfair practices. They are often highly regulated to avoid problems. Or even more drastic action may be taken as was the case when our phone system a few decades back was split up into several smaller regional carriers.

Interestingly enough, the way the phone systems have evolved over the years since, several of those Baby Bells combined back together, and with the market changes due to mobile phones, we actually find a small number of companies controlling the market. They compete, yes, but to some extent they collude to keep prices high. Take text messaging, for example, which is disturbingly expensive relative to the actual costs. It actually costs more to track and bill text message usage than it does to deliver the messages, so when you pay for texting, you're really paying for them to bill you for texting, not for the delivery of the actual messages. This type of situation is called an oligopoly. Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile can't make any huge moves to totally disrupt the market because of the market share of the other companies, but they don't want to either, because they're all sitting pretty if they can maintain the status quo. The potential buyout of T-Mobile by AT&T would actually serve to start tipping the monopoly scale if approved by regulators, so I don't think it's likely.

Business Spanish

Business Spanish was different than any other Spanish class which I have taken in that there was a point to it. I say that kind of flippantly, of course. I have enjoyed the various classes I have taken over the years, but most of them lack a real context of learning a language for a specific reason.

I remember in one of the earlier classes I had taken having a discussion about why we were learning the words we were learning. What's the big deal about learning the words for family relationships, food, types of vehicles, and rooms in the house? We did come to the conclusion that it's probably because those are common things around us in everyday life. You don't go very far without encountering a door, needing to eat, or having to find a bathroom.

In learning a language for a business context, there were reasons for learning more advanced, nuanced words and phrases other than a laying-around-eating-apples-by-the-pool-in-your-cousin's-backyard context. One of the most useful skills would have to be writing an appropriate business letter, which is hard to do in any language.

This class would actually be followed up the next semester by a Business Communication course (in English), which was also very helpful in learning many rules of grammar and writing business correspondence. It's sort of interesting that it's the first course I've ever taken in another language before taking the same course in my native language.

Something more applicable to my college career generally is that this was the first, and only, course I've ever taken as Pass/Fail, if that wasn't the only option. I had learned about the Pass/Fail option long after it would have been really useful to me. I still don't understand why that isn't one of those things they train freshman on in university orientation.

I was enjoying this class. I thought I was learning a lot. The teacher was tough, but it was interesting. Then the midterm hit. It destroyed us. Everyone in the class just bombed it. The professor was not happy about it. Everyone was stressed out about it. I think a few people dropped. I looked into the option to change to Pass/Fail, and it looked like it might work. I talked to everyone I could find in the department to make sure they would still accept the course for my minor in Spanish if it was not graded.

Everyone agreed I could, so rather than fight with my grade in the class, I changed to Pass/Fail. The tricky thing is that it's technically P/D/F, not just Pass/Fail, so if you earned a D, you'd still get a D on your transcript. By this time, I had recovered from my freshman year and had a decent GPA going, so even a B would pull me down, and it seemed worth the switch. I was pretty certain I wasn't going to get a D, but above that I had no idea.

In the end, I totally don't know if it was worth it. I mean, it was, because it caused me a lot less stress, but I have no idea what grade I would have earned in the class. I have no idea what grade my fellow classmates earned. I don't know if she applied any type of curve or graded it straight. All I knew is that I got some peace of mind, and I got to try out the Pass/Fail option.

Legal and Ethical Environment of Business

This course, also known as Business Law, was really a great class. It was hard, but not too hard. It was interesting, but not too interesting. Just kidding. It was just the right amount of interesting, though.

Here we learned the basics of the legal system. We talked about the differences between civil and criminal proceedings. In criminal proceedings, to be convicted, it has to be beyond reasonable doubt. The prosecution has to make the tough case. In civil litigation, however, it's a plaintiff rather than government prosecutor going after the defendant, and judgment is made on a preponderance of the evidence. Basically, throw the evidence in one of those Lady Justice scales, and whichever way it tips, no matter how slight, that's the side that wins.

We talked a lot about land and things like adverse possession, trespassing, and liens. Our professor told us about how he was able to get a piece of land for basically nothing by filing certain paperwork and paying the taxes on a piece of land for a certain number of years, and it became his for only the cost of the taxes. I'm not sure if that makes me want to be a lawyer or not want to be one. I think I'd enjoy doing stuff like that a little too much.

One of the things I liked most about the class was not related to the content (well, slightly related) but more to its administration. Specifically, the administration of tests. I generally subscribe to the belief that tests should be well written. Item analysis should be done to ensure questions are measuring what they purport to measure in a valid way. Garbage or joke answers should be avoided, because they don't add anything and throw off the answer statistics. The only point I can see to those obviously incorrect joke answers on a multiple choice test is that it may serve to reduce some test anxiety for some students.

So the questions on the tests for this class were terrible. But terrible in a good way. They were written by a random graduate assistant or something, not the professor. If they had actually be written by a lawyer that was worth anything, they would have been tight like I would expect them to be. Having such ridiculous questions actually served a purpose, though.

After taking the test, we would get our copy of the test back, and we could go back through everything that night and come back to class the next day prepared to fight for points. If there was a bad question, okay, when there was a bad question, you would be prepared to explain why the answer you chose was right or why none of the answers was correct or all of the answers were correct, or something else. With a page number and a quote from the book, you argued your case. If you had a preponderance of the evidence, you got the point back. Sound familiar? He gave us garbage so we would go through it, analyze every word on every line, become an expert on that item, and hold him accountable for the mistake in the way of compensatory points back.

I also had one of those real life versions of that nightmare that we've all had of showing up completely unprepared for a test. I don't know what was going on that I showed up to one of the midterms and wondered why so many people were there early sitting on the ground outside waiting for the previous class to finish up, until I saw everyone madly skimming through their textbooks. Oh, it's test day! Last minute cramming. I flipped my book open, and got in about 5 minutes' worth before the class started. Luckily, it was one of those classes where you could drop one test. Unluckily, that meant I'd have to take the comprehensive final, which I was looking forward to skipping and dropping the 0.

Principles of Business Information Systems

While the Science Orientation course I took was technically my last orientation course, I'm not sure it's totally accurate to claim that. The Principles of Business Information Systems course I took was probably more accurately labeled a BIS (now MIS) Orientation course. Yes, it's meant for other business majors, too, so they can have a basic understanding of what the IS people do, but that still screams orientation to me, whether or not you're talking to students who will actually major in that field.

The part that was weird was that this was a 300-level course. It's something I never understood. Apparently other people didn't understand it either, because they have since changed it to a 200-level course.

I just never really got it and still don't. If they would change it to a 1 credit 100-level orientation course, I'd totally understand. What are some career options? What do IS professionals contribute to the business environment? Basic terminology related to hardware and software. Trends in the field. Professional organizations. I remember writing a two page paper about my brother in law's business, selling calculators and cables, since back in the 90s, this crazy new e-commerce thing was a pretty big deal.

They actually added some Excel and HTML/CSS to the course. Yes, when they dropped it down from a 300-level to a 200-level course they added more stuff to it. That may have been to keep them from having to drop it to a 100-level course.

Data Communication and Networking

Something I really liked about the Data Communication and Networking course was that it was in the late afternoon one day a week. That was a far cry from my Chemistry class at 8:30 every morning my freshman year.

Something I still wonder about to this day was the deal with the McDonald's cup my instructor would be sipping on every class. It was one of those jumbo paper cups, not a mug, and they don't last that long, so I'm sure it was a new one every time. It made me wonder if he just ate out on days we had class or if he ate at McDonald's every day. Maybe he did just save that same cup and reuse it all the time.

On the first day of class, we took a pretest. We were promised that anyone who received higher than a certain score (maybe 70) could receive an automatic A in the class and wouldn't have to attend the rest of the semester. The test was basically a preview of the final exam, and it was hard. Nobody came anywhere close. It does make me wonder what he did with the test results. I don't know if he used the results to actually determine where we were knowledgeable and where we lacked in aggregate to guide his lectures. I've always thought it was a great idea but have never seen anyone else start off a class this way.

This class covered the basics of the OSI model and various network configurations and equipment. It was a pretty basic intro to get us familiar with all kinds of networking terminology but not to a point that we could actually do much with it, especially given that many of the technologies we talked about were old and not used much anymore, except in legacy environments. For what it was, it was a reasonable introduction to networking.

Survey of Accounting II

The second accounting class I took was more interesting than the first class I took. We had gotten past the endless writing of debits and credits on T charts and started doing some interesting things. It covered topics such as cost accounting, budgeting, and standard cost variances.

Sure those topics sound boring, but this is where you start getting to a point where the accountant can actually help a business make important decisions. By breaking down fixed and variable costs to determine the true price of, let's say, an item you are manufacturing, you can determine the price you need to sell it at to cover all your costs. The accountant becomes a key member of the management team who helps everyone else understand where the money is coming from and where it is going. If I had to be an accountant, I would go into cost accounting.

Something I remember from this class was going to my professor's office to review my tests with him. I was always able to get a few points back by going in and talking to him. I would write notes all over my test paper, but the scantron only records if the bubble you selected is right or wrong. I would go look through the questions I missed, look at the notes I had written to see where I went wrong, and show him how I had maybe just flipped something right at the end, so I was really close to getting it. He gave me back partial credit on several questions like that.

It was in this class and the Microeconomics course I also took during my second semester as a business major that I would hone my craft of estimating my grade on a test. I take multiple choice tests relatively quickly. I'm pretty good at figuring out that type of question, generally. One testing technique I learned early on is that the longer you spend on a question, the more likely you are to miss it. Just answer it and move on. Your first guess will more often be right. If you get through quickly and have one of those professors who likes to lecture after the test instead of just letting you go, you sit around with nothing to do for several minutes while the over-analyzers are working hard at changing their correct answers to the incorrect answers, so you have to find something to do.

The technique I would use is this. Go through the test and count the answers that I just straight up felt confident about. I know it. One point. For questions that I didn't feel as confident about, I would count a percent for how sure I felt I had it right. If I totally guessed, 25%, assuming 4 potential answers. If I had ruled out 2 possible distractors (test item analysis lingo for wrong answers) and guessed between the remaining 2, I counted 50%. Add up the points and divide by the number of questions, and there you have it.

Advanced Spanish Grammar

We would all do well to take an advanced grammar course, no matter the language. Before I get too far, though, I'm going to claim that any missteaks I make are here on purpose to point out the need for better grammar and spelling lest I am caught by the cardinal sin of improperly making fun of someone else's grammar.

That said, a blog post comes to mind, which came across Twitter earlier today. With the caveat that I understand that I'm not a perfect grammarian, and I've come a long ways in my learning not to look down on those with poor spelling and grammar skills, I really do like this post that I'm going to share, and I am not making fun of it at all. I have not yet watched the video she cites, but I plan to. The post is great, so if you get a pingback from this and come find my post, Chelsi, please don't feel bad.

I'm just going to say that it's a little funny to write a post talking about students' poor grammar skills and title it Is Texting and Instant Messaging Ruining the English Language? when it should have obviously started with the verb "Are" due to its compound subject. I totally get where she was going with it, thinking of texting and instant messaging (and later tweeting) as a singular phenomenon. Is Informal Electronic Messaging Ruining the English Language? I don't know what else I'd call it, and it doesn't matter. The title is fine, and the article is great. If anyone thinks I'm making fun, I'm not. I'll save the snark for responses on Yahoo! Answers. It's a blog post, which by definition is a less formal communication method. Being less formal, it is more important to get the point across than anything else, and we would all do well to cut each other a little slack. I often specifically choose to ignore certain grammar rules to reinforce a point or to make my writing more approachable. Yes, I am pointing out a grammar mistake in someone's post about poor grammar in order to make the point that she gets her point across well enough that it doesn't matter that she even made the mistake.

Okay, so what does this have to do with Spanish? Well, when you're learning a new language, you often learn many things about your own language that you wouldn't have otherwise. Also, when talking to someone who is a native or at least well-educated speaker, it is much different than talking to someone who speaks in halting sentences and a poor accent. We joke about some foreigners forgetting to use words like "the" or not conjugating nouns properly. It is those little things that make a huge difference in sounding educated or not. That is why this class is so important. It focuses on all the little things that take you beyond being able to find el baño and allow you to have a decent conversation with an intelligent person in the new language.

It goes into proper use of the common prepositions a, con, en, and de (to, with, in, and of). The ever-confusing verbs ser and estar (to be) are covered, as are the tricky pair of prepositions para and por (for). In addition to those words, advanced verb forms and tenses are reviewed, including such favorites as the past perfect and imperfect, reflexive verbs, and passive voice.

My favorite advanced grammar skill is piling on reflexive and direct object pronouns at the end of a verb. You can end up with a two word (Quisiera comprartelo.) sentence in Spanish with what would be eight words (I would like to buy that for you.) in English. Granted, they are the same number of syllables, so you're not saving much.

I'm interested by concepts that are present in one language but not another, such as clusivity. A word I really like in Spanish is aquel. It has a few different forms based on gender and number, plus it can be either a pronoun or an adjective, but on top of that, the concept of aquel is one we lack in English, unless you include "them thar hills". Grouped together, there are éstos, ésos, and aquéllos, meaning these, those, and those way over there, respectively. Aquel refers to not just those things, but those far away things. I think if we had such a construct, McCain may have referred to Obama not just as That One but as Aquél.

Psychology

The Psychology course I took as part of general education was a bit strange grading-wise. The content of the course was great. We learned a lot of things about how the brain works, about memorization, careers in psychology, historical figures, and various other theoretical foundations of the field. I remember talking about Bernie Goetz, the Subway Vigilante, as I recall as an example of things people will do under extremely stressful circumstances.

One of the best parts of the course was watching The Mask. Part of the point was observing Ben Stein's role as a clinical psychologist analyzing Stanley's problems that the mask represented (which I unfortunately can't find a video for, but this is a great scene).


Where the course went a little weird, like I mentioned, was in the grading. As we would study each day's material, he would give us a couple related multiple choice questions (but not the answers). By the time of the midterm, we had a bank of questions (but not the answers) that he had given us, from which he wrote the test. In the study session before the midterm, we could ask questions about anything we wanted, so if there were multiple choice questions he had given us that were a little tricky, you could ask some questions about it and know pretty much what the right answer was. Basically, everyone aced the test.

His plan was to follow the same process for the final, and he did, but he let us know that a few people complained that the test was too easy, since he had given us all the possible questions. It was way more questions than would be on the test, and we did have to figure out the answers ourselves, but we had them nonetheless. Some people were apparently frustrated with the fact that you could just look up and memorize all the questions and answers and were worried that other students would pass without really learning anything about psychology. His response was that psychology is largely about the brain and memorization is a big part of that, so there was more psychology in how he gave us the questions than we might have thought. That was the flippant response anyway. The more serious response was that if anyone thought the process was too easy for them, they could get with him to write a paper on an approved topic related to the course content.

I don't know if anyone took him up on the offer. I didn't. I still wonder who was so uptight about a Psych 101 course being too easy. At work we've actually been working on a similar online course, and it's funny because some of the recommendations I made for the course would have turned it into something much more difficult (and I still maintain more rewarding). Thinking back on it, I should perhaps recommend students watch and write a paper on The Mask instead. I wonder how that will go over.