Continuing Education

2014 has been a good year for my education in at least three and a half ways. I want to write about them here, not to brag, but to cheer for myself moving from "kind of, sort of learning some stuff" to a more structured approach that seems to be making a difference.

1. My Spanish is getting better. Early in the year I took some community-ed Spanish classes where I had to get over my fear of trying out the language aloud in front of other students and a teacher who was a native speaker. Those have ended, but I've been using Duolingo to work on vocabulary and practice translation, and I'm starting to use some new strategies from Fluent Forever that should help even more.

2. A few months ago I got our old family accordion repaired, got some instruction books, and started practicing. My family has been very patient (accordions are loud) and I'm having a lot of fun! The weirdest thing is that while it's always been hard-to-impossible for me to memorize piano music, accordion music is much easier to memorize. Which is good, because imagine having to turn pages during an accordion performance.

3. Early this year I was introduced to Coursera, a platform for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) where you can sign up and take classes from universities all over the world for free. They're not for credit, of course, and usually not as rigorous as a regular undergraduate class, but they're a fun way to explore different subjects and get some brain exercise. Most of them run for 6 to 12 weeks, and my biggest problem has been trying not to sign up for too many at once. Here's what I've finished this year:

The Science of the Solar System (Caltech) - Serious science class with an amazing (and famous) instructor, Mike Brown (also known as Plutokiller). My second favorite so far.

Songwriting (Berklee College of Music) - This one was fun and took me way out of my comfort zone (I had to post my singing online for strangers to listen to).

Vital Signs: Understanding What the Body Is Telling Us (University of Pennsylvania) - All the things the doctor checks when you go in for a physical, explained.

Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World (University of Michigan) - I liked reading sci-fi classics like Frankenstein and Dracula, but I didn't like writing essays and trying to come up with something meaningful to say. That's one thing I don't miss about college.

Programming for Everybody (University of Michigan) - Easy introduction to the Python programming language.

Pre-Calculus (University of California, Irvine) - A great review of algebra and trigonometry and all that fun math I haven't used in years.

Fundamentals of Music Theory (University of Edinburgh) - Not the best-thought-out class (it got really difficult really fast) but it was fun to listen to the instructors.

Developing Your Musicianship (Berklee College of Music) - Some basic music theory, demonstrated by a super fun teacher who's clearly enjoying every minute, leading up to learning how to write and play a 12-bar blues.

Copyright for Educators & Librarians (Duke University and others) - Very specific topic that was actually quite interesting.

Learning How to Learn (University of California, San Diego) - Fairly good class with some good ideas about more effective studying and learning.

An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python (Rice University) - My very favorite class so far. Each week we had a game to program, getting more and more complicated and ending with an Asteroids game - here's mine. (Of course they gave us step-by-step help and provided the sounds and graphics, but still, it was really fun to write the code and get it to work correctly.)

Introduction to Guitar (Berklee College of Music) - I gave this 6-week guitar course a good effort and can now say I have tried guitar. Back to accordion for me.

Social Psychology (Wesleyan University) - Quite a good overview of this subject, with lots of video interviews of well-known psychologists and clips from famous and infamous experiments.

Think Again: How to Reason and Argue (Duke University) - Logic, fallacies, evaluating deductive and inductive arguments.

How Things Work (University of Virginia) - Basic mechanics (physics) using everyday examples. I just finished this one today.

I'm kind of amazed at how long that list has gotten, just from spending some time on classes most evenings instead of watching TV.

3.5. The half is for the Shakespeare reading. Apparently my goal of reading all the plays in one year was a little ambitious, but I'm more than half finished and still going (The Merry Wives of Windsor, currently) so I know I'll get there eventually. And then on to Dickens, I think.

Sidewalk astronomy

First of all, happy National Punctuation Day!

Basic celebration technique: Use proper punctuation in all your writing today.
Next level: Read a chapter of Dickens or Austen or another 19th-century book with long sentences, paying attention to the punctuation.
Advanced: Take the quick punctuation symbol quiz at Quizicon.


Yesterday we had our first astronomy class. We talked about the solar system and how it's hard to get a sense of the distances involved when you just look at numbers. We did two activities that I highly recommend, both for scientific interest and for the jaw-drop factor!

The first one was a scale model of the earth and the moon. We followed the general outline from this site. We used a basketball for the earth, measured it and calculated the diameter, then calculated the circumference needed for the moon. It turns out that a tennis ball is about the right size. Next, I asked the kids to guess how far apart the basketball and tennis ball should be placed. They moved the balls around and made different guesses, but all were between about 1 and 5 feet. Then we did the math to figure out what the distance really should be in this scale. It comes out to about 24 feet. I had someone hold the basketball at one end of the living room, then got the tape measure and showed them how far 24 feet is -- all the way across the living room, up the stairs and back along the hallway! It's amazing when you see it represented visually. Before doing this, I had never comprehended how far away the moon really is.

The second eye-opening activity was a scale model of the solar system. There are many sites online that give instructions for this, but I used this site because it has a spreadsheet where you can put in different numbers and tweak the scale however you want. I went out early that morning and measured how long our block is (with our homemade hodometer or measuring wheel, which has been surprisingly useful over the years) and then twiddled the spreadsheet until the whole solar system fit onto our block. The spreadsheet gives you all the distances from the sun, but I also wrote down the distances from each planet to the next planet.

In the class we used a ruler marked with millimeters to draw the sun and planets in the scale we were using. The sun ended up being 50 millimeters, or almost 2 inches across. Jupiter was 5 millimeters. The earth was a tiny dot, 0.4 millimeters.

We went to the end of the block and placed the sun. (We taped our sun and planets to water bottles so they wouldn't blow away.) 7 feet from the sun was Mercury, then 6 more feet to Venus, 5 more to the earth, and 9 more to Mars. The kids were fairly impressed, but then I announced the next distance: 65 feet more to Jupiter. Wow! Now jaws were dropping. 76 to Saturn, and then an incredible 170 feet more to Uranus, 192 to Neptune, and 167 to Pluto. That took us just about to the end of our block, where we could barely see the sun at the other end.

This is an amazing activity because when you see pictures of the whole solar system, the sizes of the planets and the distances between them can't be in the same scale. It wouldn't fit in a picture. So we get the impression that those distances aren't as big as they are. Seeing our tiny dots of planets and the huge distances between them made those numbers much more real.

The spreadsheet also pointed out that in the scale we used, the distance to the nearest star (other than the sun, of course) would be 901.6 miles. That puts the solar system back into perspective as a relatively close family, far from our nearest neighbors!

I had to laugh during our activity as I realized the odd picture we made. Here were 10 kids, ages 7 to 14, marching together down the sidewalk, chanting the distance aloud as we watched the arrow on the hodometer. "63, 64, 65..." I wondered if the neighbors were thinking, "Oh, it's just those homeschooled kids, practicing their remedial math."

Produce departments and English

In our local grocery store this week there's a sale on plums. The sign says:

WHY THEY LAST
RED AND BLACK PLUMS

I'm not sure why they last. Do you know? The funny thing is that a few months ago they were asking the same thing about the strawberries.

(At least it didn't say "red and black plum's.")

Words I had to look up II

stentorian (sten-TOR-ee-un), adjective.
Extremely loud. From Stentor, "a Greek herald in the Trojan War noted for his loud voice."
I looked up senator to see if it could be related. Nope, senator is from the Latin senex, "old man." (Insert your own senator joke here.)

rarefied (REHR-uh-fide), adjective.
Can mean less dense (as in air), but I needed definition two: "of, relating to, or interesting to a select group; esoteric." Now it makes sense: "Beyond that rarefied community, though, very few people have heard . . ." It's not a community high in the Himalayas, it's the relatively small group of serious Egyptologists.

hussar (huh-ZAHR or huh-SAHR), noun.
A soldier in a military unit based on the Hungarian light cavalry (horsemen) in the 1400s. The word traces through a Hungarian word for "highway robber" and a Serbian/Croatian word for "pirate" and eventually links up with the Latin cursus, "course," which also produced the word corsair which means a pirate or privateer. (Makes sense, but I didn't know corsair and hussar were related.) Cursus goes farther back to Latin currere, "to run." And course has a second meaning I didn't know, which is "to follow close upon, to pursue," an appropriate linkage for corsair.

dragoon (druh-GOON), noun.
A soldier in a military unit of heavily armed mounted troops. So the hussars are apparently the lightly armed, more agile riders, and the dragoons are the powerhouses (at least in Napoleon's time). It's from the French for "dragon," as far as I can tell.

Larry the Language Nerd

The strange and fascinating comic strip Wondermark recently paid tribute to (or poked fun at) us language nerds. Now I need to find an excuse to use the title "Grumpy Grammar Gus."

http://wondermark.com/d/434.html

Words I had to look up

(The first of a series. I look up words all the time, and if I post some of them here, maybe I'll remember them better!)

soi-disant (SWAH-dee-ZAHn) (nasal French "n" sound there at the end), adjective.
So-called or self-proclaimed. "The soi-disant superstar seems not to realize her fame has significantly waned."

autochthones (ah-TAHK-thuh-neez), plural noun. (You should have heard the way I was trying to pronounce this one before I looked it up. Frightening!)
People or living things that are native to a region. "When I arrived with my conquering force, the autochthones were surprisingly unwelcoming." (From Greek chthon = earth.)

chthonic (THAH-nik), adjective.
Relating to the underworld. (Same Greek root.)

Link to a very fun quiz

You have 5 minutes to guess the 100 most common words in English. When you get one right it appears in the list. I went like gangbusters for about 90 seconds and then really had to think. The 5 minutes ended, I got my score (54 out of 100), and then there was a little bit of head-slapping when I saw the ones I missed. Try it! (But go easy on the slapping.)

English Majors

I ran across a Garrison Keillor skit about people like me. Here's a peek:


SS: I like you, Frank...but— when I hear you use "gift" as a verb—

TR: Whatcha talking about?

SS: Gift is a noun, Frank. It shouldn't be used as a verb.

TR: Oh please. You're not going to be one of those people, are you?

SS: I am one of those people, Frank. I'm an English major-I thought you understood that.

TR: I thought you'd get over that, Jessica.

SS: Frank, being an English major is not something you get over. It's who I am.


Read it all here.