“How Learning Works: 8 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching 2nd Edition” by Marsha Lovett, Michael Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Susan Ambrose, and Marie Norman

I got a free copy of this book from a course on teaching that I took earlier this summer. It is a really useful read, I found myself thinking of different things I could start implementing in my teaching as I read it.

The main idea with the book is they go through eight kinds of issues that you might run into with teaching and from there get into research on the problem, and strategies based on the research to help. There is even a whole appendix with examples of things that they mention in the text such as rubrics and learning outcomes so you have an example of the language.

When I first picked it up, I didn’t quite care for the introduction which is very “we are doing this right and no one else has any idea what they’re doing” but it drops the condescending tone after that. In fact for the rest of it there’s a refreshing stance taken where it emphasizes that we need to learn more about teaching in order to be good teachers.

I haven’t used any of the strategies to be fair, but it’s already got some ideas going in my head of changes that I could make to my pedagogy. I imagine that I’ll be referring back to it plenty of times as I think more and more about how I teach, and so far that’s enough for me!

This Is Beautiful: Giving a Seminar for Undergrads

 So this past week (a week from today actually) I went to a different school up north to give a short talk to their summer researchers that are in undergrad still. It was really cool! Quite a nice change of pace. I gave my talk, got maybe a question from a student about how I decided I wanted to do a PhD, but the professors were all so into it. Everyone was super nice and they chatted with me for a while about what it's like teaching at a school like this. I hope that I get to do more, it's a great confirmation that this is what I want to do and a great way to network!

“Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize” by Sean B. Carroll

I don’t remember how this book got on my radar, but I am so glad that it did and that I finally was able to read it. This is a non-fiction book about Albert Camus and Jacques Monod, two friends that both participated in the French Resistance during World War II that went on to win the Nobel Prize.

The first half of the book talks about their experiences during the war. They didn’t know each other at the time, but Monod was in the middle of doing his PhD at the Sorbonne (which no one was interested in) and he went on to become a leader of the French Resistance. He coordinated messages, destroying train routes, and working with the Allies. Similarly Camus was working on his books dealing with the idea of the absurd (probably The Myth of Sisyphus is the most famous one) and writing for the Resistance newspaper Combat. Both of them had friends that were arrested by the Gestapo and killing, or sent off to concentration camps. It was dangerous work.

After the war ended, Monod finally graduated with his PhD and started a lab at the Pasteur Institute. It was during this time that he learned about the Soviet government essentially rewriting science so that it fit in with its ideology more easily, essentially throwing Darwin and Mendel out the window. Camus was also opposing the USSR, on the grounds that it was silencing its people and promoting ideology over liberty. The two became close friends through this, even though many other writers were abandoning Camus for his opinions. Camus eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature, and as a result started to become more active in politics. Unfortunately, he died in a car accident before he could finish his next book, which he thought would be his greatest. Meanwhile, Monod was trying to smuggle his friend and fellow scientist out of USSR-controlled Hungary. After succeeding, he did groundbreaking experiments in gene regulation that eventually won him the Nobel Prize. Similarly to Camus, this caused him to become more active in politics. When French students started protesting in the 60s, he was the only faculty member to protest with them. He repeatedly affirmed that science and scientists have a duty to society and to make their voices heard. He died while he was in his 70s of what’s thought to be leukemia.

This was such an informative read. I know so little about French history that hearing the story of WWII with the focus on France was extremely new to me. I did not know much about the Resistance, or the fights that were occurring on the streets of Paris with the Germans occupying the city. Even after the war, the occupation of Hungary and the student protest in France was all completely new to me. The single largest thing that I learned though was about Jacques Monod. I had no idea that he was part of the team that figured out how the lac operon worked, or that RNA is the material that goes between DNA and proteins, or how allosteric inhibition works. I’m not going to explain these ideas, but they are all present in intro to genetics courses, and I have taught those courses, but I never knew who the man behind them was!

Monod seems like such an amazing person and an amazing scientist. He was a conductor as well so he was very knowledgeable about music. He apparently had this quirk while writing where he would invent a quote that he needed and would attribute it to the imaginary philosophy McGregor (his mother’s maiden name). Eventually he would both introduce and eulogize Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I cannot believe that I never heard of him, scientists who are also decent people are so rare and here we have one!

Carroll put so much love and work into this book. He interviewed many participants such as the scientist that Monod smuggled out of Hungary, a colleague Monod worked with in the Resistance, and Monod’s two sons. Many of the letters being shown here were unpublished until this book, and the wealth of information about both men is incredible. I know I wrote a lot about Monod, but the extent of the detail about Camus and what he was writing about and how that influenced the rebuilding for France is also highly informative. We truly are so lucky to have this work.

I borrowed this copy from the library, but I honestly want to own my own copy and use it the next time I teach intro to genetics. It is so important to know the history of any discipline that you are a part of, regardless of whether that’s philosophy or science. I adored this book, I do not think I can recommend it highly enough.

This Is Beautiful: Ed Sheeran concert

 Last weekend I got to see Ed Sheeran perform in Detroit as part of his Mathematics tour and let me tell you. It was an amazing show. I forgot that he is such an amazing performer! Beyond just knowing how to work and control a crowd, he does all of the music himself (well almost all of it) and completely live. It is so cool hearing him create these elaborate layers with the loop pedal and build a song from scratch each time.

Not only that, but the concert had a few guests to it! Khalid was an opener, he came back on to do the song that he created with Ed Sheeran for the No. 6 Collaborations Project. And then the most amazing thing was that Eminem came on to do a song with him as well! It was nuts, I'm not even a big Eminem fan and I lost my damn mind. 

Just in general, such a fun concert and such a fun night. I'm so glad I was able to go.

“The Serpent’s Shadow” by Rick Riordan

This is the final installment in Riordan’s series, “The Kane Chronicles,” that focuses on Egyptian mythology and gods. I covered the first book here and the second book here. I do remember reading it when I was younger, although there was a lot that I did forget and rediscovered with this reading.

The book starts with the Kane siblings along with their trainees at another museum trying to get a scroll that details how to defeat Apophis, the giant Chaos snake that is about to rise and take over the world. The snake knows they and there though, and ends up destroying the whole place, including the scroll. However, they get a clue from that, a fragment of a shadow. That gives them the idea to use Apophis’ shadow to banish him from the world. What then follows is they head to the Egyptian afterlife to find a ghost who knows the magic of how to do this. They convince their father to hand him over, and then split up. Sadie and Walk go to test out the spell on Bes’ shadow. Bes was a dwarf god who gave up his spirit in the previous book, the idea is you use the shadow to do the opposite of a banishment, use that to call his spirit back. While they’re doing that, Walt learns that he’s about to die from his family curse that drains his magic. He has a plan though, he merges with the god Anubis, and together they really freak Sadie out. She runs out of there, and goes to help Carter and Zia who are in the middle of Chaos looking for Apophis’ shadow. Along the way the ghost they’re traveling with plays a few nasty tricks, and then runs for it. Sadie drops in just in time to capture the shadow, but then they are surrounded by demons who came to protect the shadow!

Just then Bes comes to the rescue, along with other forgotten Egyptian gods. They rescue the team, and they hitch a ride with the sun chariot. There, Zia merges with the sun god Ra. Similarly, this freaks out Carter. There isn’t a time to get into this though, as the final battle is upon them. First they save their uncle Amos, then they go to fight the serpent. Zia gets swallowed by the serpent, and Carter and Sadie finally do the banishment. This causes the serpent to spit Zia back up, and the serpent retreats. Unfortunately though, this means that the gods have to retreat as well, to maintain balance. In the aftermath, Zia/Carter make up, and Sadie learns to be ok with the boy she likes having merged with the god she likes. And she hears from her mother that there are other gods that soon will threaten the Egyptian ones. So while this is the end for now, the seeds for future stories are planted!

Alright so first thing that caught my eye, are there a ton of polyamorous relationships in this book? Walt and Anubis are more or less constantly sharing a body now. Zia and Ra are debatable as Zia ends up separating from Ra, same with Carter and Horus and Sadie and Isis. So those likely are not poly, but Sadie ends up with not one but two boys that she likes! And she is happy to not have to choose between them! That right there, sounds like a poly relationship. I imagine that Riordan did not intend to create a poly relationship, he likely just wanted to resolve this love triangle, but that is a fun ending that subverts a lot of tropes!

The book does have a lot of interesting things to say about shadows though. I did not know the history of the shadow being part of the soul in Ancient Egypt, but it makes sense. The shadow is a representation of the individual, following wherever you go. But it also represents a person’s impact, in that they “cast a long shadow.” If you get rid of that, you get rid of the whole person and their work. And we see shadows in other works as well, like Peter Pan trying to find his shadow and reattach it. It definitely is a figure that we see a lot of.

To be nitpicky though, I do not think it ever gets addressed that Zia hosts both Nephthys and Ra. In the first book, she is hidden away because she’s hosting the former. In the last book, it’s turned into the latter. Of course, this can easily be explained away by her being able to host different gods at different times. But we aren’t given any other instance of this, and no one even brings up that she hosted Nephthys. So might be a little loophole in the story.

Other thing I want to touch on is the ending, and the tidbit about other gods. I remember reading that in high school and being so excited for a crossover with Percy Jackson or something like that. As far as I know, there is just a short story overlapping the two series right now, but I do think Riordan is getting closer to a big series or something like that. The ending of “The Trials of Apollo” alludes to a meeting between different pantheons of gods, and a cat is there. Likely that is Bast, the cat goddess from this series. So who knows, there could be something cool on the horizon.

Anyways, another Riordan series knocked down. I think next I will be reading the series on the Norse gods? I have never read that one so I am excited to finally be tackling that!

This Is Beautiful: Work Slowing

 I'm very close to taking a month off later in July for medical reasons, and it's honestly really nice that I have starting having my whole life slow down as well. I have less rehearsals in the evenings now that most things are over, and even work has been nicer in that I still have to go in everyday, but I don't have as much to do. Having free time is proving to be really nice, I'm enjoying this for sure.

“Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet” by Alice Robb

I initially found this book through a podcast from Articles of Interest on the design of pointe shoes (you can listen to it here as well). I immediately knew that I had to get my hands on this book, I have struggled for so long with media around dance and ballet in particular. Most stories and books about it typically glamorize the art form while when I was growing up in dance classes, I had a much more complicated relationship to dance. I loved dancing, but I could not wait to get out of class. I put so much pressure on myself to do well, and look good, and it made a lot of it miserable for me. I kept comparing myself to other girls in my class, learned to ignore the pain in my feet, and it was not until college that I unlearned a lot of this and just had fun dancing again.

This book was like a whole therapy session for me. Robb uses her experience dancing at the School of American Ballet for ten years as the backdrop to talk about ballet as a whole. She covers important aspects like how Balanchine is essentially worshipped as the ambassador of ballet to America, and how that legacy tends to overlook his sexual harassment or how he single handedly shortened more ballerinas careers by pushing their bodies to the limit. Similarly she talks about gender roles in ballet, how there’s always men in charge while the women are a dime a dozen. There’s a great chapter on control and how regimented each ballet class is, but how this can be an escape for the young dancers in that it is a constant. You always know how each dance class is going to go.

Another chapter talks about how using your body as an instrument makes you less likely to pick up on social cues like flirting. If you’re in physical contact with other people all the time, holding hands does not seem like much. Ballet also leads to a lot of unhealthy weight loss, pretty much all professional dancers are restricting their intake to keep their “ballet body.” And it is interesting that most other places the body positive movement has made an impact, but dancers can still get called “fat” all the time.

The pain chapter was hard for me to read. I don’t do well with body horror, and I know that dancers dance on broken toes and things like that all the time, but it’s so hard to hear about what people have put themselves through in the name of dance. She then broadens it to talk about masochism and how some dancers have gone on to write about their experiences with that as well. Dancers also have a different relationship to time in that most dance careers are over by the age of 30. You have to get a lot done early on in order to be successful. And finally one of the most interesting chapters was about how dancers have a full sense of their body and control over it. Robb talks about different studies looking at this, and it is really cool to see the science side of this training.

So many chapters resonated with me personally. I remember being in college and thinking about how the men could do much worse in class and not get half the corrections the women did. I know growing up I found the structure of ballet incredibly useful, it let me drop all of my worries about classes and friends and just be in the moment. (Sidenote: I tried to get a travel grant once claiming that dance was a form of mindfulness and was not taken seriously at the time.) I think I was really lucky that I never developed an eating disorder, as it is I mostly just think of myself as “chunky” even though I’m sure my friends would never describe me that way. And even though the pain chapter was hard, it does resonate. I remember being in other dance classes, sharing that I was in pain, and being told to sit down even though my ballet training told me to keep going. It teaches you that your pain does not matter, and I have had a really hard time unlearning that one.

The chapter I have the hardest time wrapping my mind around is the one on flirting and relationships. It makes me wonder, as an asexual dancer, did I have a better time with dance because of the sterile nature of ballet? There is not any sex or kissing in classical ballet, maybe that’s why I have been so drawn to this art form. Once I got older and hit the gyrating, swaying thing that is modern dance, that really put me off. I have writtenabout this elsewhere, but the dance world as a whole is not kind to asexuals since so much of dance is about sex. It is not something I have given much thought to, but maybe there is something there. Robb mostly focuses on straight ballerinas in this chapter, but I wonder if it would look different if she talked to some queer ones? Not even just asexuals, I figured at some point there would be a discussion of queer relationships among the female dancers, but that never came up.

At the same time though, I wonder how much of this is just being an artist or being raised female. Women are always minimizing their pain, most women underestimate the pain of their menstruation, and even when they voice their discomfort men tend to overlook it. And the sections that talk about competition amongst the dancers I think is ubiquitous to art. In music I am always comparing myself to others, as well as dance. Even though it has narrow considerations, I think there is a lot of weight to this in that most dancers are female and all dancers are artists, so still is an accurate description of the experience.

I truly cannot recommend this book enough, I think it gives a really accurate and honest portrayal of the ballet world. Both the good and the bad. We need more books like this that talk from personal experiences with the art form instead of what society at large perceives the dancers to be. I am so happy that I read it.

This Is Beautiful: Weekend Off

 This sounds so lame but I haven't had a weekend where I didn't need to go into lab and feed my cells in a while. But the stars aligned and this past holiday weekend I had to toss my cells and gave myself an actual break from going in. It was lovely, I slept late and got some real rest and spent time just doing nothing. Is this what it's like to have a real job and not be a grad student???