Every year at some point before Halloween, I imagine myself going to a large, fabulous party somewhere in celebration. That worked out last year, though I managed to sabotage a potentially good time. So this year, we keep expectations low. In celebration of Halloween, I will:
Continue wedding planning with my fiancée.
In the process of (1), spend more than 20 consecutive minutes in the same room as Mykala.
Study Histology.
Wax a tooth.
Go to bed early.
I’ll be dressed as a sleep-deprived dental student complete with hair that needs to be cut, glasses, and scrubs. My most convincing costume yet.
Twelve hour dental school days aren’t even long anymore. They’re just typical. At the end of them, you come back home (starving, if you didn’t pack a dinner) and just settle in and try to concentrate on more work until bedtime. Thankfully, nothing is hard per se… it’s just a gigantic pile of things to memorize.
Mykala has been keeping me sane; she gives me perspective and food, as needed. Both of very high quality.
So, yes — lots and lots of memorization. As time progresses, this will give way to skill building and understanding. In the meantime, the information dam has broken, and the weight of the water crashes down each day.
Give me a snorkel and a pencil, and we’ll press on until December.
I came up like everyone
They taught us all the same
I said what they told me to say
And then from that they grade
Give up repeating the facts
Fact can be arranged
Here I am, I’ll take my chance
Now play the record straight.
Now give it up!
Oh oh oh oh oh oh
Give it
up!
Oh oh oh oh oh oh
Talking points from talking heads
With automated smiles
There’s no higher ground to stand
Than bottom of the pile
Give up acting unaware
You can’t ignore the crime
The enemy is you as well
The enemy is I
This has been the longest shortest week I can remember — that is to say, the days have been very long, to the point that I can scarcely differentiate Monday from Tuesday from Wednesday and so on. The days just blur from one to the next… I can feel my mind, like a muscle in training, becoming better and better at learning (which is helpful) but I feel my body become more and more tired. And so… I’m off to the library in a minute to see how long I can study there.
Studying for a biochemistry exam tomorrow is like undergraduate déjà vu. Like that old Garfield and Friends episode:
Déjà vu… the feeling you are doing something you have done before…
Déjà vu… the feeling you are doing something you have done before…
Repeat ad nauseum. Thankfully, the didactics slowly fade out and the clinical slowly fades in through the next two years. The D1s and D2s live for the third year, when clinical work is almost full time — bliss!
Today was fail. Tomorrow we try again. Tonight, we prepare for tomorrow. This weekend… well, I haven’t thought that far ahead. Also: this text brought to you by a first-person plural personal pronoun used in the archaic (for English) T-V distinction.
At least that’s my new explanation for always saying
“We’ll see you later.”
If I had the time to record an album of music, I’d want it to sound like Peter Bradley Adams’ Leavetaking. Try out the track Los Angeles. This guy is the real deal. Hole. Ee. Crap. That’s some good music.
On Friday afternoon, as the yellow leaves rustled under a warm autumn sun, Mykala and I drove through the country around White Bear Lake listening to that album. Magical.
Dentistry — hoo boy, they make you earn it to work in this occupation. It was a long long day, and my left eye seems to be twitching for some reason. (Note to left eye: please stop! Ok, thanks, bye!) I did make it outside to sit and eat a spot of lunch with Mykala as she was coming back from Marriage and Family Therapy related classes. Such a (literal, figurative, actual, metaphorical, etc., et al.) ray of sunshine in the middle of the day.
I know we’ll look back at this time and remember only sunny days.
Several years later I developed a broader theory of what
separates the two general classes of learners—helpless
versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different
types of students not only explain their failures
differently, but they also hold different “theories” of
intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence
is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and
that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes
crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors
to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to
change. They avoid challenges because challenges make
mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like
Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that
having to work hard means they are dumb.
The
mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think
intelligence is malleable and can be developed through
education and hard work. They want to learn above all
else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your
intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because
slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can
be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing
rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to
learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we
predicted, were destined for greater academic success and
were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.
Later in the article, the author’s hypotheses were verified: your innate IQ has very little to do with your grades, and even less to do with mastery of skills and understanding of academic materials. This concept even extends to sports, careers, etc. I think it is common sense. What isn’t common sense is how to engender this “hard work trumps innate ability” idea in our children (emphasis mine):
Although many, if not most, parents believe that they should build up a child by telling him or her how brilliant and talented he or she is, our research suggests that this is misguided.
In studies involving several hundred fifth graders published in 1998, for example, Columbia psychologist Claudia M. Mueller and I gave children questions from a nonverbal IQ test. After the first 10 problems, on which most children did fairly well, we praised them. We praised some of them for their intelligence: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” We commended others for their effort: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.”
We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed mind-set more often than did pats on the back for effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for example, shied away from a challenging assignment—they wanted an easy one instead—far more often than the kids applauded for their effort. (Most of those lauded for their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from which they would learn.)
I’ve found I usually tend towards the more difficult problems — for example, in DDR, I always want to fail the fast, difficult songs (to try to learn as quickly as possible) rather than shine at an easier song. I wonder if my parents took conscious steps to instill this hard-work-over-talent attitude in me, or if it is simply a core belief of their own that was passed on to me. Perhaps I’ll ask.