Well, I thought I was going to waffle myself out of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) because I am old, experienced, and should never have to suffer such indignities again because I have done it so many times in the past. My hopes were shattered earlier this week when I heard from my buddy who had talked to the bureaucratic high mucky-mucks at the UNL graduate admissions office. I indeed have to take the General Test (thankfully none of the specialized tests). So, in the next few months I will have to drive either to Portland or to Tacoma or take the train to Seattle to spend the night with Kelly so I can go to a test center and try to remember stuff I have not considered for over thirty years. I suppose I should not let such a small indignity prevent me from moving forward, but if I am not up to the task it will give me pause–not so much because it will prevent me from entering the program but because I was not up to the task of taking a general knowledge test.
Category: Education Page 3 of 18
One positive outcome of this new effort to get a PhD in my retirement years is the impetus it will give to the spinning back up of the GaugeCam project as a wholly open source project (free as in freedom and free as in beer, as they say). I will be doing the heavy lifting on the software end of the project, taking over the server part and maintaining and improving the client parts. I have started on a very basic web server to show the graphs of the water height and point to our blog and downloads and documentation. I have a bit of a learning curve on this, but am on my way (see above).
Now I just have to figure out a way to include the bean inspection in all this.
No one suffered quite as much as Christian when he was a child.
We pulled the kids out of school so they and Lorena could fly to San Diego with me for a business trip. The hung out at the hotel, swam in the pool, and visited the Rizo family in Chula Vista. A great time was had by all.
Lorena found some very cool drawings he made during first grade (one of his only two years in government school). His teacher, Mrs. McCormack was great. There is no need for me to say anything about them. They speak for themselves.
Lorena signed up for class today at Centralia College. She is taking only one class, but it will get her into the system and she only has a few left before she gets her Associates Degree. Astronomy is a five hour online class. We hope to be able to use Bob’s telescope if the weather cooperates. Hopefully, she will be able to finish up in a year or so if she takes one or two classes per semester. They accepted almost all of her credits so we are in a very good place for her to attend.
Lorena got all her official transcripts in from the five community colleges she has attended over the years. She has credits from Clackamas, Linn Benton and Portland Community Colleges in Oregon and Wake Technical and Johnston Community Colleges in North Carolina. She applied for admission and got accepted at Centralia College. They have all the transcripts and as soon as they are reviewed, she will be able to get and adviser to determine which classes she needs to finish her Associate Degree. There should only be a few. The good part about Centralia College is that also gives Bachelors Degrees and she can just continue there if she wants.
Over the last couple of days, I had a couple of long and interesting talks with my old friend, Troy, with whom I worked on the GaugeCam project when we lived in North Carolina. Troy is an Assistant Professor at University of Nebraska right now with lots of interesting research going on. We discussed the idea of me reengaging on some of his research again when I started to approach retirement. Well, retirement is rapidly approaching and it looks like the stars might be starting to align. This is still just wishful thinking, but we have talked about a few specific ideas and I even called and talked to my old Masters degree professor, Carroll Johnson long retired from University of Texas at El Paso. We have hope we can make something happen. If this idea comes to fruition, I hope to be writing about it here on a semi-regular basis.
This morning is Christian’s last required class for his PhD. He still needs to pass his comprehensive exams and write and defend his dissertation, but this is a seminal moment. His mindset right now is that he never wants to ever take another class, but part of that might be the whole “senioritis” thing. If he had been on a normal trajectory, this would be the last year of his undergraduate degree. Still, the sentiment resonates with me. I have often heard that after a certain point, classes just get in the way of learning things and really they are as much a mechanism for keeping track of who can get good grades on their homework, papers, and tests as they are mechanisms for learning. In as much as those measures actually measure learning, even imperfectly, that is a good thing, but there is a “sell-by” date on their usefulness for people who progress pass the fundamentals of a discipline.
It was an interesting juxtaposition yesterday when I received an email from a homeschooling mother about the push-back she received from Wake Technical Community College in North Carolina when she tried to enroll her 14 year old child into some classes there. We ran into the same flavor of push-back from Wake Tech when we tried to enroll our son Christian there under very similar circumstances. That interaction was well documented here on the is blog. Click here for a description of that particular part of the story. That email was ironic because, a few minutes before I read it, I was on the phone with Christian, now 22, who was sitting in an airport in New York waiting to catch a flight to Boston to make a presentation on his PhD dissertation topic to the people who fund his research at MIT.
Both our kids were extremely well served by Wake Tech. Both of the kids finished hard, math focused STEM degrees at the undergraduate level with honors, had multiple funded graduate school opportunities at least partially because of their college start at Wake Tech. They functioned well socially and academically at Wake Tech and they went there without adult supervision. We attribute their success from a social standpoint to the fact that they were not socialized in a traditional school cocoon and were able to interact effectively across a broad range of age groups and social backgrounds because of their homeschool socialization.
None of this had to do with any special abilities of our kids. They are/were of normal intelligence and academic gifts, but they excelled because they were in the kinds of environments provided by both homeschool and Wake Tech. It would seem like Wake Tech would want to do more of that sort of thing than less. I hope that I can help promote this if I ever have the opportunity to do so, either with Wake Tech or any other such excellent community college that will listen.
You can read about how we homeschooled by clicking here and how both the kids skipped high school by clicking here.
This image from six years ago came up on our social media today. It is Christian’s Dean’s List notification for the first semester of his second year at Wake Technical Community College. I had completely blown it for the following semester by forgetting to pay for everyone’s classes by the deadline. Kelly was able to get the classes she needed, but I had to register Christian for Differential Equations and Calculus based Physics at Johnston Community College which was about a 40 minute drive from where we lived. The only class I could get him into at Wake Tech was Linear Algebra at Wake Tech. Fortunately, he was able to take another class on line from Central Carolina Community College. He actually had a 4.0 semester that semester and finished every math class he needed to get an engineering degree when he was 16 years old.
There was an added benefit in that he got to do the driving over to Johnston CC every day–a great thing for someone who just got their license, Lorena took two classes with him, so she went with him every day, and he got paid by the college for taking notes for a couple of members of his class who were not able to do it themselves.
This is Kelly doing her Melania Trump impression. I guess now that she has moved uptown she needs to express herself with a high level of haute coutre. Actually, along with the move to a much better living situation, she is on the brink of some good, new and ambitious plans. She will start it all off next week with a trip to be with family and long time friends in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon followed by additional travel, preparation (hard preperation) for very difficult new endeavors. We hope we get to help her some with this through moral support and the odd weekend when she comes down her to wash clothes, play the piano and be pampered by Mom.
This is Christian’s new habitat now that he does not have Mom’s kitchen island anymore. It has been fun to have him here and it is so nice to see him sitting down in the kitchen, thinking, playing his guitar, working on his computer, and studying while Lorena works in the kitchen. We miss that. We have been to Jimmy John’s twice, and out to breakfast three times since he has been here. Lorena has him all cleaned up with a new haircut. Lorena and Christian have been down to Anytime Fitness a couple of times with the obligatory stop at Starbucks for some coffee. Christian spends a lot of study time there. It is a way to keep going on his studies while avoiding being stuck in his apartment or the lab for ours on end. It is kind of amazing to us that he actually sits and just thinks a lot. It is part of the territory with his area of Information Theory. Most of all, though, we are trying to get him to forget all that for a few days and just relax. Maybe he will come back again before too long.
P.S. Note the nice new haircut. Mom dragged him down to the barber earlier today.
First, the important stuff: Kelly’s new glasses arrived and I think she looks just stunning with her new librarian hipster look.
On other fronts, there are lots of good things going on. She loves her work, her company, and her fellow employees. She made a great decision to stop for now at a Masters degree and get some experience. I am not sure how she could have found a better first job than the one she is in. Amazingly, she makes use intense of the things she learned during in her Bachelors degree and internship in Statistics to inform her work doing precisely what she learned studying Marketing Strategy during her Masters degree. Write now she is deep into planning and running focus groups. Before that she developed a huge (for her corner of the industry) marketing survey and then evaluated the results with statistical tools the company had never previously used. One recent new innovation she brought to the company was a better way to set pricing more informed by data and analytics than by expert opinion alone.
So, three quarters of a year in, she has started to think a little about what to do next. She will finish her first round trip of the Marketing process in the fall and really needs to get her second round trip in where she does it completely on her own, and then a third round trip to own the process. After that, she needs to decide what to do next. There is a great growth path for her right where she is, but there are other academic and work options.
Kelly’s values are not at all in alignment with the Seattle zeitgeist. There are some particular evils held in high regard that are difficult to abide and they permeate even parts of the society, particularly in places like Portland and Seattle, that historically have been less coarse and held good morals. I think that reality will play heavily in whatever direction she wants to head next.
Still, when you have new stylish glasses like these, life looks pretty good.
Click on the images or the following links to the single day planning sheets at a larger size:
[Kelly’s 2010 planning sheet] [Christian’s 2007 planning sheet]
Lorena found most of our homeschool planning and other materials when she unpacked our stuff for the library last week. It was a lot of fun to look at them and remember a little bit about where we were and what we were doing at the time all this took place. I forgot how much effort went into to providing a precise enough plan that the kids would know exactly what was expected of them while I was away at work.
It also made me realized that the kids worked hard to get where they are. Although both kids were able to advance to the point where they did full time college level work by the time they finished eighth grade, they did it more through hard work and day to day advances in each of a plethora of areas than by any special intellectual prowess.
For example, at the time of Christian’s 2007 planning report, just after he turned 12 years old in the sixth grade, Christian was just one year ahead of what would have been the most advanced students when I was in the sixth grade back in 1966. He got there through a ton of hard work, inching through Singapore Math for the previous two and a half years. the same thing was true for Kelly in 2010. She already had about a year of college credit from CLEP tests by the time this planning report was written, all through a lot of painstaking daily work.
It did not seem so onerous at the time. This is just what we did. By keeping at it and doing all the work every day, we inched a little ahead every year to the point where I was able to write this series of post about the culmination of our homeschool efforts on skipping high school.
Since we actually believe (or desire, God willing) we will be in the house for years to come, Lorena has earnestly started to unpack the books and put them into what we hope to be at least part of our small, but memory filled library. We have what we have always felt like was lots and lots of books even though we have thrown out quite a few. This is about 1/3 to 1/2 of our books so I guess we really did not have that many in the end.
A lot of our books are the stuff we kept from homeschool. We also have a lot of the kids’ work and all their test and other records filed away in a filing cabinet. I do not know if I am nuts to keep the stuff, but it was such a big part of our lives that it is kind of hard to throw the stuff away. We read a lot of these books aloud together. I guess we are hoping we will have friends’ kids who will enjoy them when they visit and maybe even grandkids someday.
All this stuff went up onto the second floor landing where there is room for some more book cases when we can afford them. We have a couch and two chairs and want to put a ton of lights in there, too. Right now, we have a closed balcony wall that looks down into the living room from the landing. We want to modify that so we have a glass barrier that so it will open the room up a bunch more. There is already plenty of light coming in from skylights in the living room and a could of high windows. It is a nice room. Honestly we are loving this house.
Christian has been to work for three days and it looks like he is getting his arms around things in the lab. He really likes the area where he lives although he says the culture is a little more direct. Actually, he did not exactly say “direct,” but you get the idea. He hopes to look around a little in Boston this weekend, maybe get in a workout and see the art museum across the street.
On another note, we got a call today from our builder, Mark P. He said the granite guy called him and wants to install the granite in the kitchen tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM. Lorena was very happy with that. The appliances were supposed to go in this week and the granite next week, but it looks like it will be the other way around. We should have some pictures to put up tomorrow.
The only things we have left after the appliances are the backsplash, painting and a few odds and ends. It will be nice to be able to cook on a stove and in an oven instead of on an apartment balcony grill.
I drove up to Vancouver, BC last night to stay at a Hilton close to where the brand new corporate offices of my new company are located. It is a beautiful drive up from Centralia and the border crossing is not too bad. Every time I come up here I think, “I don’t remember it being this beautiful.” It is truly an amazing place with snow-capped mountains, lots of beautiful stretches of water and a huge, cosmopolitan city. I am looking forward to being here now and then and my company says it is fine for me to bring Lorena.
Christian flew from Tempe to Boston yesterday to start an internship at MIT’s Lincoln Labs. He moves moved into a dorm at Northeastern University close to (or in) downtown Boston sometime today yesterday and will be shuttled over to the labs every day during his stay. This is another milestone in his march toward his degree. It seems to be a long, long way from laying on the floor learning arithmetic facts during his homeschool days.
He is a one or two years away from finishing his PhD and starting to think about what he wants to do next. He has made his own way economically and in the running of his household since he left home after his Bachelors degree. My level of participation in his education has stood at absolute zero since then, too. It is not that I wouldn’t like to help, I just do not have the skills or knowledge. I know his work at Arizona State and at Lincoln Labs is very demanding both in the hours he spends on it and the complexity of the work. He will be glad to finish.
Update: Amazingly, this is the view from Christian’s dorm room for the summer. He told me he got into the room last night. My understanding is he can see the Boston Museum of Fine Arts right out his window.
We saw the April 30, 2017 whiteboard (below) when we first arrived at his apartment on our move to Centralia, WA. Christian hopes he is on the verge of his first (semi) important, first author publication in a major academic journal. The work for that paper is pretty much done. He has to refine the verbiage and get past the whole scholarly review thing which is never a sure thing, but he has something that is pretty solid. The two whiteboard’s below are two consecutive days of work. I thought he spent a lot of time at the computer, but that is not really how he works. He looks at the whiteboard and then he just thinks. His job, his professor tells him, is to think. He has a second paper in mind. He hopes it will be better than the first. The first is solid–something that needed to be worked out. The second, however, is something that might be a true innovation. Something new, not yet considered, that contributes to the field. We hope so, but it is hard to know. Even after a paper like that is published, its importance might not even be know in the lifetime of the author. Truly interesting stuff. AND the whiteboards look really cool.
April 30, 2017 – Christian’s Whiteboard
May 1, 2017 – Christian’s Whiteboard
