What I Learned Today

I love YesJapan!

This website, designed to teach you “Japanese from Zero”, has a lot going for it. It has a simple, clean design, five courses of increasing complexity, and a free 7-day trial period (after which the monthly subscription fee is $14.95). But beyond the mechanics, I really like the pedagogy. One of the things I find most challenging about learning written Japanese is the kana (and kanji). If a book is written purely in Japanese script, I find it tiring and tedious to slog through; I’m just not fast enough at decoding the symbols (yet). But if it’s all in romaji (“our” characters), then it’s easy to be lazy and not learn how to read actual Japanese. Given my upcoming trip to Japan, I’m guessing that being able to read signs will come in particularly handy.

YesJapan to the rescue! They use a “progressive” solution to this problem in which they teach you a handful of new kana at a time, and from then on, the new ones are replaced in all subsequent lessons. For example, by lesson two you’ll encounter words like “あre” (“are”, “over there”) because you’ve already learned the hiragana for “a” (あ). You end up being able to read the kana without exerting much incremental effort at all, since there are only a few new foreign things to remember at each time. Brilliant!

Another great thing about the site is the copious use of pronunciation links. There’s nothing like being able to play (and re-play) native speakers’ versions of what you’re trying to say, so that you can emulate your way to perfection.

There are quizzes to test your retention, vocabulary lists for writing practice (using only the kana you’ve learned to date, of course), and interactive games like Kana Attack to let you “fire” at incoming kana by correctly guessing their romaji — flash cards on steroids!

Course 1 has this motivational phrase at the top of the page:

Chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru

Piled up specks of dust become a mountain

So here I am, piling up specks of Japanese dust to build a my own little mountain. Yesterday, after four hours of teaching and five hours of work on my thesis, it was great fun to indulge in a couple of hours working through the first two lessons in Course 1.

Last semester, I joked that I’d somehow gotten ahold of a virtual Time-Turner, since I was taking a class at USC that occurred at the same time I was teaching at Cal State LA, on Thursday evenings. This was possible since I was taking the class through the Distance Education Network, and therefore could view the 2.5-hour lecture on my computer at a later date (usually the weekend).

Santa sometimes has a funny sense of humor, and this Christmas he brought me (among many other wonderful things) an actual Time-Turner. And yet — while it was pretty cool to be able to turn time last semester, unlike Hermione I didn’t actually end up with any more hours in the week. By the end of the term, I was aching for a break. So I held my Time-Turner and realized that, rather than a symbol of incentive for double-booking, really it was more of a warning — a caution against that kind of stacked-up crazy schedule.

But did I heed the warning of the Time-Turner? No. By the time January rolled around, I’d already committed to an even crazier term: working, teaching an entirely new class at Cal State LA, taking yet another class at USC, all the while trying to write a Master’s thesis so I can graduate this spring. None of them are technically overlapping in time, but (just as when the Time-Turner let me spread things out) all together it’s still a gradually suffocating weight.

Thank goodness my teaching duties end with the winter quarter at Cal State LA. As of March 15, I’ll have one less thing to occupy my energies. And if I ever propose this sort of schedule again in the future, someone kindly strangle me with the Time-Turner’s chain.

I am teaching a programming class on Data Structures: lists, arrays, trees, heaps, stacks, queues, and other fun things. This is my first time teaching at this particular university, and I’ve had to successively ratchet down my expectations of the students as it became clear that their preparation was not, well, adequate for the topics this course covers. Or rather, they do well catching on to the concepts, but struggle mightily when it comes to implementing them in code. I’ve been somewhat puzzled by this, since even students who have the prerequisite course under their belts seem to be having trouble.

Today, I got my first glimpse into why.

I scheduled a brief post-midterm conference with each student, to give them feedback on their current progress and to answer privately any concerns they might have about the course. One student today launched into a description of what that prerequisite course was like.

“I don’t want to say anything bad about the professor, but I don’t think I learned much. He just showed PowerPoint slides, and never ran any of the code, and we never had to write any code. He said it was more important to know the concepts, and he didn’t want us to write code because then we might get too used to the syntax of one language. You know, each language is different.”

I was flabbergasted, but tried to hide it. Sure, programming languages differ. And it’s great to get to a point where you have a solid grasp of the abstract ideal of an iterative loop, or a recursive method, or, heck, a list or an array or a tree or… all the stuff we’re covering–without being tied to one language’s syntax. But it’s staggeringly unfair to expect a student to get to that point without having worked in any languages at all.

It’s possible that this student’s view of his professor’s pedagogical opinions has been filtered or changed from what the professor actually intended; we don’t always communicate effectively. But the sad fact is that many of these students lack basic programming skills in the language in which these courses are taught, and that leaves them handicapped when facing all of the rest of the courses in the department. I can hope that they’ve gained some skill from the battery of assignments I’ve given them (and knowing what I know now, if I started the course over, I’d reduce the volume of that battery significantly), but any skills have been gained at quite a cost. I continue to be impressed at the amazing amount of energy and hours these students invest to keep up with what I give them.

Interestingly enough, six students (one from my current class) have already signed up for the class I will teach starting in January (Machine Learning!). You’d think they’d be sick of me by now. :)

It has nothing to do with heaven.

I’ve observed that I persistently fill any available time with new adventures and activities. It’s not that I don’t like being alone, or idle, in itself. But sometimes I take on a bit more than I can handle, and something doesn’t get done, and I’m disappointed. So the question is, why do I keep doing this? Why not just sit back with a reasonable status quo and let it tick along?

The answer seems to be that I need to be challenged. It’s not just that I like to be challenged. I need to be pushed. Courses often give you this push, forcing you to spend hours working on homework or preparing for exams. Deadlines at work provide pushes, too. But in the absence of that sort of external force, I cannot resist imposing my own push on myself. I like the feeling of accomplishment when I go further than I thought I could, or achieve more, even when there is risk of failure — perhaps even more so when there is risk of failure. And sometimes I do fail (or at least dissolve into a puddle of stress). But somehow I keep coming back for more.

I sometimes despair at this tendency, since it seems inevitably to ratchet up my stress level. But I think I can at least articulate why I do it, and little self-knowledge goes a long way.

I’m constantly worrying away at my boundaries. How high can I jump? How fast can I run? How many degrees can I get? I like to live right at the edge of my capability, right at my limits. I like to know that there are limits. I like to be pushed to exceed those limits — and maybe even to expand the limits in the process. In taking on more commitments, maybe I’ll be forced to find ways to be more efficient, which will extend my time-reach. Maybe I’ll find more ways to trade money for time. Maybe I’ll learn the tricks needed to run faster, jump higher. Some core part of my being rejects a static existence, a single fixed optimum that solves “enough” of what’s out there. What’s existence for, if not to continually get better?

It’s time for bed. I’m off to slay dragons in my sleep.

Today was the first day of my Remote Sensing class, which I am attending remotely through USC’s Distance Education Network. In this 2.5-hour class, we covered an introduction to what remote sensing is, what kinds of instruments are used, and some highlights in terms of scientific discoveries that have been obtained through this technology. Here are some tidbits I took away that were surprises:

• Some of the earliest “remote sensing” involved sending cameras up with balloons, then retrieving them and developing their film. This kind of surveillance was used as far back as the Civil War!
• The (spectral) width of atmospheric absorption bands varies with atmospheric pressure, and therefore with altitude; as pressure increases, they spread out to cover adjacent wavelengths.
• Sea-surface height varies with water temperature (this is how they track El Nino) and with water depth (useful for mapping the ocean floor from orbital observations of the sea surface). Separating the two effects (lower sea-surface can mean colder water and/or an oceanic trough) would seem to be a significant challenge.
• Landsat-7, unlike its predecessors, can detect clouds in images on-board and decide to discard cloudy images.