Mama PhD

Ben now has two weeks of college classes under his belt, and we are all breathing a little more easily.

One topic I really enjoyed in my high school art class was perspective, the artistic technique used to create the illusion of depth in a picture. This is a concept that is also studied in Geometry, and it is a concept that I found myself thinking of this past week as I laughed at the fact that my daughter seems to be at a point in her life where she thinks that the world revolves around her. This perspecticve is at least partially caused by the nurturing neighborhood that we live in, where everyone’s child is important and neighbors are people to not only live next door to but to also socialize with us and support us as we live our lives on a set of a few streets way off the beaten path.

This past Labor Day was one of the loveliest weekends I’ve spent, not because we went anywhere, but because I didn’t spend the time frantically finishing multiple syllabi and dreading the impending semester and the end of my ‘real’ work. As an administrator, I’ve been working all summer and my teaching duties are minimal, so the semester’s start does not radically alter my schedule or workload. But it was the end of the summer for our eight-year old daughter and she alternated between excitement and loss.

Our family has fallen out of our school day routine over the summer. We were ready far too quickly this morning and ended up arriving 25 minutes early for my children’s first day of the new school year. I’d forgotten what time we needed to leave the house. The funny part is that students go back on the first day just for an hour.

In statistics, we talk about a “population” as being everyone that could possibly be included in a study, such as everyone who lives in New York City. In contrast, we talk about a “sample” as being a subset of a population, as, for example, all people in New York with a last name beginning with “L”.

It’s been a busy week in Tampa. I have been at my Florida home (instead of preparing for school in Chicago) because I am interested in witnessing the Republican National Convention (RNC) activities.

We’ve got a huge moving van in front of our house now, and we have until Friday to pack it with all the boxes of stuff we’ve been preparing for months.

I've just spent the last hour and a half working on my semester plan, and I'm not done yet. I've filled in as many appointments on my calendar as I know about, looked over my class schedule and meeting schedule, and done my best to figure out when I'll be working on my research. According to my semester plan, I have at least three days a week when I can do something -- anything! -- to advance my current project.