April 2006 Archives

Sometimes life is good to you. It throws out favors as if it has beads on a mardi gras float. Today is that sometime. :)

Today is the final day of classes. I'm officially done with the GA of un-fun-ness.

Today is the day in which I arranged for an undergraduate assistant for an amazing professor with an amazing class. Specifically, this is my professor that taught the course about Stigma that I took last semester, and, specifically, this is his Honors Introduction to Psychology course. This means that 1. I will have some awesome reading as a part of the assistantship, 2. I will get to lead discussion, rather than teach class PRN, 3. I will be working with adults that want to do well and are generally well-behaved, and 4. the class is much, much smaller than his other 113-student intro course. Ack. It should be more like 30. Or 35. :) I am so excited about this one. We'll be reading Frankl, which is one of my favorites.

Today is the day that I got a job! And a perfect job nonetheless! Well, mostly perfect. It is only for 10-15 hours a week, in the evening and on Saturdays. (Very convenient). It is at the counseling center. It is EASY. :) It doesn't pay huge sums, but it's enough. Also, the job isn't just a summer job, I can hold it through next year as well. :) I start training next week.

Today is the day that is just over a week from my va-ca-tion with the husband to see the parents. : ) Mmmm....

Also, I'm starting violin back up after my recital. This year, I'm playing Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, Bach's a-minor Sonata for solo violin, a Mozart Sonata (which one is still unknown), and maybe Dvorak's Four Romantic Pieces. :) Yay!

Plus, the weather is lovely, I'm about to pig out at El Burrito Loco for dinner tonight, and I have the Bullying Paper for my research group off of my chest. Whew. Just three more finals to go (only two of which concern me in the least).

Oh, and my Aloe didn't die last night due to limb loss. Good news, too.

Seriously.

http://redshirtknitting.com/?page_id=271

It's true.
Trees need sweaters, too.

Then I was going to just delete junk comments, but didn't have any.

So, now I'm going to blog, even though I shouldn't. C'est la vie.

News:

1. We have a new apt for us in June! Yay! No more paying ridiculous sums of rent each month! It's a one-bedroom, which will also be nice, because the "back room" is severely unloved at the moment.

2. I finished the poncho, most officially. I'm wearing it right now. The weather has made a turn for the worse. I suppose that that could be 3. bad weather. Pictures to come.

4. I finished and survived my recital. Turn out wasn't huge for it, but in the words of Beth "I think that it only takes 10 guests to make a recital official." Good enough. I stayed remarkably calm and my pianist made a mistake. I laughed and laughed afterwards with Katie about how pissed my grandma might be when she hears what my professional, staff accompanist did to my recital. :)

Also good:
"Kristen, you deserve a break today- and Tuesday- so enjoy the morning without seeing me!
Dr.T
P.S. It was truly a pleasure to hear you play on Saturday- the Bach was probably the best i have heard you do, and the Kabalevsky was also very very good! It is rare when the best you play coincides with your recital hour! So it was really great!"

Dr. T is my professor. He gave me flowers afterwards, which, all in attendance agreed, was touching.

I haven't listened to the recording yet, but once I muster the courage, and if it's good enough, I might take requests for official listenings / copies.

5. Now, we (me and the Mendon) only need to survive until the end of the semester - 2 more weeks ick ick ick. And, in those 2 weeks, I'm required to go to my class with the questionable GA. I'm not allowed to drop it. Ick ick ick. Have to write final exam. Ick ick ick.

Anyways, that's it. More to come when it's not past my bed time and when I'm not still pretending to write my experiment discussion section. (it's OK that I'm pretending. mendon's pretending to write a paper, too, and he's playing Tron... ).

It's beautiful! The flowers are just around the corner from our apartment and all over campus. And, finally, it's warm and breezy and we're finally getting some green.

This is the insanely lush and beautiful view from the front porch of my Dad's childhood home. We were able to sneak up to this area on the afternoon of the wedding. We, actually, because of construction, were able to go inside the house. That means that I saw the green-stained wood-paneled living room that they had. The blue and green bathrooms, with matching floor tiling. My dad's old bedroom, and the screened-in porch, among other things. With nostalgic ramblings to go with the tour. (Uncle Duncan, who is really a talker, was there as well). The house is pictured in the "Extended Entry;" it's the first one in there.

Before that, though, we were visiting with Grandmother in her hotel room. By visiting, I mean that Duncan brought his brand new guitar, and I brought my violin. Which means that I played 2 movements of Bach, he played a bluegrass medley, and then he pulled out his music for me to sightread, so that we could play together. It was so awesome to be able to get together with my family and play music with or for them. Later that evening, Duncan was chatting with a cleaning lady, who said that her boss caught her and her husband listening in on the concert. When questioned, they said "shhh! we're listening." Luckily, their boss seemed to just be amused.

The other four pictures in here are from the wedding itself. Jerry playing in the flowers; Dad and Grandmother, who looks just radiant; the ceremony itself with the bride and groom. The second picture/last picture is their vows. Aw. The ceremony was beautiful. All of the groomsmen and anyone else who had one wore kilts. Dad, in the picture here, is wearing a tie that is a Wallace clan fabric/pattern. Turns out that the B- family traces back to the Wallaces. Good to know. To keep the theme, Tally was serenaded into the chapel by a bagpiper. But, this was after the priest had kind of sorta started the ceremony without the bride, while her wedding planner flipped out in the back of the chapel. Ooops. (I thought it was hilarious; I hope Tally did, too, because no one else seemed to notice, so it can't be that big of a deal).

Also, a lovely perk to the weekend: we were able to steal the bride away from everyone else for breakfast. That means that we were the only ones to her about her several day retreat to the woods, and her eventual honeymoon to Nova Scotia. We were the only ones who knew that she was completely unaware that the "some sort of car" that her husband had arranged for the evening was actually an old Rolls Royce. Fancy. We also got to hear about how she was feeling and what she's been up to and it was awesome for me, because I'd not seen her for 15 years. Also along those terms, I found out that I have 2 more cousins! John and Frank, who are awesome, too. Remarkably enough, I ran into John at the airport while we were in line for security, which definitely made the wait better. :) It was a long weekend of learning all about family that I wasn't actually sure whether or not I had and then getting to hang out with them and learn that they're all great people. I really loved it.

So, Congratulations, Tally. It was such a pleasure to be a part of your wedding.

Oh, do notice that there's another new blog beneath this one. I know it's not nice to double up, but it seems appropriate enough here.

But more on my weekend later.

For the moment, here's a quick update of this most recent Miami-drama:
I went to class, and got my paper back (the one that I had left with the chair). Obviously, my GA had met with her. It was awkward, she wouldn't look at me, and she didn't revise my grade. I still had a 0. I meet her in her office hours, asking for a grade, becauseI don't deserve a 0 if I didn't plagiarize. She won't give me one, I have to resubmit my paper, edited, in order to get one. Thus, I cannot have the curve that the rest of the class is allowed. She won't apologize. She's terse. I'm peeved. I throw vague citations into the paper to appease her, and I start thinking of dropping the class.

I go to Jackson and Atlanta for the weekend and I don't think once about it. What bliss.

I come back and realize that I cannot withdraw from the class at this point. Nor can I just change it to a credit/no credit option. Class is still awkward and my GA won't look at me, even when I talk to her. I asked the Chair of the Dept. if I have any options outside of petitioning to an academic committee about withdrawing. She shrugs and says that she'll get back to me. I really like the Chair. She is just too awesome.

So that's it for the moment. We'll see if the Chair has anything to say. If she doesn't, that would be fine enough, but I REALLY don't want to write the final for this class- it's the same as this midterm. Great.

I got accused of plagiarism!

Yes, me, today, right around 10:50 am. I got a paper back saying "cite" "cite" "cite" all the way to the end where I had a big fat Zero out of Fifty on my Mid-Term, with the note "this is Plagiarism." Well then, if that won't get one's heart racing, I don't know what will.

I sat and talked with my Grad Assistant and we talked about my paper after class. The problem seemed to come down to my assumption of common knowledge; specifically, that I assumed common knowledge to be too big. Which left me playing this debate game in my head all day: "Isn't common knowledge based on your assumed audience? Isn't my assumed audience my grad. assistant? Aren't short answer questions only supposed to contain common knowledge by default? If a reader isn't familiar with something uncited in the paper, shouldn't it be the shortcoming of the reader, and one that they should quickly correct with their own research?" etc. etc. It also took me a while to realize as well that part of my g.a.'s accusations of plagiarism were based on the assignment that she gave. The instructions were to cite every use of our text (which I didn't do), and she used, to an extent, those grounds to accuse me of plagiarism. Regardless, rather than going through the department, she offered me a deal. I would correct my plagiarism (which I still felt was an unjustified accusation) and turn the paper in before Wednesday, with a 10% late penalty in my grade. That didn't sound too bad, but I was getting really paranoid about my conceptions of what plagiarism is. Remember that this is an authority that I respect and trust telling me that I was very, horribly wrong, and that I needed to correct it ASAP.

So, I panicked for a few hours and had Mendon flipping out, because that's all he could do with an entire frappa-caffeine-something in his system. I had a girlfriend enraged at the whole thing: "they can't accuse you of that!" Which was incredibly reassuring and kind of her. I finally broke down; my paranoia subsided and I realized that I had to stand up for myself and do something, because I was either caving for the sake of my grade, or I really did plagiarize and just had no clue how to correctly write a paper. I called Dr. Cayton, who is wonderful and loving and hosts our bookclub and is the Chair of the History Department (so she knew a thing or two about these situations). She read my paper (this was approximately 2 hours after I was accused, with 1 class in between) and told me that I needed to be talking to someone in the Psych department. I really wanted her to just tell me that "This Isn't Plagiarism!" in a big, declarative way, but she didn't.

So, I head back to Psych, bounce from one administrator to the next and finally found myself in the office of the Chair of the Department of Psychology (and will be Dean of the College of Arts and Science quite soon). I was panicked, afraid that if I told her that I was accused of plagiarism that I might be incriminated; what if I had goofed?! But, instead, she was kind, and wonderful, and let me babble in my nervous sort of way. She listened to my concerns, read my assignment, laughed at the grammatical corrections that Dr. Cayton made on the assignment page, and asked if she could keep it. She said that everything would be OK and she was just the best mommy figure that I could have hoped for at the moment. She talked a little bit about how there's a system to keep students from being accused when they turn in quality work, and, she said, it was important to use it. She thanked me for coming in and basically told me to go home and stop worrying about it (which I'm trying really hard to do, but it's no easy task. I still have class on Wednesday to go to and man am I intimidated by what my GA will be feeling and may have heard from the Chair of her department).

So, that's it. I, of course, didn't plagiarize (I had citations all over the place), but the accusation was sufficient to send me reeling. Accusing someone of plagiarism is usually the equivalent of offering to smush their career into nothingness, and in my case, it was the largest insult I've received in a long time. So, now I'm off to quintet rehearsal. There will be an update come Wednesday, with class and confrontation on the horizon. So, how exciting!