On thinking

Today I'm upset about some things, which can be summarized by saying that I wish people would think. Here is a song that is the exact opposite of what I'm thinking about. And I'm upset that it seems like most, or at least too many, people seem more in line with these lyrics than whatever the opposing ones would be. Anyway, I will get back to my dissertation revisions now but I was stuck thinking about this. I find it very problematic when people don't think through things and therefore build off of false premises or assumptions or don't think about what they are reinforcing or don't think it matters, because I think all of these things are potentially harmful to oneself and others and contribute to distortion. I will spare the Dewey quotes, and just roll the lyrics.

They want you to become less callow
Less shallow
But I say: Why invite stress in?
Stop studying strife
And learn to live "the unexamined life"

Dancing through life
Skimming the surface
Gliding where turf is smooth
Life's more painless
For the brainless
Why think too hard?
When it's so soothing
Dancing through life
No need to tough it
When you can sluff it off as I do
Nothing matters
But knowing nothing matters
It's just life
So keep dancing through...

Dancing through life
Swaying and sweeping
And always keeping cool
Life is fraught less
When you're thoughtless
Those who don't try
Never look foolish
Dancing through life
Mindless and careless
Make sure your wear less
Trouble in life
Woes are fleeting
Blows are glancing
When you're dancing
Through life...

A long avoided update

We've known for a while now that we are heading to London for the next year while Austin is on rotation for his job there. He will be working on payer access in oncology (getting a cancer drug approved in the European markets). And, seeings as Austin is on his way to the airport now, I figure I should take it as some sort of reality check that this is in fact happening. The kids and I leave in another month on July 25. While we are there we are letting a flat in SW London (Surrey) in Richmond (technically we are in East Twickenham since we are just over the bridge on the other side of the river). Here is the view at the edge of the lot back across the Thames towards Richmond (that's the Richmond Bridge). We will walk over that bridge about 10,000 times in the next year. Trains, stores, and schools are all on the other side.

Speaking of schools, here is Ainsleigh's "castle school."

Yeah, it is literally in a castle. It is an all girls private school, and if my anxiety levels weren't already rising as a result of finally writing this post and checking the time for when we leave for the airport, I'd write several paragraphs about my complete ethical dilemma over placing her in a private school when everything I'm working towards is with the aim of improving public schools. And of course there are reasons why she isn't going to be in a public school, namely that we missed the January enrollment deadline by several months and would have had to take another trip back over with her to prove she was a resident. All of that notwithstanding, I'm still having trouble with the whole thing. But, she's going to love it. Uniforms with Madeline hats and 14 kids to a class and all. I still have to sort out Rippy's preschool, which should be 5 mornings a week.

So, that leaves me. While we are over there I'm going to be a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge working with Tim Rowland, whose work I used a lot in my dissertation. I met him in January and he was interested in what I was working on and we are going to write a book about the coding protocol that I wrote for my dissertation. I'm also going to be teaching math ed in their elementary ed program and doing some work with their grad school math ed seminars. I will probabbly be up at Cambridge alternating between 1 and 2 days each week. It is a two hour train ride to get up there so I won't go more than I have to for classes and meetings. On the other days, I will be back in Richmond working on writing some articles for publication.

Well, we are off to bring Austin to the airport now so I will leave it at that, other than to say that in general I'm quite sad about having to leave home.

April revisited

This is the final catch-up post from three outings/events in April that were probably the last weekend activities in which I participated for about 6 weeks while it was dissertation crunch time. The first are just a few pictures from Duke Gardens. It has become a tradition of ours to go to Duke Gardens before the morning session of General Conference.

This is classic Rippy right now: holding George and old cell phone that he carries around--and not looking at the camera.

They painted the bridge (which used to be white) bright red. I'm sure they had their reasons but I preferred it when it was white. In any case, the real reason I was posting this picture was to comment on the proportional length of Ainsleigh's legs (click to enlarge the photo for a better view). Too bad she has not been blessed with any Weston coordination to go along with them.

I'm not really sure how she and I are related a lot of times, including in this picture:

The duo:

The duo gone rogue:

The second outing was Touch a Truck, which we also attended last year as part of Rippy's second birthday festivities. This year it was the week before his party. It is a fund raiser for a local boy scout troop that offers kids the chance to climb on, pretend to drive, and honk the horn of every type of vehicle imaginable.

And yes, that includes the air horns.

Driving a trooper's car

Waving goodbye to the helicopter as it lifted off.

Driving a town bus

A size comparison

The third set of pictures is from Rippy's third birthday party. He has been obsessed with the Lion King for a while now, as explained back in January when we took the kids to see the show when it was in Durham. And, he made good on his January request for a Scar party.

Some of the decorations (the lion on the top right of the sign was Scar. Thanks to Krista for sharing her artistic talents with us!).

The cake--admittedly much too cute to pass as Scar but I loved the design and Rippy gave it a green light.

As soon as we started singing Happy Birthday he blew out the candles.

He exhibited a similar amount of patience while waiting for a fork:

The mysterious package from Farmor and Farfar.

Look at that face!

Fortunately it wasn't so dangerous afterall. Inside was this lion that Ripken's great grandmother Janice made many years ago for Uncle Garth when he was a boy.

Even Marcos had a snuggle with the lion--which was saying something because it needed a bath.

Rippy's favorite gift was a keyboard from Sarah. It was perfect given his interest in music, its impressive range of percussion tracks, and its portability. Here he is getting a quick tutorial, after which he told Sarah, "I need a beat!"

Rippy's first groupie, Gigi.

There were also a few lion crafts for the older kids (which turned out to be just Ainsleigh). So, now that he is age 3.167, that is the story from when he turned 3.0.

And thus ends the out-of-order re-telling of spring happenings chez nous.

Uncle Tim

We just got back to town from a NC/MD road trip. The week before we we left Uncle Tim came down from VT to visit right on the heels of Bethany's visit. It was also Ainsleigh's last week of kindergarten. Here she is heading to the bus on her final day:

And here is Rippy, her morning escort.

We had a lovely visit with Tim but didn't do so well on getting pictures with him, and the ones we did get were nearly all of Rippy refusing to be photographed, one way or another.

Stomping away:

Throwing a fit:

Left hanging:

Finally--the airport send-off:

It was really nice to have time to talk with Tim. It always makes me happy to be in the same place as him because he has good karma and is so enjoyable to be around. We hope to see him one more time before we leave for the UK but if not we will probably see him sometime across the pond.

Strawberries in summertime

The kids and Sarah and I went strawberry picking a little while ago...okay probably it was a while ago by now. That whole dissertation thing was a bit of a time warp. We went to our favorite local patch and it was as wonderful as ever. Here are some pictures from that evening.

Initial spoils:

One of the great things about Sarah is that she will still carry Rippy on her shoulders and take Ainsleigh's berry basket even when it results in this:

The strawberries were the size of small apples

The ones that did make it home didn't last long, although there are still some in the freezer that are being saved for smoothies.

Dance Recital

Ainsleigh's third dance recital was in mid-May. Rippy and Sarah and Farmor and Farfar all attended (Austin was in London). Somehow she always ends up in the class with the poofiest and/or pinkest costume. Here she was at age three (such a little peanut!) and here she was last year at age four. This year she and her classmates were pink balloons and donned not one but three shades of pink.

She freely admits that her favorite part is getting flowers afterwards.

Rippy imitating all that dancing with a twirl of his own:

Proud big brother. "You did a good job, sister."

This picture makes me happy for many reasons, one of which is Ripken holding the lemon that he carried around all day (a similar occurrence happened back in November with a lime that he carried around with him all day at preschool).

Post-recital nap, of sorts:

It's Dr. Tracy L. Johnson now...

I have a PhD!

On Friday May 13 I submitted my dissertation. It is currently 404 pages (the final version will be a little longer). It was especially busy and pretty much non-stop working on finishing the analysis and doing almost all of the writing the past several months, and it really ramped up the last 6 weeks. The last week of writing was super intense and included some 16 hour work days.

Then there was the requisite all-nighter the last day/night/day to finish it off. I always knew that last night would be an all-nighter. What I did not expect was that I would not be working on it by myself in the wee hours, but Sarah stayed up all night with me and was such a huge help with making figures and the table of contents and moreover keeping me together during very stressful times. Here is the image from that night:

It was really amazing to go from something like this (the outline of my concluding chapter)...

...to this (the chapter based on the above half-page of notes turned out to be 70 pages):

So, 5.5 years of grad school (1.5 for the masters, 4 towards the PhD), 2 years working on my dissertation study, a lot of late nights, one all-nighter, and one bottle of mountain dew later...it was submitted on May 13. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out and how grounded it is in theory and how much of a synthesis it is of what I've learned in grad school both through my coursework as well as through my experiences teaching in the elementary ed program and supervising student teachers. Along the way I wrote a new coding protocol and developed a new methodology. And, it is pretty darn good.

The past 3 weeks while my committee has been reading my book (as I explained it to Ainsleigh and Rippy) have been much less intense but still stressful. I took several days off for the first time in I don't even know how long. Then I had to put together a presentation which was supposed to present my study in 30 minutes. Here is that equation:

2 years > 30 minutes

And, I had to talk my advisor into giving me 30 minutes. Originally she said 20. It was fairly painful to have to leave so much out that I wanted to talk about, but finally I got it down to 30 minutes. My presentation and defense was this Friday, June 3. Pre-defense flowers from Tracy K kept me company as I did the final prep Thursday night.


One thing I was very much looking forward to about my defense was seeing my old student teaching supervisor again, who was working on her PhD at Penn State at the time I was there. Now she is on faculty at Ohio State (did you hear about their football coach?) and on my committee. Thus far she has participated in meetings remotely via video conferencing so this was a real treat to see her again after 10 years. We were able to go to breakfast together ahead of time. Also one of my best friends Bethany, who grew up around the corner from me and I've know literally forever, drove down with her son Ethan. There were also a few classmates and Austin and Sarah at my defense. After my presentation they all got kicked out and my committee asked me questions and we talked about my dissertation for an hour. Towards the end there was this great moment where one of the professors said that my dissertation "was just awesome" and said "I wish everyone would do data analysis like this." Then another professor said, "I wish everyone was Tracy."

After another 20 minutes of talking about (fairy minor) revisions that I will make to the final version, I was done! We had some help getting the kids over so that they were there when I finished. Ainsleigh sang an original song for me that repeated this verse:

Graduation Mommy

I love you

Graduation Mommy

You are done

Then we went to lunch at The Carolin Inn with Sarah, Bethany and Ethan, and two of the professors on my committee. Then it was time to bring Belinda back to her hotel so she could head to the airport. Austin and Sarah and Ainsleigh went to set up for that evening's party (which I still knew essentially nothing about) and Bethany and I brought the boys home for a quick nap. Then just after 5pm Bethany was allowed to tell me that the party was at the clubhouse in our neighborhood, which actually I have never even seen the inside of. It looked fabulous with all that Carolina blue!

My party hosts

The set up

Sarah did the decorations--there were lots of mathematics symbols and equations on the windows, and even better were the *hysterical* quotations on the walls. She took quotes out of my dissertation and re-wrote parts of them to say that my dissertation was awesome. There were even a few from people whose work I challenged that said they were worried I was going to steal the spotlight from them and their lackluster work. And then there were the quotes from Ripken, Ainsleigh, the goo goo dolls, and President Bartlet (and yes, even the ghost of Jack Dawson). Here is my friend Megan and I with two of the quotations. Bartlet is saying I should be Secretary of Education. Heather Hill at Harvard is saying she's not really all that.

The spread--Carolina graduation calls for Carolina BBQ! The Q Shack did a great job with the catering.

Gorgeous flowers from our friends Becky, Rachel, and Kate at Tre Bella (always the best choice for local flowers and weddings!)

My geeky cake that Sarah made--complete with my initials and exponential growth.

Geeky + Symbolic = Perfect

Sarah, Miss Abby Parcell, and Alisa.

My advisor, Olly

Classmates Jenn, Brandon, and Dwight

The Prietos, Olsens, Jones, and Kendra

Ainsleigh's teacher (and my former student) Ms. Chiu. Ainsleigh just drooled over her attention all night. And Samantha was very sweet to oblige. Note who Ainsleigh is hugging.

The Prietos

Some of the YW. Jeanette and Kendra

Morgane (or, as Rippy says, "Organ").

We waited a few minutes too long to take a family pic. Rippy was melting down (note the boots). Ainsleigh also wasn't so interested.

Cake helps

What to do with all the leftover cake?

Every time I looked at Ainsleigh that day I thought about how this now big girl was a little baby when I started grad school:

It was really so nice to have everyone there, including some people I haven't seen in quite some time. There were people from church, UNC, and the school at which I used to teach.

And then there was the after party. At 9pm Sarah and Bethany and I headed to mystery location #2, which turned out to be the free expression tunnel at NC State. Always Carolina t-shirts are in style, especially on someone else's campus. Same with spray paint cans.

Apparently level of education and delinquent behavior are not correlated, after all, seeings as both perpetrators have PhDs.

Spray paint + stencils may have led to this...

...and this...

...and even this.

But we just wanted to make a few things clear...

After all, I doubled my initials!

This may have also happened. All in good fun.

Finally, a picture with Bethany!

This was a fabulous way to announce my new title to the world (or at least the people walking under the railroad tracks). Always I'm grateful for Sarah being more adventurous than I would be on my own, because it was such a fun night.

The next morning we made a short visit to the pond and got a few more pictures with Aunt Bethany and Ethan--who Rippy calls "Even."

Always in the boots these days

It was fabulous to have Bethany travel down for my defense and party and see her and Ethan, who has the best thick curly hair right now. We will see her one more time in July for a quick trip to State College.

So, that's the update from Dr. Tracy. Thanks to everyone who made it a special day for me. It's not a stretch to say that I will always remember it.