Debbie's IISME Journal 2008

Gail Halvorsen was known as the “Candy Bomber” after World War II. I thought his story was inspiring. After the war when Berlin was cut off from the rest of world, the Americans began dropping care packages over the wall. Gail was one of those pilots. One day while he was near the barbed wire fence separating the Berliners, he noticed a group of children. Feeling sorry for them, he reached through the fence and gave each one a stick of gum.

That gave him the idea to drop candy bars into the city along with some of his aid runs. Acting on his own, he tied handkerchief parachutes to hundreds of candy bars and dropped them with his regular loads. In order to signal the kids, he would flap his wing flaps. This got him the nickname: Mr. Wiggles. The children started sending thank you cards to him via the US government. Because of these letters, the Air Force started financing these drops and recruited other pilots to do the same. It became a regular practice.

I was so touched by this story. Just a simple act of kindness had a huge impact on so many lives. Sometimes I get frustrated at being the “nice person.” I wonder what’s the use? Reading a story like this lifts me up. It reminds me that kindness is powerful no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential.

My thirteen-year-old niece went on a trip with a friend (her age) and the girl’s family last weekend. It seemed like such a fun trip. They were to go hiking, fishing, etc. However, during the drive to Tahoe, they were all discussing what math class the girls were going to be in. Neither of the girls got into eighth grade Algebra. The friend’s parents were upset about it and are sending her to SCORE for the summer. When they asked my niece how her parents felt, she said they were okay with her being in the Pre Algebra class. This was apparently unacceptable to the family. My niece (Steffie) said the parents said that Steffie’s parents didn’t care about her performance in school.

I heard on the news that the number of children diagnosed with autism jumped 125% in Santa Clara County.  The researchers hypothesize that either the number of cases are in fact increasing or doctors’ ability to diagnose the disease is improving. At my site, the number of students with this disorder and Asperrgers is on the rise.  One definition of autism from  http://pediatricneurology.com/autism.htm#Introduction is Those people who have difficulty in the non-verbal parts of communication (including their desire and ability to use language in a social context) may be considered to have an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

If it is the case that the number of children with this disorder has risen to that degree I am shocked. I wonder, though, if maybe the guidelines have been made overly strict or if there is a lot of misdiagnosis. I am leery of the idea of a huge increase in cases. Could it be environmental? What are we doing to our environment that is causing children to be born with a neurological disorder? Or is it really all a mistake?

When I was a kid, I remember the adults talking about this or that kid started talking late or is a little spacey. There wasn’t much else said about them (at least not around us kids). That’s just the way they were. And (!) some of the late talkers/spacey kids outgrew the issue. (Einstein didn’t start talking until he was five). We all went to school, graduated, and went on with our lives. I’m concerned that the early diagnosis (by age two) labels these kids for life and doesn’t give them the chance to grow out of it.

You may remember last year or the year before when a doctor’s laptop was stolen and all the patient information was compromised. In the news report I saw, it was suggested that companies should encrypt their computers so this couldn’t happen again. This week, my computer got encrypted unbeknownst to me. This not only means that the files on my computer are encrypted, but any device such as a flash drive, disc, camera, cell phone, or ipod get encrypted too.

Needless to say I freaked out! The only device I lost was a flash drive, fortunately. However, I’ve been frantically trying to retrieve my files. I’m unable save them. Once a device gets plugged in, it gets encrypted. I may be able to email my word documents, but the power points I’ve made explaining some of the concepts I’ve learned are too big to send. I opened a Google Documents account, and was able to get a simplified version of my power points put on it. None of the animations work so I’ll have to redo them anyway. I can’t seem to copy and paste the slides on to my other computer. At any rate, I’m so glad Diane told us about this resource, or I’d be really up a creek.

I did the coolest thing in lab today! I got cheek cells from my husband, daughter and me and ran it through the DNA Identifiler. It is a process used to get DNA profiles of people using 16 points on the genome. The experiment went perfectly, and the results were clear. They show how for each point, our daughter got one allele from me and one from my husband. It was so cool!

I know I can come up with a lab from this. I won’t be able to use the equipment, but I can use the results. Well, I’ll work on it anyway.

May daughter, Erin, was so cute about this. I had gotten the samples Sunday night. On Monday we did the initial part of the experiment (PCR). At dinner that night, I was telling my family all about it. Erin asked, “What if the results don’t show I came from you and Poppy?” I said, “Well that may mean they sent us home with the wrong baby, but I no matter what we’re keeping you.” We all laughed.

One of things that made this so much more fun than previous experiments was that I had a personal stake in it. I paid real close attention when the results showing male vs female showed up. It comes out in colored bands on the computer screen. I could see there’s Erin, there’s me, and there’s Brian! YAY!!

I think the shear joy and enthusiasm over such a simple thing is what makes me more suited as a teacher than as a business/scientist person. No one gets as excited about results except the other teacher fellow. I can’t wait to take it home and show my family.

During the hot weather earlier this summer, I got into the habit of walking my dog at four in the morning. No, I’m not kidding! I had been walking him in the evening, but in the hot weather, he was struggling and sometimes he would just lie down on someone’s lawn and look at me pathetically. I would eye him and say, “Get up! I’m not carrying you home.” I tried bringing water bottles for him to drink and more to drench him with, but he would just lie there.

The four AM walks solved this problem. It was always cool enough, and it was early enough for me walk him, do my morning stretches, shower, eat and the get to work. And, then, this week, he started waking me up at 3:30 AM! After a couple of morning of this, I decided that the morning walks weren’t really working for me. Fortunately, it’s cooler. If it does get close to a hundred or more, we’ll have to work it out, but as for now I’m done. He still yips a little, but I’m not compelled to get up. He’s getting the message, and is slowly stopping.

You might be wondering why I felt it necessary to walk him at all when the temperatures were too high. Well, my dog is a Labrador. Those of you who have read the book Marley and Me probably understand immediately (If you are a dog lover, you will really get a kick out of this book). Labradors, when given insufficient exercise, will do things like eat your furniture, walls, and tires off your car. This destructive force is best avoided. Although, I admit, that the heat must have been making me crazy to get up at such an ungodly hour for a dog!

I read two articles on the NEA website about how student loans are discouraging people from entering the teaching profession. According to one article, (http://www.nea.org/neatoday/0801/studentdebt.html) graduating seniors are accumulating over $19,000.00 worth of debt. People are looking at this and at the beginning teacher salaries and getting priced out of teaching.  Since the price of college is increasing and government support for students is decreasing the projections are dismal for the teaching profession.

I was talking to my husband, who is also a teacher, about our daughter’s college fund. We’ve had a fund open for her since an hour after her birth, and because of the soaring cost of college, we estimate that we can afford about a year and a half at a UC. It was very discouraging.  We still have time to make some more up, but if she does decide to go to a UC or a private school she will have to pony up for it. Maybe that is a good thing….who knows.

If I were starting in this profession, this would be a definite concern to me. Given the statistics from the article, it seems like a new teacher would finish paying their student loans in time to start paying for their own children’s college education. I know several teachers who after ten years of teaching in California discovered that they still didn’t have enough money to buy a house. So some moved to Oregon or changed professions. 

This is sad on many levels.  It’s terrible that after putting their hearts into a career they discover that they unable to give their own families what they want.  It’s terrible that their school/district had invested ten years into these people and then they just walked will be unable to give our own children the higher education that NCLB says they should have available.

“If a miracle were to happen one night while you were sleeping, the next morning when you wake up how would you know it had happened?”

My sisters, my niece and I were having lunch one day last week. My niece who is a psychology major asked us, the above question. We all hemmed and hawed, thinking, “What are kids learning in college these days?”

 
Finally, one of my sisters said, “When I woke up, Hugh Jackman would be there next to me.”  Another said, “I’d be four inches taller” (That would make me a whopping 5’2”). We all had a laugh. We tried to think of other miracles, and, of course, world peace came up along with the end of hunger on the planet. It was a fun activity. I think I may use it in my class to start up a discussion about goals. It allows the students to think outside of the box and to be just a little fantastic. What would your miracle be?

Last week I got the opportunity to visit one of the other fellow’s school. She teaches a biotechnology course, and in the last ten years has developed a state of the art biotechnology lab. Her lab is extremely impressive. She has fifteen computers and fifteen laptops. She has a wireless connection for her class only. Ten microwaves and refrigerators, special fume hoods. It is a science lab to die for!

She was able to convince her school district to give her $400,000.00 to convert her class (which was built in the 1940s), and every year she has written grants and gotten donations to support her lab. AB has donated a DNA sequencer so that her students can sequence their own DNA. It was very inspiring.

I don’t know anything about grant writing, but I’m willing to give it a go. I talked to a colleague from my school, and she said she would be interested in helping me write one. Does anyone have any tips on which grants to apply for and what to say?

Mistakes.... I don't like making them. I usually prepare real thoroughly before I attempt something and that usually helps decrease my number. This summer I notice that I am making a bunch of them. As I drive home, a list of things I wish I had done differently runs through my mind. I try to stop the list and remind myself I did the best that I could, but I still get into that shaming place. 

Many of the mistakes are due to lack of experience in the lab. One thing about lab work is that I often don't know I've made a mistake until the very end. This means I've messed up an entire day's work on possibly the first step. The second part of this is that my mistakes are public knowledge because everyone looks at the results. It's really embarrassing. I know the purpose of my current experiments are for me to learn the protocol. I wish I was currently in college so that maybe a TA could give me some quick pointers. 

I'm learning to read things more carefully, and work real slow. I keep double and triple checking my work. If I was my student, I would try to give me a confidence booster, but I don't know how to do that here. So I am just plugging along.

I’m back in the saddle again. The weekend was fantastic! Three days off really made a difference. My family and I went to Central Park in Santa Clara for a picnic and to watch the fireworks display. It was a blast. The park was full of people singing and barbecuing. People waved flags and had red, white and blue glow necklaces. Everyone had a good time. It was like a slice of Americana you’d see on TV.

We got there at about 7 PM and played Frisbee and cards until 9. Someone started playing patriotic songs on his guitar about that time so a big group of us joined in singing. I can’t remember a more festive Independence Day.

The fireworks show was awesome. It lasted about thirty minutes, and in the background, we could also see the fireworks display from Great America. It was a double treat. By the end of the show, though, I noticed that the smoke was so thick it obscured some of the ending pyrotechnics. I was briefly concerned about the air quality and the fire danger. That wasn’t born out since there were no fires and the wind had kicked up Saturday.

This has been a long week for me. I’m having a hard time with getting the little pipette tips into the plate wells. The wells are so small and close together that it is hard to see. I stopped drinking coffee altogether to see if that will help steady my hand (and I only drink decaf to begin with). Shaking can cause contamination. It’s been very frustrating and discouraging.

I’m looking forward to a three day weekend. We’re having a family get together for the fourth. I have seven siblings (most have big families) and we’re spread out throughout the country. It will be good to see everyone again. The grandkids grow up so fast. It is fun to meet up with them.

Okay, the weekend will be a good break from a long difficult week. I really am looking forward to sleeping in and kicking back with my family. I will come back Monday with a better attitude. For now it’s back to the lab to practice, harrumph!

I had an interesting experience in lab. The person we were working with is obviously very good at what he does. We were setting up for an experiment, and he was explaining how to make the various concentrations for the reactions. He has a very soft voice and talks and calculates very quickly.

I was lost. And embarrassed. My partner, who is a college intern, seemed to be following along just fine. From previous experience, I know she is much better at the math than I am. I felt like I did in school when calculations were being done. Back then, I could take home and study it carefully before the actual lab so I wouldn’t look so stupid. No chance of that here.

I tried to follow along, and in between, I would ask questions. As I struggled with my confusion, I remembered how in college, groups would get together and divvy up an assignment. Well I felt like I should have been the one assigned to go get the pizza. After a while, though, I noticed that my partner, regardless of the front, was as lost as I was.

This gave me a little more empathy for my reluctant students. Science is a fun class because there are labs, and the kids get to interact a lot. This lab experience helped me realize that it isn’t all that fun doing a lab if you are the slowest one at calculations and/or understanding what’s going on.

This weekend, I met with a couple of friends who not teachers. We were talking about how companies tend to be top down, military management styles. One of my friends was commenting about how her boss was such an ogre when they first started working together. He was unreasonable and down right verbally abusive. After working together for a while, she learned how to diffuse his tirades.

Recently, their department merged with another department. There were battles between the two department heads that seemed to my friend to be what she sees on Animal Plant when two lions are battling for leadership of a pride. The battle raged into the cube area, and some of the underlings ended up being collateral damage.

At the end of last semester, I had a couple of kids come up and ask me how well they needed to do on their final to get the next grade up. Having been around the block a few times, I said to them, “Well, I can’t give you an exact number since I haven’t entered all the grades into the computer yet, but do the best that you can so that you get the most points possible.”

About this time, I also got kids begging for extra credit assignments and some coming up with old projects to argue about getting more points. Since I teach mostly freshmen, they aren’t so aggressive and I can divert them easily. Some of my colleagues who teach older kids go through this with every test and project. Sometimes the parents come in and try to dicker for points. If they aren’t satisfied, the administrators get called. It puts a lot of pressure on teachers to inflate grades just so they don’t get calls.

Next year, I will be teaching a section of older kids, and I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions about how to deal with Point Piranhas. 

This is what I worked on today:

The AmpFaSTR Identifiler PCR Amplification Kit is a short tandem repeat (STR) multiplex assay that amplifies 15 tetranucleotide repeat loci and the Amelogenin gender determining marker in a single PCR amplification.

This machine comes with a 186 page user manual. I got a message from my supervisor that we would be working on it at 8AM. Well I got the message at 7:45 AM, and crammed to preview the manual. Fortunately for me he actually meant 8:30. I was able to read the introduction and look up some of the words before we started on the machine. He asked me and Julia if we had read the manual. We both said a little. The supervisor said, “Oh that’s okay. I never read them beforehand. Just the introduction and the results sections.” That made me feel better. He then said the kit (the chemicals involved) cost $3000, so we needed to be extra careful.

We only use about 1 micro liter of each of the chemicals and the total volume in the kit is probably less than 25 micro liters. I’m still flummoxed about the volumes we are using. The pipette tips are needle like at the tips so I can actually see liquid in it, but when I release it out, hardly anything comes out. I am blown away by how expensive this stuff is, and by the fact that this company is allowing me to do practice runs with it.

As I said earlier, my lab buddy is a young woman named Julia. She is nineteen years old, and has just finished her second year at UCLA. She is a bright and sweet young woman. I’ve noticed difference between Julia and me. She’s faster at the lab calculations and more up-to-date with lab procedures. One of the most notable differences is how we approach novel tasks. My inclination is to ask someone. I prescribe to the idea that it is better to ask than to screw it up. Julia on the other hand prefers to work it out on her own. I’ve learned to step back and let her do her magic. Much of the time, she’s able to come up with the answer, and I’m guessing it helps our mentor since he doesn’t have to be interrupted so much.

I think we are learning to work together as a team. Sometimes it does help to ask rather than to hunt and guess. We were working on one of the machines and we were stuck. Since I had already noticed her tendency to find the answers on her own, I stood back and let her work. She very methodically checked every menu and read each of the pull down bars. She looked for quite a while. I caught on to her strategy and suggested we search the computer for the user manual. Well it didn’t work, and we eventually had to ask someone. So we applied both methods and were able to get our work done.

Another difference between industry work and teaching is there seems to be a lot of down time in industry. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t have as much responsibility as the people who work here full time or if the down time is real.

At school, something is happening every minute of the day. Class time, break time, lunch time, before/after school, as long as I’m on campus, there seems to be someone or some thing that needs my immediate attention. Days seem a lot more dramatic at school.