Scavenger Hunt

How can you get the chaplain, his wife, and their ten-year old daughter to walk into a busy shopette (the on-base convenience store), flapping their arms like wings, making loud chicken sounds, and cluck their way right up to Church's chicken counter where they ask the dumbfounded lady if they need any fresh chicken, all while being videotaped by yours truly? It's relatively easy, actually. It's the same thing that makes the chaplain's wife and I stand in the middle of a busy baseball diamond singing the national anthem in less than 20 seconds, and performing "I'm singing in the rain" with umbrella and Gene Kelly-like tap moves in front of the base theater.

It's a scavenger hunt.

And why would anyone in their right mind, at least a few decades too old for a scavenger hunt, and while it's 100 degrees outside participate in a scavenger hunt? Your kids, of course.

My children usually don't do scavenger hunts. I have the coolest children on the block, for real, but they don't do "put-on group stuff" as the oldest likes to call it. No school sports, no clubs, no church groups. Nothing. Granted, they both did play in the school band (if you can call it that at their respective ages) for about a year, and the oldest did his best to play soccer when his dad was asked to coach the base teams, but that's about it. They don't do school spirit, and they really don't do groups that have been created for a purpose so to speak. They will hang out with their friends, throw impromptu trumpet / horn/ guitar concerts in our front yard, ride in base bicycle tours, and hang out in the woods behind our house, but it had better be unplanned and unstructured.

I'm not sure where they get this from. I am, and always have been a sucker for school spirit, and I have tried my best to pass this on to them. I've offered to buy them school shirts ("No, purple is just LAME, sheesh!"), take them to games or concerts ("Can't I just stay home and work on this song with insert random friend's name"), and talk to them about how much fun it is to be a part of something ("So you're saying that hanging out with kids who won't talk to me during lunch because of something to do with school will be FUN?"). Granted, their dad may have not been a member of a million clubs, societies, arts and sports team like I was, but at least he ran track, was a full-fledged memer of the beta club, and ended up joining the military, therefore doing nothing less than gushing pride and motivation right now.

So anyway, when I asked our kids if they wanted to do the scavenger hunt organized by the base chapel yesterday, and the youngest, upon hearing his friend was going to do it too, yelled a "yes!", I of course immediately signed up.

Now I wasn't going to do the scavenger hunt. Jill (the chaplain's wife, and the youngest's friend's mom) and I were going to chaperone some of the little ones in her car, and catch up on our lives. But once the kids had divided themselves into groups, and most of them decided to ride their bikes (including my youngest and his friend), only Jill's youngest was left alone, with no group and no bicycle as her older sister had appropriated that for her best friend. So what do you do when a ten-year old stares at you imploringly, begging you to be part of her team? You say yes.

And that's how you end up flapping your arms like a chicken in front of a half a dozen bemused shopette customers.

Admittedly, the scavenger hunt was the very best I have been on. Ever. And as a former girl scout I have been on more scavenger hunts than I care to remember, so I like to think of myself as somewhat of a scavenger hunt connoisseur. There was no ringing doorbells, asking people for bobbypins and diapers and unused hotel soaps. No, this scavenger hunt went milennial, and rocked. For one thing, it involved a video camera. And then the activities were things I could have made up, and as far as craziness goes, that's saying something. Among other things, we had to ask people at the BX to sing the Air Force theme song on camera, sit in a firetruck making siren sounds, do the "fork in a garbage disposal" Dance (we never did figure that one out) in the middle of the BX, get a tough to firefighter to admit he's seen 101 dalmatians (on camera), run through a drive through with a team member on your back, pretending to be a car, and best of all, convince a uniformed security police officer to sing "Bad boys, bad boys, watcha gonna do when they come for you" on camera.

The base chapel considers activities such as these to be a part of their outreach program, i.e., informing the base community about the chapel. Now although I'm not sure how having a ten year old and myself hang upside down in a playground singing "I believe I can fly" achieves that goal, but we did have fun. A lot of it.

And the best part? We won!

Be careful what you wish for

If you want to get husband-dear annoyed*, there are several (I could almost say "numerous") ways to approach this. One would be to monitor his every move, act as a narrator to his life if you will. My darling husband can't stand it when he's in the middle of doing something, and you, or anyone ,ambles up to him and says something like, "So, you're greasing your bike chain/ cooking dinner/ folding laundry" or whatever else best describes his current activity. Another thing that one may not want to do around husband-dear, is engage in lengthy relationship-building conversations with people you don't really know, but are only interacting with because you happen to be using one of their services (e.g., the lady at the cellphone store, the terminator man, etc). Moreover, you also may not want to be a dog, sit at his feet, stare at him, and whine incessantly.

In recent weeks, while my parents were visiting, I also discovered one other thing that can get on the love of my life's nerves if engaged in too much, and that is starting a sentence with, "In Dutch we have a saying...". It works best when followed up with a completely bizarre saying, and an incredibly lengthy explanation why this saying is slightly relevant to the current situation.

You should probably know that I come from a family that speaks mainly in sayings, and who have a slew of sayings that seem to have been passed down from generation to generation. And so husband-dear was innundated with explanations about sayings such as "doing something for the cat's violin", "One can cut really small sticks from really thick wood", and something about a slate roof.

Now it's one thing to use sayings like that in a situation where everyone understands them (and in this case, that would be my extended family only), but to have odd sayings about people named Jantje van Leijen, about birds, neighbors, and dogs and their bread which make no sense to you bandied about on an hourly basis, has to be quite the experience, and I have to admit that husband-dear bore it well. He listened, forgot them, mixed them up ("a dog that doesn't like the bread in your hand is better than..no..wait.."), and tried to counter every Dutch saying with an American one.

And so in passing, my parents learned a large number of American sayings, from "like water off a duck's back" to "be careful what you wish for". Interestingly, it seems as though Americans are not half as obsessed with animals as Dutch people (or at least my family) are, and thus lack many of the completely nonsensical sayings our language uses.

The one saying that I wanted to talk about in this post (and yes! I know! It took me -forever- to get there!), is "be careful what you wish for". You see, do you all remember how in my last post, I complained about not wanting to say goodbye to my parents the next day? Well, I didn't have to after all. My mother had apparently caught some sort of summer bug, and got sick that same night. We ended up having to take her to a MedStop the next day, and they weren't able to leave until yesterday. It was nice having them around for a few extra days, I'll be the first to admit that. But still, be careful what you wish for.


*Disclaimer: I, of course, love my husband dearly, and would never engage in any of these behaviors on purpose.

Een moratorium

Een moratorium. Om specifieker te zijn: een afscheidsmoratorium.
Ik weet niet eens of 'moratorium' een Nederlands woord is, eigenlijk.

Maar goed, ik stel dus een afscheidsmoratorium in. Een (tijdelijke) stop op het nemen van afscheid. Ik doe het gewoon niet meer. Niet. Dus als u binnenkort weggaat, ik hoef het niet te weten, want ik doe het niet meer, dat afscheid nemen.

Ik zit denk ik in een verlate 'nee' fase, want u moet namelijk weten dat ik, toen ik zes was, al in mijn vierde woonplaats woonde. En toen ik met negentien jaar op kamers ging, begon ik aan mijn tiende stad, in drie verschillende landen. Ik zou dus eigenlijk enorm goed moeten zijn in het nemen van afscheid. En dat ben ik eigenlijk ook wel. Ik noteer adressen, stuur emails, en denk er eens in de drie jaar zelfs aan om een kerstkaartje te sturen.

Maar ik ben het gewoon beu.

Want nadat Summer, onze chaplain, Kay zijn vertrokken, en dan straks ook nog Shelly weggaat, is het vertrek van mijn ouders morgen gewoon niet leuk meer.

Dus. Pap, mam, afscheid nemen, dat doen we gewoon niet meer. En als ik het helemaal niet meer zie gebeuren, dan breng ik jullie gewoon niet eens naar het vliegveld. Dan blijven jullie gewoon gezellig hier. Ik bedoel, iemand moet toch zorgen dat de boel hier aan kant blijft, de lokale Walmart goed zaken blijft doen, en ik niet vergeet te eten?

Goed plan?

Happily pathetic

I am now absolutely pathetic. I know. I haven't blogged in six days. It's ridiculous. And it will not happen again.

Well, I can't lie to you all. It actually may.

You see, I have ten days left before I have to go back. Correction, I have ONLY ten days left before I have to go back. Ten. Days. Maybe it's eleven, actually. But whatever it is, it's really. Too. Short.

So anyway, during those ten (or eleven) days, I want to stay away from my computer as much as possible. And not because I don't love y'all, or like writing, but because I am a) developing a nice, firm case of "o-m-g my wrist is going to fall off if I stay on this laptop any longer", and I do need it to be healthy in ten days, b) my parents are here, and c) my parents are here.

For those of you who have keeping up with my blog (you rock!), you probably remember that the last time my parents visited, was Christmas 2008. So when they promised to come over this summer for a few weeks, I was very happy.

And I've stayed happy. They arrived two weeks ago, and it's just all been really good. Not only has my Dutch improved by about 200% (I re-learned that the past tense for "hangen" is "hingen", not "hengen"), but we have had some really good times together, such as this past weekend, when we all drove up to north Georgia for a long weekend and a mountain bike race.

Oh, and did I mention that my parents like to clean? And tidy up? And help with whatever else needs done around the house?
I kid you not, they do.

You see, when it comes to cleaning, tidying up, making sure everything around the house is spotless and picked up, and yelling at the kids about leaving their socks on the couch AGAIN, I don't fall far from my mother's tree. Except for the yelling at the kids part ("you just wait, socks are really not such a big deal in the greater scheme of things"), my mother has stepped up to the plate (and then some), and let me tell you, she can stay for good as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure, but I think my mother sees it as a personal affront if I do a load of laundry without asking her for her help. Does she see me heading towards the hamper? She'll beat me to it, load up the washer, transfer it to the dryer, and fold it before I have a chance to say "Please sit down, you're a guest". She runs the vacuum (well, she tells my dad when he needs to run the vacuum), she will help me clean our bathrooms, all the while telling me that she absolutely HATES sitting still.
I'm not sure how they consider this a vacation, but they do. And they keep telling me they like it.

And between shopping trips, floating in our pool, hosting a Dutch coffee, and having more help than I could ever want around the house, I'm pretty happy myself.

Now excuse me while I go and lay around some more.

The grade book

As it's once again the last day of the semester, and the grades are once again due, I sit here and ponder. And think about how for hundreds of years, teachers have been doing what I'm doing now. How I'm somehow connected to all those who went before me.

OK, so that's not what I'm doing. I'm actually jumping between several excel spreadsheets, my online class grading sheet, and our university's online grading system so fast, it's making it my eyes blurry, while trying to remember which class, which student, and what grade I'm trying to look at now. Inside my head, things sound something like this right now, "87.88, 87.88, OK, yeah, that's what the online system has too. Now, did she take the final? OK, let's put that grade in here, what does that up to? Now let's check that with the user report. And what happens if I curve it like so? OK, 94.5, 94.5, that goes here. Hey, that doesn't add up. What?! Oh what did I do now?"

So no pondering, no reminiscing, just me and my computer. And sometimes I really truly wish we could just go back to the old-fashioned grade book. You know, those books that always had this odd square shape, and twenty thousand columns on one page. Those used to make teaching mysterious, almost mystical. As a student, you would look at your teacher's grading book, and wonder how they made sense of all of that. And now, students can lean over your shoulder, and comment on your excel spreadsheet. Poof! Mystique is gone!

I remember when they introduced collegiate online grading systems. Believe it or not, it wasn't that long ago that grades were still turned in on a piece of paper. Professors would calculate their grades, fill them in on a form, and send them, via interdepartmental mail, to, well, I don't know. You see, in my case, I just gave them to the department secretary who took care of it for us. I'm telling you, those were the days. But apparently, someone wasn't happy, and our grading system received the "the latest innovation in higher education", namely online grading. These systems were supposed to make the faculty's lives easier, streamline the grading process, and do a whole host of other things that were supposed to make the university one big happy place. Or something.

To be honest with you, I'm not sure who is happy right now, but the faculty aren't doing any happy dances yet. The systems work great, but there are little catches that can really turn a sunny happy day into a pit of misery. Like the catch that if you scroll down the page, the last grade you put in changes. Don't ask me who invented that, but if you use your mouse to scroll, your last grade will drop one whole grade (from an A to a B to a C, etc) with each scroll-click. Or the fact that the list of students in the online system may not be the exact list you have. Or you and the system might disagree on what constitutes "in alphabetical order". My current grading system is trying to convince me, for instance, that K. Smith comes before A. Smith. And that would be fine if you could enter each student's grade separately, but you can't. The system presents you with a really long list of all your students, with their names on the far right, and the grading box on the far left of the screen. You thus have to enter the grades in order, because there is no way of knowing if this box belongs to Felicia or William. If you're not aware of those little differences, and you're entering grades based on the order of your list of students, you can be in for quite a surprise when you print out your grades for one last final check.

Of course, Excel doesn't help either. It really doesn't. Well, it does in the sense that I no longer have to use a calculator to figure out my grades, but it also offers way too many opportunities to make your life way more complicated. Like curving for instance. Very few teachers used to curve, and if they did, it would entail dropping the students' lowest grade, or counting something as extra credit. Now, with excel, you can calculate means, and standard deviations, and create a curve so complicated, it should be presented at a conference. And because you can, you do. Or at least I do. And so what should be a simple, "let's add up my grades" turns into a major statistical operation.

And then I'm not even talking about online classes. These not only have their own grading system altogether, but which are also accessible to the students, which they can and will email throughout the semester complaining about how the grades up there can't possibly be right.

No, I'm telling you, the days of the grading book weren't so bad.

Off to the funny farm

The reason I was conspicuously absent yesterday, and did not pen a single word about that dismal world cup final, was because I am once again up to my ears in student papers. We have finally arrived at (cue joyous music) at the last week of the summer semester, which means it's final-paper-time. And whenever it's final-paper-time, as my loyal readers know, Dr. D tends to lose her mind just a little. And not because each year I have more and more students in my classes and thus more and more papers, which I think is partly because I don't mind failing a student or two, or three, or six, but also because of the academic honesty issues I run into every single year.

Really, it's all my own fault. It is. I have fellow professors who -never- have academic honesty issues. They never complain about citation issues, the lifting of entire paragraphs from wikipedia, or the blatant recycling of one's lecture notes. They also don't use turnit.com, and definitely don't run suspicious phrases through Google.

And I do.

Every semester I start off, telling myself I will not be as fixated on plagiarism as I was previous semesters. Mainly because it's a lot of work, it is incredibly frustrating, I have to face a lot of angry students, and it just really gets me down. I mean, wouldn't you feel just a teeny bit depressed if you spend over an hour explaining, discussing, and elaborating on academic honesty, proper citation, and APA, only to have 25% of your students turn in blatantly plagiarized work?

But then every semester one sentence in a paper will stick out. It will remind of a book I read, a website I checked out, or even better, my own online lecture notes. And it will not mention a source. And I'll try to ignore it. I might even grade the paper and move on to the next. But that sentence will stick in my mind, calling out for me to check it. To -at least- run it through Google. And I always give in. And then before you know it, I've decided that out of the spirit of fairness I then have to check all papers. And since running 5-page papers through Google is a lot of work, I sign into my Turnitin account. And there it is: Pandemonium.

Today's winner is a student who decided to copy her entire literature section from my lecture notes. With references to Dutch and German books and all. Whenever a student does that, it really drives home how much plagiarism really is like stealing. I spent hours finetuning my notes, and with two clicks, someone just conveniently "borrows" it.

I wonder at those people who claim that in today's social networking media age, students no longer understand the difference between mine and thine. Are they correct? Is that why there is so much plagiarism compared to ten years ago? And is that an excuse? Is all knowledge equal, and does it therefore not matter where you got it from anymore?

The bottom line is, I don't know. And in all honesty, I don't care. If you want to graduate, you have to know how to write an academic paper. And that includes knowing how to cite your sources. And if lectures, powerpoint slides, workshops, recommended literature, and comments on one's homework assignments don't do the trick, then perhaps you are doomed to redo Dr. D's class another two, or three times. And it doesn't matter how much of a millennial you are.

But at the end of the day, I am stuck grading papers where every odd-looking sentence sends me to the internet. Where every statement without a source makes my stomach sink in fear that I have yet caught someone else not adhering to the rules. Where I can't just grade a paper for its content, but have to constantly be on the lookout for signs of plagiarism, because who knows where that content came from.

So there is no joyous music just yet. In fact, the soundtrack to my life sounds a little more like this.

TGI Friday

One red Honda.
A grand 106 000 miles.
Three years of commuting 90 miles one-way each day.
Two snowstorms.
One near-spin out.
And as of today:
One ticket.

My first ticket. My first ticket ever.

I cried. In fact, I can still cry if I think about it long enough. I had a perfect record. And that is quite the miracle, considering the family I come from. Both my father, my brother, and sister-in-law like to collect speeding tickets. Sixteen euros here, twenty euros there, and an occasional hundred-and-eighty euros when my brother doesn't realize he's speeding in a work zone. I guess you can say I get my driving habits from my mother, who has received one ticket in over forty years of driving.

But now my perfect record is shattered. Shattered. And all because I didn't pay attention, saw an empty intersection, missed the cop, and performed a beautiful rolling stop. Just gorgeous. Had there been a yield sign, it would have been perfect. Only there wasn't. There was a stop sign instead. At first I didn't believe all the flashing lights were for me, but they were. An absolutely adorable cop gave me my citation, and told me I had to call the court, or show up to court, to find out the fine.

And that's when I freaked out. Well, I joked with the cop, put my license away, and drove off, and then started to freak out. I mean, court?! Call a court?! Or worse, go to court?! Somehow I associate court with, well, you know, criminals. And I'm not a criminal. I am a nice, law-abiding citizen, one who won't even secretly stick some of her recycling in the regular trash, or drive down a one-way street because it's faster. I am about as criminal as your grandmother. At least, I think I am. I mean, am I?

Let me tell you that thoughts like that make 90 miles last forever. Especially if you're too scared to drive anything but two miles below the speed limit, don't want to use your phone, in case you miss another sign, and are on the lookout for cops constantly.

Of course, husband-dear did not quite know how to handle a freaked out Dixiechick. I mean, you call the court, find out what the fine is, and then decide if you want to contest it or not. Easy, right? Well, not according to the blubbering woman on his couch who kept repeating, "But I'm a good person! I shouldn't have to go to court! And now what will this do for my citizenship application/ job/ your security clearance?!"

But you see, he calls it freaky, I call it a cultural difference. And not just because it sounds nicer, but also because it's really true. You see, in Europe you don't go to court, unless you've really truly messed up. Most of the time when you've violated some trafic law, you don't realize it until a fine arrives in the mail, accompanied by a beautiful black-and-white photograph of you committing the offense. And even if you get pulled over, the police will usually happily tell you that "the fine is in the mail". Or so my brother has told me anyway. The only time you go to court is if you have been really bad. Like driven after having consumed a six-pack of beer. Or killed someone. Or driven really ridiculously fast (like 100 miles over the speedlimit). So in my mind, I'm like all those people now. And no matter what husband-dear says, I have a hard time believing I'm really not considered a hardened criminal now.

And you want to know something else? I just realized the date on my citation reads 2008. (See! I knew that Georgia was behind!) Now excuse me while I go find a reason to freak out about the date being two years off.