Sleep, Eat, Research

I can't say I've done a whole lot to warrant feeling this exhausted.

I've slept a lot this week. I came to the conclusion that I was tired and that perhaps I merely needed more sleep. After a week of sleeping in, I can't say I feel any better than I did getting up at 6:30am. I might even feel worse.

On the other hand, another experiment seems to be going better for me. Last week I decided that eating past about 4pm makes my stomach upset, and so I've significantly decreased my eating in the evenings and it seems to be working. I know it sounds weird, but I think I really need this much time before bed for everything to settle (and it makes me drink more water, which could be the real reason I feel better).

In the realm of food, I've been finding it increasingly difficult to stick to weight watchers for more than a few weeks at a time. I'm not exactly sure what is holding me back, but I need to figure that out before I can move forward with weight loss. I can't say I see this as a problem. For me, this is about a healthy lifestyle and my goal is really to figure out a way to maintain living healthy. Right now, I think there might be some other things holding me back from this that I need to iron out.

As far as these experiments go, I've concluded that getting up early and not eating late are probably best for me.

I suppose the only other thing to catch you up on is perhaps school/professional goals. Really, there has been a lull in the activity for me, however, I do have a bit more direction. On a drive back from viewing a transition to proof course at one of the local community colleges, I was asking the woman I've mentioned in my previous blogs about her dissertation which she will be working on in the following months. Her goal is to evaluate adult students' existing real world mathematical knowledge and to devise an assessment for this knowledge and perhaps a method of integrating this way of thinking into curriculum for adults.

I suppose to understand the importance of this to me, you might need to know why I am even pursuing my master's degree.

While I was working in Eugene at the community college there, I worked one on one with a number of adult mathematics students, and what I often observed was a language barrier between how these students would and could speak about their common or existing knowledge and how they could (if they could) speak about they classroom knowledge. And I say if they could, because often, they couldn't. In fact, when these students struggled with a problem, more often than not they couldn't even articulate what it was they didn't understand because they simply didn't have the language to do it.

So, as you might see, my goals lie in a desire to decrease this gap for adult students, whether it be through a transition course to re-learn the language of school mathematics, or a curriculum that simply uses real world language. And thus, the dissertation of this instructor that I have come into contact with, is very important to me and my future work.

Now, if I haven't bored the hell out of you, that's good. If I have, well, better luck next week, eh?

For now, I should be moving on to getting some much needed reading done.