Tiling

So for my weekend adventure this week I set to tiling my bathrooms. I bought a house when I moved to Logan that had three bathrooms, all with carpet. It kind of boggled my mind that one would have carpet in the bathroom, but I had seen it in other houses in Logan so I thought to myself: Maybe it's a Logan thing. After all there are some places in the world where people put carpet in the bathrooms...Great Britain being one. I personally think that carpet in a bathroom is the worst possible thing that you could have in a house. You come out of the shower and step in the carpet making it wet, and then it is wet for at least ten hours. That is not sanitary. I had never tiled before but I thought to myself: how hard can it be? I'm patient and pretty good at following directions. So my dad said that Lowes and Home Depot have free classes on tiling. I went to Lowes and they said they used to have in person classes but now they have all their stuff online. That was fine with me, but the tile I finally selected for my first bathroom was from Home depot. I went to get the tile and lo and behold they still had an in person class. So I thought to myself I might as well give that a shot since I am here. But it turned out the employee who usually did these classes had forgotten that he was supposed to do it. I was the only one there and he showed me what I needed to know. Then I got home, sized up the tiles and saw how they would fit. Then today I mortared them down to the floor. Now I need to wait to put in the grout. I am sure I would have done okay with Lowes' online training. Maybe I should check it out now.

Skiing take 3

Yes, I went skiing again. And I seemed to do a lot better than the first two times. Maybe next time I can give a blue diamond hill a try. But what I am going to write about today is the methods by which children learn to ski. At Beaver Mountain there appeared to be several different strategies. Some kids took lessons from ski instructors. Since I was riding the lift by myself for the most part, some of these kids rode the lift with me so there was an adult to make sure that they were safe. Essentially these lessons seemed to be demonstration and practice. The ski instructor would demo a technique and then the kids would practice. I was able to steer to avoid people much better yesterday, so that was very helpful because sometimes there would be a class of 6 or so kids all practicing.
But some parents showed their kids how to ski. In those cases, there seems to be three methods. Some simply allowed their kids to try under their supervision. Some had leashes attached to their kids to help make sure the kid could not get too far away. And then some parents skied holding their kids right in front of them. So I was wondering what would have worked the best for me when I was a kid. I actually was a very rambunctious kid, so my mom sometimes had to have a leash on me out in public to keep me from running out of view. So I am guessing my parents would have gone the leash route. But maybe they would have had me take lessons?

Skiing, take 2

I went skiing again today. I seemed to remember much of what I learned about skiing from last week. But it seemed that there were more people out today, and so I had a few more issues trying to avoid people. For the most part I only wiped out trying to avoid people, which is good progress I guess.

So since this is an education blog, let's talk about education. According to behaviorism the way people learn is to give them stimuli to provoke a behavior, and then to reward them, and then to either (a) have them do a slightly more complex behavior, and reward them, and so on until you have them doing the target behavior (shaping), or (b) have them perform the next step in the overall task and reward them, and so on until they have performed all steps of the task successfully (chaining). Unfortunately that does not work so well at Beaver Mountain. Basically there is a tiny hill called Little Dogie that is not very steep at all, and then the next hill, Little Beaver, is very steep. So when I learned from Doug last week it was more or less behaviorism in action, at least initially. Doug showed me how to slow down, I practiced, and so on. Skinner would be proud. This week it was more learn by doing. I had to just go at little beaver and hope that I did not crash into anything and that I was learning along the way. And of course I fell a few times, but less than last week. But as Schank says, one must fail to learn. We'll see next time whether I learned anything this week, but I do feel a little more comfortable. I'm able to turn pretty well for the most part now. Slowing down when I am going super fast, not so much. But it went a lot better this week, and hopefully being able to slow down will come with time.

Aggie basketball

So I finally made it to an Aggie basketball game, the one against Louisiana Tech. I had read about how wonderful the student section is at Aggie basketball games, and I must give them credit...I've been to basketball games at the College of Wooster (a division 3 school where I went to undergrad with a very strong basketball tradition), and to games at two other schools with strong basketball traditions - Ohio State and Purdue. At Ohio State I have been to games both in St John arena and Value City Arena (I know, what a ridiculous name). At Purdue I have been to games in storied Mackey Arena (where the court is named after one of the coaching greats, Gene Keady). I have never encountered a student section that is as well coordinated and vocal as that of Utah State.
So what does this have to do with education, you might ask? Well, I would have liked to have had a video recorder to record the students while they were doing one of their cheers or signing. So when I got home I decided to check youtube for the aggie fight song. wasn't quite sure what it was called but it was cool when they were playing it and the students were waving their arms in unison. And lo and behold I found it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A24gog3CSSA
And I remembered that this week I had talked to my students about copyright, and mentioned that a lot of stuff in youtube is in violation of copyright. It's important stuff, as teachers can be sued or fired for using materials in violation of copyright. Unfortunately it is also a subject that has a lot of grey areas, something some of my students did not seem to like too much. So I thought to myself, "is this clip in violation of copyright?" Though it does have some subtitles, it did not seem to be a professional job, not meaning that it was bad but meaning that it did not seem like something out of a television studio. That's good, as if someone recorded it off TV, then that would be a copyright violation. So if it is just a homemade video, then it is probably not violating copyright by puting a link to the youtube page here.
Well, tomorrow it is my second attempt at skiing. I may become a real Utahn yet!