Daddy loves you

Here is another post about notes in the bathroom at a Baptist university. It says "daddy loves you," which I think may be in reference to God but is both weird and unclear.

full cup press

A little peaberry coffee for the afternoon homestretch...

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Dissertate

This week I heard back from some peeps at the U. of Chicago that they are going to let me use a data set that they have.  Kind of big news.  As in, I can now start working on the dissertation big news.  Only downside is they have already published a lot off of it, but I think I can make something work out of it.  

So, now I am all excited to really dive in on the reading and what not.  I was holding off a bit because it would be sad to do all the reading and never have data to run stuff with.  Thus the study couch for the night.  Sara is working, so it is just me and the beautiful coffee porter reading about physicians, beliefs, decision making and everything that will solve the world's problems.  Cheers. 

grading

When I was an undergrad, I remember thinking that papers were very helpful.  They force you to sit down and think through a topic in more depth than you would if you only took an exam or something like that.  So now that I am teaching, I think that papers are important for a number of reasons.  I now wish I had different opinions about assigning papers to students.  I really, really don't like reading massive stacks of papers.

Below is me happily holding all of the papers I graded this past semester.  Except for the small stack I found on a different desk (totally thought I lost like 40 or 50 final papers... that would have been unfortunate).  This is also minus the graded papers that students actually came to pick up.  I felt I needed to document this.

writing

So I don't think I will ever take people's writing for granted anymore - especially more professional or academic writing.  Each sentence has likely been written and re-written many, many times before it ever reaches the reader.  I have a paper that has been through a few reviews by now and I have been writing and re-writing for over a year now.  Each sentence has been read literally like a hundred or more times and most every sentence has been inserted, changed, removed, moved or any other combination so many times by now. It is interesting to think about whether or not the paper is still the same paper as it was when it started or not.

I can now see why people say that papers and books are never really finished, but are abandoned.  There comes a certain point when you just get tired or reading, working on, or changing the thing and you just want to give up on it and move on.  That is the point at which it is considered 'finished.'  I think this one was 'finished' long ago but it still plagues me, ha....

build it. they may come.

People's health is an interesting beast.  We often think of health as between one person and their immune system, or some variation of this.  There has also long been a correlation between lower income individuals and poor health and, often, shorter lifespans.  There are many ideas and studies showing why this latter relationship may exist, but so often it can be oversimplified.  This becomes a real struggle when we try to make structural changes to fix things (think healthcare reform) - we know something is broken, but if we are not sure why how can we really fix it?  (Before I go on, you should keep in mind that there is neither an explicit nor implicit political point/argument in this blog.  Carry on.)

Here are some thoughts from some recent research in the sociology of health and illness.  Policy makers and people in general often place a high degree of emphasis on the individual.  This usually translates over to things such as focusing on health care and insurance coverage, or even the availability of (affordable) health care.  But, even if these problems were fixed, people still may not use the health care available to them because it is not clear that this is the problem (obviously it is a big problem, but it could be subsequent to other issues).

Going back to the 'poor people' and their healthcare.  We assume that poor communities have poor health because there is no insurance or the care is hard to access.  While this may in part be true, recent research shows that within poor communities, it is not the poor people that are most affected by barriers to health, but middle-class and upper-class individuals living in that location.  In other words, the poor health in poor communities is actually not attributed to the poor people within that community, but the middle and upper class individuals within that lower income community.  This is usually because poor individuals have social networks in place that allow them to deal with their issues apart from the structural solutions in place - they talk to their friends and family to get help with health and not a doctor.  The middle and upper class individuals living within those poorer communities, on the other hand, do not have access to these social networks for solutions and 'suffer' the consequences.  Thus, it is possible that if we provided all of these poor people with health care that it may not change community level health outcomes anyways.  After all, they are not even the ones pulling down the average level of health.

Additionally, poorer individuals are less trusting of those in positions of authority like a physician and also expect worse outcomes from their interactions with doctors.  So, if they did have access and insurance as well as actually use that access, they may still have worse health outcomes than others.  This, again, is not so much a structurally caused health problem, but more cultural.  They have other ways to deal with health issues in their community and have different expectations when they do seek formal help.  Neither of these will be fixed by a shift in the structure of our health care system, but may require something else.  Some think a possible road forward is for all doctors to be more engaged with the communities they serve so that when/if people do have access, they will use it and expect something from it.  Others find it hard to differentiate solutions to these problems from political activism, and as such think no requirement for 'health advocacy' should be imposed as the activism would necessarily alter the substance of the medicine itself.  Either way, it is clear that health requires much more than a mere individual focus and that a structural change is needed in the delivery of health care.  It is significantly less clear, however, what that actually means.

Pretty interesting.  Sorry if that was a bore.  Mostly because there will probably be more.

My standardized tests

Measuring what, if anything, students have learned is rough. Almost painful even. There is really no win for the teacher. If you have them write papers, you have to read them. If you do short answer exams you have to read them and decide whether or not their fringe answer is close enough. If you do multiple choice/scantron exams you have to write the questions – which is worse than I would have thought.

BUT, you have more creative license when writing them – especially if every now and then you want to put a give-away answer in there. Here are a few for an exam coming up:

1. The mechanism that Durkheim describes as constructing the beliefs and bonds of a given group is:
     e. Positive reinforcement in the form of limited distribution of chocolate.

2. Mr. Stroope pointed out that Hindu characteristics, beliefs, and actions are pervasive in India and that as a result:
     e. It is easy for McDonalds to blend in and sell hamburgers as long as a picture of Ganesha is present.

3. Central to the spread and success of the Reformation was:.
     c. Better farming practices that allowed more free time for reflection.
     e. People had always known there was something unlikable about the Catholic Church.

4. A schism, pertaining to religious bodies, is when:
     b. Cracks are found in the church’s foundation.
     e. A denomination stops using one Bible translation and begins using another.

It looks like I run out of 'could be true' answers towards the end of questions (most of those are the 'e' option...).  Also, I suppose I could actually defend some of those somewhat.  Ehhh, I hold the answer key and that is that.