It's Not the Sweetest Thing

So, a year ago, give or take a week, I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. I believe I made passing reference to this once, but in honor of the anniversary, I thought I'd treat this to a bit more thorough an examination.

I have seen very positive results to my physical fitness as a result. In the past year I have ridden the East Lansing bus about 23 times, walking for most of my other intra-Lansing trips, although anything over 3 miles I tend to walk one way and beg a ride the other. I have lost 55 pounds, which seems quite good, but also highlights how much excess weight I was/am still carrying. I make a point to be more active, adding ping-pong and more dancing to my usual fare of dancing. And I try to eat, if not well, then at least less.

I cannot totally attribute this turn around to my diagnosis. As I mentioned to my parents shortly after my diagnosis, it may have been a wake up call, but I was a lighter sleeper than usual at the time as well. Even before that summer, I was gradually wresting my life back from a malaise that had gripped me for a few years, probably instigated by a break up that rather unsettled my life, then prolonged by my incredibly brilliant idea to move to a place where I had no social support a couple years later, when I think I was actually making decent progress climbing out of the first emotional pit I was in.

Anyway, a couple of months prior to this I had started dancing in Michigan finally, so it was the first time I was dancing weekly since graduating. Even my willingness to make a follow up appointment and get my diagnosis indicates something good about my state of mind, as my first inclination when faced with an excess of stress is to curl up in fetal position (metaphorically sometimes) and hope it goes away.

However, getting diagnosed was not all roses and lollipops as it may sound. I really wish that I had blogged or journaled in those first couple of months following my diagnosis, as my thought process was interesting and I would like a first hand account of it. I remember feeling very guilty! I was also bitter, at my first appointment I was provisionally diagnosed as pre-diabetic, and I actually changed my diet and behavior as a response to that, which was odd for me. It isn't as though the diagnosis came as a surprise, our health education system is good enough that a smart kid like me got the message that being sedentary and overweight was a recipe for all sorts of health problems, I just didn't want to/didn't think I was able to confront my lifestyle issues.

So, to be diagnosed as a diabetic about a week after I came to believe that I was capable of doing something about my health was a bitter pill. I'd like to say ironic, but that usually indicates unexpected, maybe it was ironic in the sense that it felt like a cosmic joke. Fortunately, this bitterness has somewhat abated with the realization that, for the most part, being diabetic has not adversely affected my opportunities. I take pills twice a day and eat more like I should have been eating anyway and my blood sugar nearly regulates itself (crazy homeostasis, I know!). The only extra needles I face are twice a year to have my blood tested, since little pinpricks for self-tests hardly count.

As I mentioned, I felt guilty, and continue to feel that way. Partially because I do believe that if I'd eaten better from the get-go I probably would not have developed diabetes. This guilt is partially, but not entirely, alleviated by my belief that at least now I am dealing with it in a fairly positive manner. But what really makes me feel guilty is Type I diabetics. I feel like I am trivializing what they HAVE to go through, due to a birth condition, by calling my rather manageable and somewhat self-inflicted problem diabetes.

I also was very sad or shocked when I first got the diagnosis. Whatever the reason, I spent quite a bit of time morosely brooding about it and crying when I was safely ensconced someplace private. This has almost completely subsided, as I have no real justification to wallow in self pity and the reality of the diagnosis has seeped in.

Finally, I am afraid. Less afraid than when I was first diagnosed, but still afraid. Apparently diabetes can kill you, but that isn't really immediate enough to really worry me. The two symptoms I really associate with diabetes are vision loss and progressive numbing of the extremities. These threaten two of the three best things I do in my life, reading and dancing. So sure, diabetes could kill me, but before it does that it can already take my life away. Late January some of my toes and the side of my foot seemed to lose some sensitivity, once you are consciously trying to feel if your foot feels normal, odds are however it feels will not feel normal. My doctor thinks a pinched nerve is the most likely cause, and it certainly didn't present in a manner consistent with a diabetic system, but for a couple of weeks I was very frightened, and it kept occurring to me that this was too soon, I was not ready to stop dancing. I don't think that I ever will be.

I still play it somewhat close to the vest with my diagnosis, sure I am posting on my blog about it, but that means what, ten people I know will find out, and most of you probably already knew anyway. Part of this is because it isn't really something that comes up in polite conversation, because I can pretty much eat whatever I want still, just now I do so with a mind toward moderation. But, a very real part of it is the guilt, I just don't really want people to know that I am diabetic, like I try to hide most of my flaws, with rather limited success in many areas. However, I don't want people to think I am hiding it from them because I distrust them or something, so when it does come up I try to be open about it, until I can shift the subject, and I think it is probably healthier to be open about it, as I don't really like secrets, so I am even trying to become comfortable bringing it up in conversation. As far as the Internet goes, comfort is still lacking, but I am able to broach the topic now. Presuming I posted this, eh?

You're Beautiful

There is a thing on Facebook called, "Tell Her She's Beautiful" day. Despite the gendered pronoun, it is intended to address the image issues that men and women face in our society, and hopefully help build positive body image for all of us. You know, women get called men and lumped into mankind all the time, get over it dudes!

Anyway, since telling any casual acquaintance of mine that they are beautiful in person seems uncharacteristically forward of me, I decided to do the next best thing and write a blog post about it. So, you are beautiful!

How do I know? Well, for starters I am of the opinion that most other people are good looking, yes, that includes you guys, I wouldn't call you attractive, but rather aesthetically pleasing. Secondly, I find that my appreciation of a person's appearance is correlated with how interesting I consider them as a person. Since you are still reading this post, I am inclined to think you find abstract thought and identity issues interesting, therefore you probably are an interesting person. Ergo, you are beautiful!

Body image is a tricky thing. Last summer I made some modest lifestyle changes for health reasons that, as an incidental side effect, caused me to lose some weight. When this happened I began to hope that, should I lose enough weight, I might gain some self confidence. However, the rational part of my mind soon pointed out that I have always considered myself the "fat kid," and no matter what I look like, as long as I am the "fat kid" in my mind, my personality is unlikely to be altered significantly.

We, especially women, are exposed to unrealistic and unhealthy standards of appearance in our culture. I think it is important that we support each other in attempting to achieve health, not some unimportant number like weight or waistline. As a professional mathematician, I will let you know that there are a lot of very important numbers, your weight is not among them.

Merit Based Salaries for Teachers and The Importance of Control Groups

I feel like my blog has sort of become me complaining about my life. This is not what I want it to be, mostly because I don't think that is either interesting or thought provoking. Last post may be excused because it provided an excellent example of Sartre's existential dilemma, but my complaints today are more mundane, as such, they shall be relegated to the end of this post.

With the US falling behind in educational achievement, our public school system has come under heavy scrutiny. Even more so as the documentary, Waiting for "Superman" hitting the pop culture radar. One of the controversial "fixes" proposed is tying teachers' salaries or bonuses to evaluations of their merit. I, as a semi-educator, view this suggestion with a little trepidation, not that I have any illusion that it will affect me one way or another.

My biggest problem with merit based pay is that teachers are not responsible for the quality of their students, for the most part. Perhaps my perspective on this is skewed by coming from the field of mathematics, but much of my students' success or failure is predetermined by their level of preparation when they enter my classroom. Unlike the private sector, I cannot weed out people who's performance I become responsible for if they have no business being in my classroom, except by failing them. This leads to me often trying to cobble a rudimentary working understanding of integral calculus for some of my students on top of a mathematical background where they still fear and distrust fractions and do not actually understand exponentiation. I think there are some Biblical verses condemning what I do (Matthew 9:16,17), but the task of reteaching almost the whole of mathematics to my students is daunting.

Granted, if one makes certain assumptions about the uniformity of mathematical backgrounds from class to class, then comparing educators in the same school teaching the same subject might yield some results as to the comparative efficacy of those educators. However, comparing educators who have students prepared by one school as opposed to another seems bound to confuse the individual educator's merit with that of the system that has prepared their students.

Finally, education is not a passive activity like watching the television. In order for students to get more out of it, they must put more into it. Mathematics may have come easily to me, but I was (almost) always actively trying to understand what was going on. When you understand the background, each new layer of complexity becomes relatively simple to understand, if you try. For example, on a recent exam, my students were asked to set up a partial fraction decomposition problem. Not recognizing that (x^2-4) factors was, at a glance, strongly correlated with not knowing to put Ax+B in the numerator over an irreducible quadratic factor. There is no reason that these concepts should be linked, one is a rather subtle question relying on mathematical skills they should already have, namely factoring, and the other is a simple fact about partial fraction decomposition that they ought to have learned in my class, yet, the two mistakes were almost always made simultaneously.

Granted, it is a lot easier for me to take college students to task for not investing in their education than it would be to criticize cute little elementary schoolers. My point, however, is not that we should blame the student's for their own academic successes and failures, but rather that we need to create the proper support for students to encourage them to invest in their own education from an early age. This is not something teachers can be responsible for alone, I believe, as I have said before, that our educational apathy is a cultural institution, and that students are often receiving deeply negative messages in the home and in pop culture about the value of education.

Ok, that is my two cents on that. As mentioned, I have some other thoughts on education kicking around, which may make it into a post. In regards to my own life, as mentioned we recently had a test, so grading that took up a bunch of time. Taking even more time was the Group Theory assignment due Monday, that our class just turned in today. Between those two tasks, I have been rather stressed recently, but they are now over, so I can focus on my other problems. Prominently featured among those are the fact that my laptop bricked Monday, so I have to decide what to do about that. Additionally, while sprinting to catch the bus this afternoon I caught my foot on an uneven spot on the sidewalk, causing me to slam right-side first into the sidewalk/floor of the bus. To catalog my injuries, I have a couple stubbed toes on my right foot, from catching on the sidewalk, a skinned right knee from the sidewalk, a tight pain in the middle of my right ribs, where my chest collided at a frightful speed with the edge of the bus entrance, and a skinned right elbow from the bus floor. Aside from a slight tenderness in my left elbow, which didn't bleed at all, my left side is in fine shape. This occasionally leads me to exclaim in surprise and appreciation at how much pain the left side of me is NOT feeling, which illustrates the importance of a control group!