At 1-Year Mark of Living in New Zealand

I've passed the 1-year mark of living in New Zealand. My, how time flies.

I have my confirmation presentation this week. Technically, you are not officially confirmed in your PhD studies until you have passed this oral and written report stage. Since I seem to be the first person in my department to go through the new process, they don't really know what's supposed to happen, so I don't know what to prepare and am not really worried about it. When it comes to New Zealand and international students, it needs us more than we need it!

The Arts Tutor Training class had been interesting the past couple weeks. We learned about issues around assessment and how often it doesn't match learning outcomes. Our teacher recommended "backward engineering" a course, where you look at what you want the students to get out of it by the end and put in content and assessment that will help them get there, rather than just stuffing as much content in as you can. I can see the temptation to try to impart a lot of information, especially if it's a subject you are passionate about, but the reality is you can only get across so much in a semester. Quality over quantity, pretty much. One of my friends missed class so I was filling him in afterward, and he had never considered why traditional essays might not be the best way to measure learning in a class, so I'm glad I was able to bring up something for him to think about. I know I have been pondering this for months since that Teaching Week session on the ineffectiveness of traditional lectures!

I experienced my first bad lecture here with the "What If Computers Could Save Lives" public lecture by the head of the supercomputer at the university. It was frustrating because on a campus that has been continually cutting funding to the Arts, he basically appropriated all kinds of philosophical questions about big data and technology and ended with scaremongering and warning us to be wary of robots taking over. He also used old science fiction (Isaac Asimov and HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey) and never once mentioned the term nor gave credit to the fact that Arts people have been discussing these issues for quite some time, and maybe his poorly-researched talk would have benefited from some of their input, or perhaps he should have stuck to what he is an expert in and that actually would have been a lot more interesting than a scare session to a largely aging audience. (His actual research is on analyzing brain pathology using math and computer models.) I don't think it did the university any favors.

The new Digital Humanities seminar series is really interesting. Last one was on the internationally-used program LaBB-CAT (Language, Brain, and Behavior Corpus Analysis Tool) designed by researchers here and how it can analyze and mark up audio files a lot faster than doing it by hand. What used to take a researcher years -- going through audio files and listening for language changes and patterns -- can be done by the program in a day. The current research is on the New Zealand English vowel shift, where the second-generation New Zealand settlers began pronouncing their vowels differently from what they heard from their British/Scottish parents. Fortunately for linguists, a group of people in the 1940s went around the country with a van and a microphone and recorded people talking about their early lives, and some of these people had been born around 1850 and were the first people to learn English here. Many visitors and expats know about the vowel shift, because it is sometimes difficult to understand people even when they are speaking clearly because the vowels are pronounced so differently.

Sample image of LaBB-CAT from the website

I've been continuing to learn a lot about all sorts of topics. I created two websites in WordPress over the weekend and remembered how much time web development takes. It didn't help that years ago Google had converted their old Google Sites to "legacy sites" so I didn't have Super Admin privileges to be able to make some changes on the site I was migrating. And it took a couple hours to figure out why things weren't working, because every time you try to Google something that Google no longer thinks is important, you end up wading through all of their new Help forums that don't answer your question. Thanks Google.

I found an awesome book on world-building in science fiction and fantasy called Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. It includes media beyond books and movies too, like radio and video games, and was so interesting, I ended up reading most of it and finding a ton of good quotes for my research. Lots of Star Wars in there, too, although it came out before Disney took over the franchise so some of the information on the canon is out of date. 

I learned about life in the Chinese countryside and how birthdays aren't usually celebrated in China, which made me sad. I told my Chinese friends that I would make them a cake next year so we can have a Western celebration. They find it interesting that we make such a big deal about them. It's really through these kinds of conversations that you realize how much you think is normal is a product of your culture and what other people have passed on to you. Also, apparently karaoke is really big in China and there's a place here near the university that some students go to, so that might be on the radar for me to visit in the next year. Another friend taught in Japan for a while and was telling us about the strict education system and the high suicide rates there, which I didn't know about.

At home, I got some kind of black scuff marks all over my down jacket which I wear every day, tried to get them out with soap, mostly succeeded, then made the mistake of hanging it out on the clothes line after it had rained, and it got green spots all over it from the moss/plant residue runoff from the roof over the clothes line. These are times I shake my fist at New Zealand. 

Although many things are expensive, I had to take a picture of the price per kg of peppers at the grocery store, because it just doesn't seem to make sense for things like this to have the price per kg -- it makes it look outrageously expensive. Spring is officially here, so once the weather warms up, it will be time to start up our pepper factory again so we don't have to pay so much for the bottled ones.

Returning to New and Old Things

I enjoyed flying back over the Southern Alps covered in snow. What a lovely view of New Zealand.

What's been happening in the month since I returned from Australia...

In the Neighborhood


Construction finished on the new Pak N Save store next to the old one. The good news is we spotted insulation, so hopefully it was actually used! (Rare sight to see insulation in New Zealand.) We went to the old store on the final weekend -- of course they didn't advertise this the previous week lest people wait for the sale -- and it was almost bare because they had a 20% off everything in the store to try to clear the stock. It definitely worked, and we bought a bunch of extra items in preparation for holiday parties.

On our street, a couple more houses were demolished. No idea if and when these will be replaced.

At Home

Our landlords were nice and got us a new dishwasher without us asking when we mentioned that the spring had broken on our door so it would slam down. They are easily the nicest landlords we've had, and they said they can put off doing earthquake repairs for a few years if we want to stay.

Our car failed its every-6-months Warrant of Fitness (WOF) because two of the rotors were going. Getting new rotors and an oil change set us back a bit, but that's cars for you.

It snowed in August! It wasn't enough to stay for long, but it was fun to see it falling. The heat pump struggled mightily to keep working (again, they are not designed to work in freezing temperatures!) and the electricity bill for that day was almost $20. You can see how people end up with massive energy bills in the winter here. 

Our cat is really happy we are home. He likes impeding work and setting a poor example by lounging on blankets.

Healthwise

I picked up some kind of cold at the last conference, but it wasn't too bad and I was on the mend by the time we got back to New Zealand. Everyone else seemed to be getting sick though with either colds or flus. It is strange being sick in July since that is winter here. D got sick once and now is sick again with something else.

I went to a dental hygienist that a friend recommended and got a cleaning (called a scraping and polishing) for $80. They weren't as good as places in the U.S. and didn't seem to realize that you have the patient wrap their mouth on the suction tube occasionally so the saliva and water don't pool at the back of their throat and cause choking. Just a thought. The cleaning took a half-hour and I was on my way. Possibly couldn't help stopping at the only Wendy's in town that happened to be across the street to get two value Frosties...

We decided to finally buy a parking pass to be able to park on-campus because it was getting too cold to walk all the way from off-campus in the freezing cold and wind tunnel by the library. I have been enjoying this luxury a lot this winter.

Learning

Several dozen of the Arts postgrad students are taking a no-fee 10-week "tutor training course" designed to help us improve our tutoring and teaching skills. Some of us wish that the instructor were actually from the Arts and not the Sciences, but this is whom the university offered. I found it interesting when we were given the children's story Goldilocks for an activity that the story is not universal; then I began wondering what sorts of stories and fairy tales kids learn outside of the Western context and what messages we actually absorb from all of our early reading.

The Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Arts gave a presentation entitled "What if Studying the Arts were the Best Thing for the Economy?" where he, a music guy, lamented having to give these kinds of talks defending the Arts instead of ones celebrating all the great things about them. The good news is that at least in New Zealand, earnings potential and employment rates are pretty much the same for most Arts and STEM graduates after a few years.

I'm learning more about Digital Humanities at the new weekly seminar series on campus. When one presenter asked the audience if they knew what OCR was, and a group of middle-aged lecturers all answered no, it really reminded me why I want to push for basic digital literacy as a requirement for university students everywhere! It’s what runs our world; we should have some say in it. I did some informal polling among some of the postgrads on our floor and none of them knew what OCR was even though they've all benefited from it. I just assumed everyone knew. It stands for Optical Character Recognition and is when the computer converts an image of text into text that can be read by a computer and manipulated in a lot more ways. This happens when items are digitized and then the text becomes keyword-searchable, able to be copied and pasted, etc. If you have a picture of a text (like the page of a book), you might be able to read it, but you can't do much else with it because the information is locked in the image. OCR isn't always perfect -- it's very difficult to do this accurately with handwritten things, old manuscripts, and anything not standardized. The presenter also mentioned scanning images into 300dpi TIFF color files, and though he didn't ask this time, I'm pretty sure a sizable portion of the audience didn't know what he meant.

How I got away with it for this long I don't know, but I finally read Edward Said's Orientalism and it was really good and surprisingly readable and accessible. He wrote it in the 70s but it could almost be written today, so much of what he discussed regarding stereotypes about the Middle East are still used. I'm using his perspective for the journal article I am writing and it is perfect since there are a lot of references to Islamic and Arabic culture and practices in my text. I think Orientalism should be required reading at university level and our education system should actually teach students about non-Western areas of the world in modern times, not just in ancient history where it's "safe".

Public Speaking

I participated in the university's Thesis in Three competition where you boil down your research and why it's important in three minutes. I also convinced several other Arts postgrads to do it and use it for presentation practice. Unfortunately there is a bias toward Linguistics students who win every year (didn't know this going in) so none of us made it into the finals. It was nice learning about other research going on though.

I had the opportunity to help plan for and co-teach a session at the skills center for students with English as a Second Language, and it went well. They are so appreciative of the chance to practice their English with native speakers.

Making Change

After I discovered that I hadn't been invited to be a representative at the postgrad focus group that was set up because of my complaining about the lack of culture last year, I was finally invited and am getting the chance to air my complaints and propose solutions, as well as meet some of the postgrads around campus. On my wishlist is to have a holiday party with hand-mailed invitations (because getting another email is so easy to ignore). We'll see if that happens.

I was also given the opportunity to sit down with the newly-hired International Student Experience Advisor (I think the university is finally realizing there's a problem) and tell her all of my issues with being an international student. She is lovely and really wants to improve things if she can get some resources. (She's also been outside New Zealand so knows how things are supposed to work!)

Some of us went to the New Zealand International Film Festival's screening of She's Beautiful When She's Angry about the birth of the women's movement in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s. It was good, and fun to see older women being interviewed now about their past experiences and then have the scene jump to them back when they were in college and agitating for change. Putting faces and personalities to the big authors (Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, etc.) was cool.

Socially

The Alumni office invited me to go schmooze with alumni and donors at a party and I got a little peak into how the university positions itself to them. I met a couple interesting people and had a long discussion about what's wrong with New Zealand politics. It was great!

There's a new young lady from China in our postgrad room so I'm excited to learn more about her country from a female perspective. She seems really nice and not as shy as other international students. I also met my first person from Kazakhstan, and I'm having to put aside all the stereotypes from the movie Borat which is probably the only encounter most Americans have had with that country's name. It shows you the power of popular culture in shaping our perspectives.

First Week of School

The first week of school went by quickly. My note-taking job involves sitting in on two classes each week and typing notes out. One is a law class where I will learn about New Zealand's common law system (it is one of the few countries without a written constitution, taking after Britain), and the other is a political science class on international relations. I especially enjoy hearing the U.S. get mentioned as a passing reference rather than being the whole focus of everything!

I attended the first lecture for the class I will be tutoring for, a literature class dealing with themes of science and technology (a science fiction class in disguise, essentially). Having never taken an SF class before, I am very glad to be able to take this one (technically being paid to take it as it's part of my tutoring contract) and both learn a lot and pay attention to the teaching and preparation side of things. The first day focused on the science vs. arts debate and whether or not there is actually a huge difference or if they have more in common than we've been led to believe. Less than one hundred years ago, the arts were considered to be the higher-ranked field of study, if you can believe it. (This is why it's important to learn history, folks!)

One of the co-lecturers for the class is in charge of the Digital Humanities at the school, and I asked him several questions about it since I haven't been exposed to that before. It sounds really interesting -- instead of rejecting all of today's technology and the internet, Digital Humanities seeks to bring these things together with the fields in the humanities. One benefit is to be able to comment and critique in the space where people are at nowadays (online) and likely bring back the funding that has been lost to more "practical" fields. Examples include analyzing the algorithms that Facebook uses to show items on its News Feeds, using a computer to search through and sort all of the digital information (emails, documents) related to a study of a politician's time in office, or scanning copies of old, fragile manuscripts and making them clickable with links to historical information. I told the lecturer about my background in web development and he said it would be a good asset for future job hunting to have some Digital Humanities experience. A few days later, he emailed to tell me that the department has some funding for someone to help update that section of the website if I were interested. Sweet!

I went to a postgrad presentation on whether or not brass instrument players' native language affects their tongue movements and the tones of the music. Very interesting and an under-researched area of music production. I also signed up for a couple clubs at the big Clubs Day; we'll see how that goes. They are mostly geared toward undergrads, but there are quite a few postgrads who join as well. The closest to my area they have is the Linguistics Society, then there's the Science Fiction & Fantasy Society, and the United Nations for Youth which I'm hoping is similar to Model UN in the U.S.

At our second Operation Friendship dinner for international students, I admit that after meeting a young lady from Italy and commenting on her lovely accent, I asked if she knew how to cook Italian food. Of course! she said. Fortunately, she's the one who asked for my email address and wanted to hang out in the future, so I didn't have to admit that I would love to hang out and have some homemade Italian food! Everyone had fun playing the card game "Spoons" which I hadn't played in a long time, and I made it through the whole round without ever missing out on a spoon.

In my last two cooking classes, we made braised pork, butter chicken, and Garam Masala fish; then curry chicken, fried rice, steak, wontons, and dumplings. The class wasn't what I expected, but I have learned some things and hopefully will be able to practice them in the coming weeks and months.

Speaking Up, Cooking Classes, and Denny's

School

The postgraduate room at school where we go to research is quickly filling up with new students. Most of them are History master's students, a couple Art History. The semester starts next week, and even though postgraduates can start at any time, it makes sense that those continuing on from undergraduate and honours would be starting around this time. It should make for a more lively room.

I had a few hours of work last week for the Academic Skills Centre helping facilitate discussions for English-as-a-second-language students. The staff showed the first few minutes of a funny video on the history of the formation of the New Zealand accent (http://youtu.be/bV_UmOvV1vs). I have noticed the different vowel sounds. In the video they say that gradually the short "i" like in milk is turning into a short "u". They exaggerate it for comedic effect, but some people have sounded almost like that here.

I composed a short survey to send to postgrad students as part of my effort to build a better community and ran it by the professor I had the meeting with in December. He sent me back a really nice email saying that thanks to that meeting, he had made postgraduate support one of three strategic priorities for the year and was assigning someone to implement the Year of the Postgrad in 2015. How awesome is that! I figured he was working on things behind the scenes, so it is really nice to know that my speaking out was worthwhile. I also spent some time last week emailing an academic science fiction association in the U.S. about how it really needs to do more to support postgraduates and get with the times in terms of Facebook groups, organizing helpful materials, and attracting the younger generation of scholars. We all know how institutions that can't keep up end up fading away.

Food

I've completed two classes of the four-session cooking class I signed up for through a community center. In the first one, we made Osso Buco (beef stew with red wine and tomatoes) and Pan-fried Tofu. This was my first time having tofu. It wasn't too bad. Kind of a strange texture unlike anything else. The stew was a bit too sweet for my liking, but it was my first time cooking with wine, so I think I'll try experimenting a bit more with that. In the second class, we made fried noodles with bok choy and spring onions and steamed chicken with shitake mushrooms. All the vegetables were new to me, and I am proud to say I tried all of them and even actually liked the mushrooms! They weren't as mushy as the little ones that are normally dumped in food, although they still look weird. The teacher is from Malaysia, so she knows how to make good Asian food with the right sauce combinations.

We finally found a cheaper restaurant option here, and it is good old Denny's, classic American diner. It is celebrating 25 years in New Zealand this year, although the Christchurch one just opened recently. It has the usual items like pancakes, French toast, omelettes, skillets, and sandwiches. No waffles though! They are not as big into waffles here for some reason. We both ordered French Toast and then chocolate peanut butter lava cake with ice cream and whipped cream, and hot fudge cake with ice cream and whipped cream. Needless to say, we were stuffed. No tipping required, and we were on our way. This kind of American dessert contrasts so much with the Chinese dessert of "pumpkin cake" we ordered at a Chinese restaurant that we could only take a bite of: sesame seed-covered pumpkin shells filled with black bean curd. Not what we were expecting to say the least. We wondered how many other people ordered that not knowing what it would be.