~ my dislike of french vanilla creamer ~

It has been cold and rainly for several days. On Tuesday, by the time that I had arrived at my statistics class, my clothing was soaked and I had to sit in the three hour class feeling wet and miserable. I loathe percipitation. I did not loathe percipitation to this degree, however, until I lived in places with lots of percipitation. There, I developed my absolute hatred of wettness falling from the sky. This explains why, when forced to leave our friendly neighbor to the north because of outdated immigration policies, I considered moving to locales such as Santa Fe, which are not well known for the moisture that falls from their skies. Interestingly, while I was riding by bike home from work, before the rain hit, a dude in an SUV pulled up alongside me, rolled his window down to inform me that the radio had announced severe hail warnings across the Treasure Valley. ick...hail, just another form of moisture from above. As I have been able to discern, the problem with hail is that it is unpleasant to be caught in. What is more, I've never understood why all of these people want to live in coastal cities. Oh sure, it's pretty to have folliage growing along highway overpasses and handy to not have to manually irrigate one's yard to have some greenery. Some people may even prefer the lushness in places like Seattle (shudder!) as opposed to the parched earth of the high desert. But give me high desert parched earth any day over rain falling on my head and soaking the bottoms of my pants. ick.

In other news, yesterday I was forced to attend this conference which I found rather boring. The final lecture was on simulation technology, which was the only topic that I had an interest in. Unfortunately, the speaker was unable to attend and they had her on a conference call. As a kinesthetic learner, the most unmeaningful and useless way to teach me something is to project a voice at me for two hours. To learn, I must have something to engage me in the presentation. Even the other speakers, who stood behind the podium, were more engaged with the audience by the mere act of making eye contact and jesticulating. Interestingly, I have thought that either there's something wrong with me or there's something wrong with the conventional methods of teaching kinesthetic learners. Somehow, conventional teaching and learning theory seems to correlate kinesthetic learning with group work. I loathe group work. I remember, for example, a French class in which the professor thought that practicing verb conjugations while tossing a ball to our classmates around the room was an effective educational method. Kinesthetic learning doesn't mean that I learn simply by doing something, anything random with my hands - - it means that I need to be doing that which I am learning. Perhaps there are the introverted kinesthetic learners, like me, who prefer to learn whatever by sitting alone and learning it themselves, and extroverted ones who enjoy tossing balls with a group while praciticing verb conjugations. Anyway, during the audio presentation, I thought that I was going to roll over and die of boredom. While I could hear her words and interpret them accordingly, there was nothing binding me or engaging me to the subject and it resulted in wasted time. I apparently sat through a two hour presentation on simulation technology yesterday, but I retained none of the information and I would have spent the time in a more worthwhile fashion if I had been picking my nose and scratching my butt.

Posted by jennifer at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)