Today has been a day of preparation. This weekend I decided over a plate of left-over Chinese that I would apply to the masters program in Creative and Critical Thinking at the Graduate College of Education of UMass/Boston. Having flirted with graduate school applications earlier this fall, I should have remembered clearly how frustrating personal statements can be. They are worse, much worse than cover letters. Cover letters are easy. The job description tells you what to write. They require this skill and experience in that, so you write that you know how to do this skill and have that experience. Nothing to it. The trick is finding the right job description. Personal statements work in precisely the opposite way. You supply the skills and experience and then hope that the application committee is looking for them.

So, in an attempt to get my thoughts together, I’ve reread the first seventy-four pages of Piaget’s Psychology of Intelligence. He’s just finished critiquing the Gestalt school and about to unveal his thoughts about assimilation and appropriation. These are good buzz words. Others are situated learning environments, proof theory, and schema. The trick is to figure out how to put them all into a coherent essay explaining my interests in pedagogic research. [As an aside: when I was working on a paper on archaelogical methods I came across the word pedology. It is simultaneously the study of soil and study of the physical and mental development of children. This is both funny and apt to my research proposal.] I don’t think I’d like to work on the role of technology in math education, but there’s a good chance of it. Even worse, I could end up working in complexity theory — at least then I’d be able to thwart proponents of intelligent design with their own rhetoric. [To be fair, complexity theory is a legitimate and arguably useful branch of scientific inquiry. It discusses things which are adaptive, self-organizing phenomena called learning systems. Here, learning is a technical term. The ID camp has stolen complexity theory and severely misused it in a popular context. Even chaotic systems like the weather and magnetic fields are not covered by complexity theory (as far as I understand it).] Decentralized systems are important and have been overlooked in science and social science curricula for a long time. There is a trend to introduce it into the school system through modelling the spontaneous genesis of traffic jams, the movement within colonies of ants and termites, or the behaviour of slime mold, for example. This so-called ecological solution to modelling can be very powerful, but to me, it is very boring. Danielle would make fun of me if I studied chaos theory [in the Jurassic Park-coffee house sense] and liken me to Kevin. I’m not sure I could live that down.

Enough of that for now. Anyone who wants to help me develop my personal statement, please help. It’d be entirely productive, I think, to talk this stuff over with a real, live human face-to-face. Be warned, I’d very likely bring a notebook to record your throughts so that I can later pass them off as my own. Be comfortable with that before you talk to me.

Separately from math, I’ve continued with Thucydides. Yes, Susannah, I’ve made it to the funeral oration. I stopped just before it started. I’m so excited I’m not sure how I’ll be able to sleep.

But should I even sleep? DJ is on his way now from Virginia. Minutes ago he hopped on the Jersey turnpike. I expect him here in about six hours. He’s promised, demanded that we play tennis after breakfast.

Before I go to bed, though, I should tell you about my latest drastic decision: I’m going to start dancing again. The American Masters: Gene Kelly on WGBH tonight has inspired me once again to sign up for a ballet class. Now this was something I had planned to do about a week ago [and also a semester ago] anyway. True, I’ve been threatening for months now. Unfortunately, I missed the registration at the Boston Ballet for this term. They don’t start a new session until September. By then my mania will have worn off and class will keep me busy enough, I hope. Still, I want to dance in that “distinctly American way” that he does. See, I’m mad at Gene Kelly. All the scholars tout him for democratizing dance. He moves like a sailor would, like a construction worker would; when he jumps through puddles you feel like you could do it, too. But you can’t — I can’t. He’s a highly trained, skilled, technical dancer. It upsets me that he makes it look so effortless, so fun. Because of the show, I did five sets of forty push-ups with my arms at varying lengths and several minutes worth of stretches. Tomorrow I plan to swim after lecture. Maybe the OFA offers summer courses. Curse that Kelly!