Status in Communication (LJ 2/10)

I cannot think of a single thing I want to think about enough to write about for the learning journal today. In fact, I just do not want to think. It's Friday (a point I actually keep forgetting somehow). End of story.

A few years ago, "keeping" a learning journal would not have been such a struggle. That was way back when I was still an English major, and in the practice of writing , analyzing, organizing, and developing anything from personal essays to research papers. In short, I was used to taking flimsy ideas and developing them into something substantial. Without choking them with cliches. And my sentences! I could actually write sentences with more varied structures. After about two years of solid math and statistics, the only writing I ever did was writing proofs to theorems in passive voice. The only sentences you used began with then, if, however, when, therefore, thus, and (my personal favorite) hence. Now I think in numbers and graphs, not an analysis of ideas or words.  Or worse--I think in code. The extent of my analysis is how to get rid of a for loop that is making my computation time 0.005 of a second longer. The other day, someone asked me what I thought about something, and I thought, "Vacuous proof: anything I say is true because the hypothesis is false." I see someone getting lunch at the vending machine, and I think of the Kaplan-Meier survival curve (i.e the rate of death) divided by the covariates of vending machine consumers and nonconsumers, not about observing the behavior at the vending machine.

So how can this post ever be considered a learning journal? Don't you worry; it does relate. Not a one to one correspondance (name that theorem), but there is a relationship. While on my field study I need to keep in mind I am not only studying statistics; I am observing and developing ideas about communication and life in general. Moreover (I've used this word in proofs too), I need to be more serious in my writing to help me make connections and develop my project (including the statistics portion). I need to think about how my sentences, and from them my ideas, relate to each other to truly formulate my ideas and learnings. That is to say, I should have a purpose in writing-- a freelance purpose, not a  given theorem or abstract to follow.