Quotable: Success

"No one seems to have thought of the fact that if life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It's just more comfortable."

- Muriel Barbery, in The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Translated by Alison Anderson.

I can't say I'd really recommend this book, but it had a lot of interesting quotes and thoughts about life, the universe, and everything. I've got a post brewing about happiness and success (and money), so this quote caught my eye. 

Weekend Reading: The Let's Not Freak Out About Education Edition

My brain is fully occupied with two things right now: (1) figuring out what to put on our school choice form, and (2) my team's current status on our integration project plan. Since topic #2 is both dull (for anyone who is not on my team, and probably for some of the people on my team, too) and off limits due to confidentiality agreements and my own decision not to blog details about work... let's talk some more about education!

And specifically, let's not freak out about it.

First up, The Grumpies had a great post defending enrichment activities for kids- you know, the things that make lots of well-meaning people roll their eyes and expound about how overscheduled kids are these days. Now that I take a step back and think about it, it is pretty funny that we, as a culture, can simultaneously worry about whether our kids are getting enough challenges/enriching experiences and whether our kids are getting enough unstructured play time. And yet, we do.

Next, an article from the Nicolas Kristof in the NYTimes about the importance of teachers. I certainly agree that teachers make a big difference in kids' lives, and I don't actually disagree with the conclusion he reaches at the end of his article- that we should spend more time this election year discusing how to encourage good teaching- but I found some of his argument a little overstated. He states: "A great teacher (defined as one better than 84 percent of peers) for a single year between fourth and eighth grades resulted in students earning almost 1 percent more at age 28" and also quotes some figures about the impact of a bad teacher.  But he glosses over a lot, no doubt partially due to the constraints of space in a NYT column. First of all, a 1% increase in income isn't really that much, particularly given what most people make at age 28. I was just one year out from grad school. If you'd judged my salary potential based on that year, you wouldn't have been impressed.

Also, kids are in school for lots of years. I actually think that most kids have a pretty good chance of coming across one or two (or more!) great teachers in that time. I had several really great teachers during my time in my average public schools. I had some mediocre teachers, too, but I can't think of one that I would consider truly "bad". And I doubt that one year with a not so great teacher spells doom, as long as the parents recognize the issue and make sure that it doesn't translate into hating school or something like that.

I'm sure most of us can look back and think of great teachers we had and a few not so great ones, too. And for the most part, we all got through our primary and secondary education, went on to college, and did fine. I'm not saying that there aren't cases where this isn't true- I'm sure there are. I'm saying that I think that for most kids, we're probably worrying more than we need to.

Which isn't to say that I think everything is hunky-dory in education land these days.  I think there are serious funding problems right now, and lots of things that could be improved... but I also don't think that most public schools are anywhere near as bad as the conventional wisdom considers them to be. Take a look at GoingPublic.org for a different view on the state of public education in this country. They are very much an advocacy group, so I don't take everything they write at face value, either. (For instance, I'm not sure I see a conspiracy of moneyed interests behind the rise in charter schools.) But I think it is worth looking at their site and thinking about what they say.

I'd very much like a thorough, unbiased evaluation of the state of public education in our country. Anyone know of one?

None of this, of course, will stop me from thinking hard about our kindergarten choices. But I hope I can keep from freaking out about the situation, whether we get our first choice school or not.

The Looming School Decision

Awhile back, I wrote a post about our upcoming decision about where Pumpkin (and eventually Petunia) will go to school. That decision is inching closer.

On Monday, Hubby and I tool the day off of work to visit a couple of potential schools for Pumpkin. We're faced with a decision because while our neighborhood school has a decent reputation, we don't think it offers any language instruction- not even in the after school programs. This bothers us for several reasons:

1. Pumpkin likes learning languages, and early indications are that Petunia will, too (she certainly loves our language DVDs).
2. Research shows that early childhood is the best time to learn a second language. There is also research indicating that learning one new language makes it easier to learn other languages later, and that it can improve performance in your native language, too. (Yes, I am too lazy to dig up the links to that research. Sorry.)
3. This is one academic area in which we feel completely unqualified to offer enrichment at home. As a scientist and an engineer, both now working in computers, we can probably cover the math/science/tech area. I like history and we both like to read, so we can probably cover those areas, too. But neither of us is fluent in another language, which we both regret. So, like all good parents, we're going to try to have our children make up for our shortcomings.

Anyway, back to our school decision. In San Diego, you can "choice" into any public school (subject to availability of space), and there are a range of magnet schools available focusing on various topics. You write your top five choices on a form, and then there is a lottery to decide who gets which choice. The form is due February 15. Magnet schools also often have enrollment targets to ensure diversity. There are several magnet schools that focus on teaching a second language in addition to the regular curriculum. One, a Spanish language immersion school, is actually closer to our house than our neighborhood school. It is two blocks away. We've been intrigued by it since we moved in and figured out what it was. In an immersion school, all or most instruction is conducted in the new language. We wondered how that would work, and weren't sure if it would be a good fit for Pumpkin. It is a K-8 school (although we could pull our kids out after 5th grade and go to another middle school if we wanted), and we wondered whether the math offerings in the middle school years would be sufficient.

Another magnet is a "Spanish enrichment" school in a neighborhood that would be convenient for our commute to and from work. Its curriculum includes 30 minutes of Spanish instruction every day, except for the "minimal day" (half day) that all San Diego public schools have every week due to budget cuts. We wondered if this level of Spanish would be worth the extra drive.

There are two other language magnets that we have considered. One offers an immersion program in French or Spanish, but is in a location that is not at all convenient for us- it is at least 20 minutes out of the way for our commute. There would be buses, but these have been cut recently, too, and we're not sure we want our kids to have long bus commutes this early in their education. The other offers a semi-immersion program in Chinese. It is in a moderately inconvenient location- Google maps says it is a 13 minute drive from our house, but we know that it is in a part of town with bad rush hour traffic. Also, it seems that the curriculum hasn't really stabilized. They started as an enrichment program and are now transitioning to immersion (except for "English language arts"- i.e., reading and grammar). So we hadn't really been considering it.

But now... well, now we're scrambling a bit to figure out what we should do. I hate to say it, but my friend who was horrified that we hadn't started looking into schools at this time last year was probably right: we should have started working on this earlier.

We loved the Spanish immersion school in our neighborhood. We got to see the Kindergarten classes, and they were amazing. The students were all speaking (and reading!) Spanish. They seemed happy, and while the school's resources aren't amazing, they aren't bad. There is a diverse group of students, both in terms of race and socioeconomic status, which we like. The magnet resource teacher who gave the tour had great answers to all of our questions. In short, we would be very, very happy if Pumpkin got to go to school there. But our chances are not great. The school had 300 applicants for 160 spots for this school year. They have divided the district into three zones, and we are in the zone that gets the fewest spots (23% of the incoming class). Now, we don't know how many applicants they usually get from our zone, so maybe it isn't so bad. But we can't count on getting in, so at the very least we need a strong plan B.

We thought the Spanish enrichment magnet was OK. However, the magnet resource teacher who gave the tour seemed to be downplaying the Spanish curriculum. This could have been because a couple of other parents on the tour responded quite negatively to her discussion of the Spanish program. They gave the impression that they thought learning a second language was a waste of time that would take valuable class time away from some other, more important subject. So maybe she was just trying to allay their fears. I need to call the magnet teacher and figure out what the goal of the Spanish program is at that school. Should a child who completes K-5 at that school be able to place in an intermediate or advanced Spanish class in middle school? Or is it more like the Spanish I had in school, which left me able to count and say a few colors, and not much else? The rest of the programs at that school seemed fine, but I was left with a vague feeling of unease about the other parents. I think most people were there looking at the school because it would get them on track to feed into one of the higher ranked high schools in the district, and not because of the programs that school offered. Several of the other parents were talking about how they wished they could get into the school in the next neighborhood over, which is ranked as one of the best in San Diego. Fair enough- but the reliance on the single number ranking has problems, and that ranking is based largely on test scores. I suspect that the other school has such high test scores because it takes very few out of area kids, and it is in a relatively wealthy part of town. Interestingly, some of the other parents were planning to check out our neighborhood school, too.

We can't go and visit our neighborhood school until January 31. I suspect that it will seem on par with the Spanish enrichment magnet, but without any language offerings. I've been looking into whether we could add an after school language program on our own, and we could, but it may not be easy. There are classes available from several places, but they typically start at 4:30- which is a little early for us. One of us would have to tweak our schedule to make that happen. I did find one program that will bring the class to you at a time of your choosing, so that might be an option if we could either find one other family who was interested in it or were willing to pay for a two person class on our own. Or, we could try to find an after school nanny who could tutor Spanish (given our proximity to Mexico, I actually suspect that this would be feasible).

We've also started thinking about our other options. Perhaps we should reconsider that Chinese magnet. We're running short on time for visits- we're both really busy at work right now, so all of these visits are difficult to schedule. However, there is a "school fair" that we could attend on January 28, which would give us some information. We could write the Chinese magnet in as our third choice, and then figure out whether or not we would take the space if it were offered to us. The only problem with this approach is that writing anything in addition to our first choice makes it a little harder for us to get our first choice. The initial lottery disregards this information, but they place everyone into schools if they can- and then take them out of consideration if a spot opens up later at the top choice school. The magnet teacher at the Spanish immersion school gave us some tips for handling that, though.

Another option would be to consider private schools as a fall back plan. The "top" private school in our area offers language classes (of course). It also costs $23,000 per year. We might get financial aid, but I'm doubtful. Remember that we will eventually have two kids in school and this school runs through high school (and I sort of doubt we'd have the fortitude to pull our kids out of the private school as they got older- but you never know). Also, the diversity at that school isn't so great (as you'd expect with a price tag like that).

There is also a French bilingual school that actually is accredited in France as well as California. It is in a location that would be moderately inconvenient, but not terrible for us. We know some people who sends their kids there, and they really like it. The kids are also bona fide polyglots, thanks to the fact that their parents have two different native languages (neither of them English), and there is French and Spanish taught at the school. I think the older child is also starting Chinese now. My husband works with the mother, so he is going to ask her for more details- like how much it costs. We could call the school and get this information, too. It is not on their website. We also don't know when we'd have to apply for that school, and when we'd have to commit to it if we wanted to go there.

So, we have some tough decisions ahead. Here are the options as I see them:

1. Write all three possible magnets on our choice form, with the Spanish immersion one as our top choice. Follow up as recommended by the magnet teacher and hope for the best. We've heard that it is very likely (almost certain) that we would be offered one of the three choices.
2. Write only the Spanish immersion school on our choice form, but research the French bilingual private school and consider that our back up plan.
3. Write only the Spanish immersion school on our choice form, consider our neighborhood school as our back up plan, and assume that we will be able to make some sort of after school or weekend language class or tutoring work out.
4. Let go of our obsession with having our kids learn a second language. Write the Spanish immersion school on our form, hope for the best, but just go with the flow at our neighborhood school if we don't get it.

Do any of see any other options? Do you think we're crazy for worrying so much about languages (a lot of the other parents at day care do)? Feel free to tell me what you think about any of this in the comments.

On Project Management

My job has gotten very, very busy lately. My company is merging with another company, and, as the person in charge of the group that handles the corporate databases and scientific software, that means that my group and I are looking at over a year's worth of work to put everything together, all while most people wonder what the hell is taking us so long. Oh, and while we also complete the "regular" goals we had for this year.

It also means that today, I said something that five years ago, I would not have ever imagined would come from my lips: "I need to get this technical work done and out of the way so that I can concentrate on project management."

You see, five years ago, I was in the midst of a career crisis. I had somehow turned into a project manager and I wasn't all that happy about it. I didn't view it as "real" work. It seemed like I spent my days gently (and not so gently) encouraging other people to do their work, and I wondered whether it might not be better if I just rolled up my sleeves and did the work for them.

I have completely changed my tune. My "a ha!" moment was when I joined a project that was in trouble. It was behind schedule, but no one was sure by how much. It was over budget, but no one knew how the spend was trending. And management was threatening to just cancel it. I came on board and had a new schedule in place, with a known budget trend within a month. Roughly 8 months later, management decided to renew the project for another year. The team was happy, and so were the customers for the software the team produced. One of the customers sent me a really nice email (as I went out on maternity leave), complimenting me for turning the project around- and I realized that, yes, I had done that. Project management was indeed "real work".

So now, I am still a bit on the fence about whether or not project management is what I want to do with the rest of my life- a topic for a future blog post or ten, I'm sure- but I am not at all on the fence about whether or not project management is "real work". It is. I fully understand why someone has to set aside some time to keep his or her eye on schedules, dependencies, and communication (intra-team, inter-team, and up to management). In fact, if you are going to tackle multiple projects at once, or even just a single long and complicated project, someone probably has to forgo work doing the hands-on technical and/or scientific work altogether and focus on project management full time. Otherwise, your projects will probably finish late and/or over budget, if they finish at all.

I know that most techies and scientists roll their eyes at project management. I think that is because people try to apply the wrong techniques to their projects. If you are running an agile or agile-like software development project, you don't need the project management techniques that were developed by government contractors to deal with their multi-year projects, which were required by the government to be fully specified before they began. In fact, if you try to graft those techniques onto an agile-ish software development project, you will probably make it fail- or at least make your best programmers quit in search of less annoying pastures. (I actually spent an entire year of my life insulating project teams from overly waterfall-y project management requirements. I learned a lot, but I can't say that I have any desire to repeat the experience.)

Similarly, if you are in the development part of drug research and development, you use a different process than if you are in the early research part of the cycle. This is not to say that I think early research should run with no project management whatsoever- but it should have a much more lightweight process. When I work with a research project (yes, we have these in scientific informatics!), I favor the use of flowcharts and checkpoints over fully specified project timelines- and I don't expect the management of that project to consume anywhere near the amount of time that managing a project that is developing enterprise-level software will consume. When I worked with teams that were heading into the development portion of R&D (and yes, I've done that, too- and that had nothing to do with software!) I expected to be able to write fairly good timelines, because the processes the team would be using were already known, even if the outcomes were not.

All of this makes it hard for me to explain what a project manager does when I get asked about it at the various "alternative career" events I've attended. I guess I can boil the core responsibilities down to these:

• Know the deadline(s) for the project, and what the impact of slipping that deadline will be
• Know which of these three things management would prefer you compromise, and which you think you should compromise, if pushed: schedule, budget, or quality. And yes, sometimes compromising quality really is the correct answer!
• Know the tasks that need to be completed in order to get the project done, and know their interdependencies (i.e., if task A runs late, will that impact tasks B and C?) Know which tasks are done and which are in process.
• Manage team communications. Make sure the team is communicating however is most effective for it- be that with meetings, emails, or IMs. Know that different teams communicate in different ways, and allow- no, facilitate!- that. 
• Be the source of project information for senior management, so that they don't go bugging your team. Try to protect your team's time.
• Know and track your budget, to whatever level of detail your organization requires.
• Keep your eye on the hidden administrative tasks that can derail a schedule- like keeping contractor work orders up to date.
• Keep an eye on your team's state of mind and availability. Are they burning out? Are the bored? Who's going on vacation soon? How will that impact the project? Try to fix the problems you see.

The processes I use to accomplish these things vary with the company and the project team. But if I'm not on top of any of these items, I do not feel good about my projects.

I know I have some other project managers amongst my readers. What do you think? Is my list complete? Since I just wrote it off the top of my head in five minutes, I doubt it. Add your items in the comments! Also, for those who are curious about project management- feel free to leave questions. I'll either answer them in the comments or write another post about the topic.


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Update: I've written a post with a short list of some project management reading suggestions.

Surprisingly Profound Kids Art: Friends and Fishy

I've had a bruiser of a day- within 30 minutes of getting up, I let Petunia burn her mouth on oatmeal, causing her to refuse to eat any breakfast. And then about an hour later, she threw up all over me (we think because her tummy was fully of snot from the cold she's getting over and not much else). So there was a lot of laundry to do and a little bit of sofa cleaning, too. Hubby took Pumpkin down to the Children's Museum during Petunia's naptime so that I could get some work done, but Petunia didn't cooperate. We took two walks (at least it was a beautiful day!) before I finally got her down for her nap roughly 30 minutes before it was supposed to be over. I managed to get 40 minutes of work done- just enough to meet the immediate needs, but not enough to get ahead at all. To top it all off, Petunia threw an absolute wobbler at bath time. She didn't want a bath (but she needed one- see the bit about throwing up, above). Then she didn't want out of the bath, but she didn't want to stay in, either. Then she didn't want to go get dressed.

Anyway, she's off reading stories and snuggling to sleep with Hubby now, and I am ignoring the fact that Pumpkin and I should be cleaning up her room and am letting her color while I blog, instead.

And I'm going to make myself feel better by indulging in a post that will make me smile, but will probably only be interesting to my parents. Hey, its my blog. I can do that.

One of the things that has been making me smile these days is my kids' art. I have no illusions that they are budding artistic geniuses, but something about the innocent outlook and straight-forward execution just makes me smile.

First, a few months ago, Pumpkin drew this picture of herself (on the left) and her "silly friends"- these were the friends she started playing with a lot when she was having trouble with B. at day care (that trouble seems to have passed, thankfully). One is another girl and one is a boy. She and her silly friends liked to run around and do silly things. I never really figured out what those things were, but she was happy- and that was nice, after having her come home sad about B.

I had hoped that we would get to keep this one, but she came across it recently, and decided that she wants to give it to the little girl depicted in the middle, whose mom just had twins, so all I'll have is this snapshot.

Friends
Artist: Pumpkin, age ~4.5 years

Next, Petunia recently announced that she was going to draw a fishy. And then she did! We're not sure if the fact that she actually drew a fish was an accident or not, but we were still impressed. She drew a fish in exactly the same way that I do.

Here is a close up of the fishy.

I like to think that this depiction of a small fish in a big, strange, but beautiful sea is a metaphor for the artist herself. She won't confirm that, though.

Fishy
Artist: Petunia, age 27 months