Nick Tingle's Blog

Wednesday of this last week was hot for us. Eighty degrees at four o’clock, and with no air conditioning and afternoon light streaming in my classroom was cooking and my students sagging. Just as I was to start, in walks this young, handsome guy with lots of hair (unlike me) with tattoos running up and down his arms and his little dog trailing behind him on a leash. He said he was from the Arts Department and had an announcement to make. I said OK, since I don’t mind announcements. Then the guy began to read from a prepared statement indicating that I, Nick Tingle, had been selected Distinguished Teacher of the Year (2009-2010) from among the non-senate faculty.

I was embarrassed and surprised sitting there having praise heaped on me. The students didn’t really get what was going on, but applauded politely at the appropriate moment. The guy took his dog from a student who had been holding it and left. Then I had to teach for an hour and forty minutes. By the time that was over, I felt as if the whole thing with the guy with the dog and tattoos had been an hallucination.

I honestly wasn’t sure it had happened. The University makes mistakes. For example, I knew I had been nominated for the honor, and I had been informed in an email that the person selected would be notified by the end of last week. Having not heard anything by the end of that week, I concluded I had been passed over, and had already gone through denial and then anger in the grieving process. What a waste of energy…and then this guy shows up.

Given who I am (paranoid) and the slight irregularity of the situation, I still was not convinced it had happened the following morning. Eventually though I got this: Tingle.pdf

So it looks like it did happen, and I have indeed been selected as Distinguished Teacher of the Year (2009-2010).

And I am honored.

The guy with tattoos.

Just got my grades and my TA’s grades in this last Tuesday. Then spent a couple of days getting stuff ready for the next quarter which starts TOMORROW!

Not much of a Spring Break, though that’s always the case. Winter and Spring Quarters just blur into each other making one 22 week marathon.

New quarter makes 93 quarters that I have taught at UCSB. I doubt I will make the 100 quarter club. I will probably retire before that, though if I throw in my time as a Teaching Assistant, I am already there. In the 100 Quarter Club.

Not that there is such a thing.

After a heavier than usual rainfall at Coal Oil Point near Goleta, CA, USA:

The L.A. Times ran a not bad article on the affect of depressed mothers upon their children.  A  selected quotation:

The harmful effects [of a parent’s depression] on children were summed up last year in a report by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine. Problems begin early, as the infants of depressed mothers cry more than other babies. They have greater fear of strangers and less tolerance for frustration, according to the report. Starting in preschool, kids with depressed parents are more likely than classmates to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Across all stages of childhood, they have more behavior problems at school and higher rates of depression and anxiety disorders.

By adolescence, children with depressed parents have poorer
social relations than the teens of parents who aren’t depressed, and
they’re more likely to be dependent on alcohol and drugs, the federal
report indicates. Depression in parents also is linked to poorer
academic performance, according to studies in the report.

And some harmful effects of growing up with a depressed parent
appear to linger well into adulthood. A 20-year study following the
children of depressed parents and a comparison sample of kids whose
parents had no mental disorders found that those with depressed
parents suffered about triple the rate of anxiety disorders and
depression by their 30s, were in poorer health than peers and much
more likely to be dependent on drugs and alcohol. The study, believed
to be the longest ever done on kids of depressed parents, was
published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2006.

These effects may not only be long-lasting but also
far-reaching. Serious depression affects about one in five American
parents, and 15.6 million children live with an adult who has had
major depression in the last year, according to government data.

They go a little into theory:

About one in 11 infants has a mother with major depression, according to a research update report last December by Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child. Healthy emotional and brain development depends on a “serve and return” interaction, just like a tennis game. Tots engage parents’ attention, prompting parents to respond with words or facial expressions, which stimulate more infant communication.

If caregivers are withdrawn or hostile, this shuts down the
game and may even alter the architecture of the child’s brain.

Of course long before brain scans gave us terms like “brain architecture” psychoanalysts were onto this stuff by simply listening to their clients.  Too bad we needed brain scans to confirm that a non-responsive mother (or father) can especially, in the earliest phases of development, do great damage to the psyche of the infant. That the infant needs to experience itself in a relatively safe environment (Winnicott: good enough mothering) ought to be obvious.

I don’t think I felt all that safe since my mother thought–and I quote–that I am “the devil’s spawn.”

We have had  more than our annual rainfall here in the Goleta, SB area by a good bit.  So we trucked out through the mud to see how the slough was doing.

Saw some egrets on the way:

The slough was really full:

UCSB is trying to restore the indigenous floral; those little markers mark the indigenous stuff.

We almost stepped in a vernal pool:
Right in the middle of a field.