Frisbee Blues, Torpids, Pancakes, and Fancy Schmancy

I'm sitting here still in bed in the aftermath of a frisbee-filled day and night, still wearing my OW kit and contemplating a hangover run. The usual roundup of exciting things in Oxford this week:

1. Light Blue v. Dark Blue
Remember when we went to Frisbee NATIONALS? You know what's more important, taken more seriously than the British National competition? Beating rivals Cambridge, of course.

Background on OX-CAMB sports Every year, the Light Blues (Cambridge) play the Dark Blues (Oxford) in every sport imaginable around this time in what they call Varsity.  Playing in Varsity makes you eligible for a Blue, which as far as I can tell is essentially a cool status symbol: a designation recognizing your accomplishments as an athlete. Everyone takes getting a Blue very seriously here. The list of competitions is here. The uni that takes the most competitions "wins" Varsity 2012.

Most of the competitions take place these next two weekends, and both men's and women's Ultimate Frisbee played yesterday!  We play both indoor and outdoor matches, and you couldn't have asked for a better day to do so.  It's February and we're playing in shorts and t-shirts in beautiful sunlight.  Didn't Michigan just get another round of snow?  (snicker)

However, despite all our February photosynthesizing energy absorbtion, the women lost.  I was actually captaining since our normal captain was off playing for Great Britain Frisbee (!), and we spent the last week recruiting enough players to play outdoors.  But the men's team took home the glory for Oxford for the 3rd year running. And then the night ended in me doing a disc race. If you don't know what a disc race is, don't worry, you don't need to.  If you do and you know me at all, you should be phenomenally impressed with me right now, and understand more fully why I'm still in bed with the lights off.

2.  TORPIDS
Also this week was the term's boat races between the different Oxford colleges.  The idea of Torpids is that all the boats line up in a line to start, and you try to bump into the boat in front of you before the boat behind you bumps you. If you bump someone, you move up a spot in rankings. The race takes place over 4 days, and if you "bump" someone every day, you get yet another Oxford status symbol called Blades (they like those here). It kind of works like constant power rankings; teams that are under-ranked should be able to bump a boat every day and move up in the rankings. Check out the cool chart of where the boats ended up, and check out all of those boats in the race! So many!

All the videos are online.  I think now that I've tried rowing I really appreciate it more; it's really hard to have everyone stay in time, AND keep the boat level, AND keep rowing hard for such a long time (hey, 5-7 minutes is really long in rowing), all while your cox is shouting at you.  Coxes have a tough job also to recognize how to take the turns and keep from going into the bank.  One boat crashed the bank so hard that one of the rowers was thrown out, and another crashed in the gut (the start) and broke their boat. 10-14,000 pound boats (dear Americans, that's a monetary amount not a weight measurement), as a frame of reference.

3.  Shrove Tuesday
Instead of eating fattening donuts on Fat Tuesday, the Brits eat pancakes.  But let me clarify.  A pancake is not a pancake.  In England a pancake is a crepe.  But the Brits get mad when I say that too; apparently a pancake is a smaller version of a crepe. Looks like a crepe in my book.  And they eat them not with butter and syrup but with sugar and lemon, which I guess is just not fattening enough for my American taste buds because I thought it was rather bland. Yes I tried it so now I can effectively mock it.

4.  Exchange dinners!
So, what do Oxford students do for fun? Mostly dress up and eat 4-course meals. Woooo, Party Central here. I will never understand why the dressing up part is enjoyable. Fancy clothes are uncomfortable for both sexes (I assume)! Why would college students who don't have to wear them continually subject themselves to doing so!   You have the rest of your working life to do that! The way it works is through exchange dinners, where you invite another Oxford college (see here) to your college to eat, and then you get to go eat at their college where you dress up and schmooze and spill wine on your (or other people's) nice clothes. I really wish they made us wear funny-looking hats to get the true British experience, but they do make us wear our sub-fusc robes to add to the ridiculousness.  Sigh. Despite my mockery, next week I'll go on my 6th exchange dinner this term. It is cool to see the other colleges and their dining halls (think Harry Potter, seriously).

TTFN.  Hope your Sunday is filled with less essay-writing than mine will be.  - LP

Wikipedia-ing & US v. UK Academia

Just got back from a lovely round of frisbee-in-torrential-rain.  I suppose I'd better get used to it.  Apparently it's sunny here... in June.

I find myself accidentally using British terminology when I talk to people from home.  I've absorbed it without even thinking.  The following gets giggles from my U.S. friends:

• Uni  (what you call university)
• Kit (it's what you call your uniform or jersey for sports). 
• Pitch (it's a sports field not a baseball throw)
• Keen (I'm keen to go out tonight) and Fancy (Do you fancy a drink?)
• Laters/ Lols (pronounced lahls) (Okay. I don't say this. But Brits do and if I did I would get giggles from my U.S. friends).

Anyways, the big news from this week was that I got sick (again, gosh darn foreign germs) and that I got to meet Jimmy Wales! Who, for anyone who lives under a rock, is the founder of Wikipedia.  I'm helping out with a study comparing Wikipedia to Britannica, and he came to Oxford to meet the research team.  

It was quite exciting because it was a small group of people.  He dresses in what I will deem Steve Jobs style: glasses, black turtleneck, and was surprisingly conversational. It's always a bit intimidating to be in a room with someone whose more or less a level of celebrity with our generation, particularly when he's the focus of attention of everyone in the room, but I decided to just go for the bravado approach and introduced myself fairly early on.

He was a very friendly guy, given that he must attend about 20 of these types of luncheons a month. I chatted with him about the Wikipedia blackout (he wanted to see the effect on journalism because he hears all these reports from journalists about how they use Wikipedia to ask intelligent interview questions; he wondered if there were a lot of stupid questions in journalism that day) and about how time-consuming email was. Apparently he's friends with the founder of Amazon, and the founder of Amazon's motto is: "If I don't answer your email within 10 minutes, I won't answer at all".. essentially saying that if it doesn't capture his immediate attention he doesn't care. Approach worth thinking about.  He has no qualms about talking about the limits of Wikipedia.  

Yes, one person did call him Jimbo to his face. I had real trouble stifling a laugh into a cough.

Anyways, since I've been studying more or less these last two weeks, I thought it would be interesting for everyone from home to get a kind of inside sociological look of academia at Oxford, told from a U.S. perspective.   

Difference 1: Specialization v. Liberal Arts. In the U.S., most colleges require a broad range of subjects (example here), partially I assume an acknowledgement of the need for a flexible workforce in today's society.  The U.K. takes the opposite approach.  You pick your subject area at age 16ish and stick with it. They spend only three years in college rather than four (or five or six). Considering I believe in liberal arts I have trouble arguing effectively for the British approach, but I will say it offers a much more streamlined path into a career, and gets rid of the quintessential problem in the U.S. of freshmen puttering away/partying/ wasting money for a year before they have any idea what they're doing.

2: The Student Definition. In Oxford, you're defined as a student. Very few students hold jobs during term time. Very few work over Christmas break. I felt like I was always searching for the next employment opportunity in the U.S. during college. Someone once pointed out that that might be a symptom of going to an Ivy-league school rather than emblematic of the U.K.  But I do think there is a more cultural emphasis in the U.S. on getting work experience while in school (illustrates multitasking and time management skills; the "soft skills" needed for post-grad employment), and also  more need to work during the school year to compensate for high tuition costs. It will be interesting to see whether the 300% tuition hike starting next year in the U.K. will see a subsequent boom in the part-time student job market here out of necessity.

3: The Formative-Summative approach: In the U.S., you could have 15-20 assignments or more in one class in one semester, all being worth fractions of your grade. At Oxford, you're evaluated very few times during the year. Rather, you get lots of formative assignments that don't count for credit, but give you valuable feedback on how to approach the assignments that do count (summative).  Summative assignments might be given out once a year and your entire "grade" is resting on them. I really like this approach; it lets you experiment a bit and see what's kosher and what's not without it impacting your grade.

4: Down With Grade Inflation.  Gone are the days where I earned 105% in a class.  Extra credit? Not a concept.  Whereas in the U.S. an A is a 93-100  and frequently one can get above that, here the highest pass is an 80+, which our orientation guide told us was "Newton-level" (he used the same grading system, how weird is that to think about; our grades are compared to some of the best historical figures of all time).

Whew. This post is long enough. Next up, social life at Oxford, through a sociological lens!

Toodle-oo,  Lisa

Snow Place Like Home

Hiya,  (people say that here)

I just got back from a wandering run: one of those runs where you start out with no route in mind and no specific distance intended and just run until you feel fulfilled (nod to Jenna my college running buddy).  I love noticing the world at the pace of running.  I began to think that I've never been anywhere quite like Britain in the winter.  I think we in the U.S. tend to think of British countryside as fairly normal and nondescript, but in fact it's quite unique. Running through British countryside is like running through a painting. Nowhere I've been in the U.S. would have quite the same still, glass-like rivers, seemingly rising almost ground level, fields jotting right up to the edge of them.  It's as neat and carefully traced as a map would be: blue line cutting through green area, no banks for the rivers, one is tempted to take one step and walk from the grass right out onto their gleaming still surfaces. Vast still fields, coated horses quietly munching; everything seems frozen in peaceful silence. Sparse rows of smaller trees criss-cross the vast plains and edge the rivers; it reminds me a bit of Kentucky countryside, but then there are no hills here. Although the trees have lost many of their leaves, some still retain some resilient green plumage; it's not quite as grey as Michigan, but still feels that quiet and dead that winter always conjures up in my mind. It's lovely in its own unique way.    

Snow. I looked out the window of my bedroom last weekend and felt a strange warmth at seeing the spattering of white flakes. Strange delight indeed; in fact it was the first time in a long time that I was actually happy to see snow. It was comforting. It was home. For a brief moment, I was back in Michigan. I went outside and caught some snowflakes on my tongue. It's times like this when you realize that even the most amazing adventures in life can still be accompanied by the occasional yearning for the familiar.

Oxford itself is enchanting in the snow. Gothic buildings look that much more beautiful with a covering of white.  The City of Dreaming Spires indeed.

It does bring up the difficulty for me of how to get to class.  I live about two miles away from class via walking; 2.2 miles away via biking. I usually bike; walking for 30 minutes in chilling cold is not my favorite way to spend my 9 a.m.  However, Martin the road bike would not do snow well, which means next week I will spend much more time getting to class than I would wish to.

Side note One of the most annoying things about living here is the fact that Brits don't have rules governing how to pass someone when walking/running on the sidewalk.  Example: if you're walking towards someone in the U.S., you'd always go to the right side of the path (mirroring the cars).  In the U.K., there's no unsaid rule governing walking procedures.  Happens way too many times where you do a kind of face-off awkward dance to get around someone. Really, this is much more annoying than it sounds right now when I'm writing it on a blog.

Anyways, exciting things I've done this week include:  Oxford Uni Women's Ultimate Makes it to Indoor Nationals by Placing 4th in Regionals!  Particularly exciting due to its unexpectedness. We had two girls new to the sport, two girls who had started playing within the last four months, three girls who had never played a tournament in the U.K., and one (rather key) player for Great Britain. And me. By all logical and objective analysis, we should not have placed well. But we had a game plan that we executed brilliantly. The last three games we won a game to take 6th place (of 12), and then won the game for 5th against Birmingham, and then for 4th against Haze, qualifying us for nationals.  Seven games of frisbee in one day where I played almost every point.  Glorious.

I also have an up-and-running plan for my dissertation, which was truly the success of the week.  I might write about sometime.  No globetrotting for a bit here though, as I've started my series of summative essays (the only marks that count for my course for the year).

I could write more but this post is getting long. One last thing is to my grandparents who I know are reading this: Grandpa and Grandma, your thank-you cards warmed my heart.  They were just lovely to get and are now sitting on my desk. I wish it was culturally acceptable to write thank-you cards for thank-you cards, that's how much I appreciated them.  I've told Mom that I will call from England when she is there soon; send my love to the family in Minnesota.

Take time to appreciate the little things.  Lisa