Midterms are here and one of my students in a research methods class sent me this question about their most recent assignment (a critique of a scholarly journal article):
also, the methodology.. would an example of that be something like a textual analysis??For those of you not in the know, I have determined the double question mark signals that a question is being asked that will make you want to actually drink a bleach and tonic. Then my sister called to complain about how my mother had ruined the birth of my grand niece by wanting to be in the room and jockeying for position during the birth. The quite-heated conversation actually went on for over two hours on two separate evenings, forcing me to ask the following:
did you see the birth?Let's ignore for a moment why in the world my entire family actually wanted to be in the room ( I know, I know, beautiful experience...miracle of life...but honestly, if I ever have a kid, we'll not be serving potato salad and having a reunion in the birthing suite) - evidently births are now stadium events. What is most frustrating is the fact that in all of these conversations, no one actually managed to tell me anything about the baby herself. Through my superior deductive reasoning (and the ability to ask a question in the time it takes a rabid relative to draw a breath between incoherent spewage) I have since learned that the child has hair and a flat nose.
did mom see the birth?
so you're upset and screaming because someone touched you?
I might be grand-uncle to a pug named Antoinette.
I'm consoling myself with the knowledge that other people's families are also absolutely insane and might also miss the point of a birth in such an utterly insane manner.
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Wait. So the grandmother of the child (your sister) was in the room, but was angry that the child's *great*-grandmother also insisted on being there?
October 17, 2007 at 6:36 AMFrankly, if this is is SOP in your family, age takes precedence. Your sister is more likely to see the next births.
That's a pretty - maybe overly - logical way of looking at it, and certainly is about as far from my family's typical modus operandi (I use this rather than standard operating procedure because the latter somehow seems to imply a collective orderliness that my family would never stand for).
October 17, 2007 at 11:35 AMAs Tom Stoppard might have put it, my family is "more the the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. Bute can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."
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