REU outlook: not good
The last time I wrote about this, I was obviously suffering some type of excessive optimism. I’m back to normal now. Tuesday was her first day of work, and we started with a meeting with our advisor, then ran off to the hardware store to pick up the stuff I ordered for the net. I told her the plan and started working. Her plumbing skills left much to be desired, and I ended up making her just clean all the pipes for me to glue. OK, so not everyone is handy like I am. I can live with that, and maybe she’ll learn something from watching me. I gave her a bunch of articles to read, and she looked at them like she’d never seen a journal article before, even asked if she should use them as models for the format of her paper. She wanted to take them back to the dorm to read, even though she has a better desk than mine (I’m only a little bitter). I said I didn’t care where she worked as long as she worked. The glue on the new net needed to dry before we could move it, so we set a time to meet back at the dock to do that later, and she disappeared. At the appointed time, I showed up. She did not. I waited for a little while, then moved the net by myself and went back to my desk. Finally, just as I was about to quit working and start shopping on the internet, she appeared with the excuse that she had fallen asleep reading. Strike one. I was mostly annoyed that she had shown up and distracted me from my shopping, but this is a project that requires punctuality and sacrifice of sleep. Her failing to show up because she fell asleep in the middle of the afternoon does not bode well for jellytime. Since then, she has done nothing but ask the dumbest questions ever and worry that she doesn’t know how to write a proposal despite the many examples available to her and having already discussed the outline with me. Strike two. Jellytime starts tomorrow. I’m giving her the weekend off because I’m super generous. Or because I don’t want to spend my whole weekend being angry at her. I told her this morning that she would need to meet me at the dock at 5:35 AM on Monday morning. Her eyes nearly popped right out of her head. We’ll see if she can avoid strike three. I don’t know what I’ll do if she doesn’t.
On a more positive note, thinking about how to teach her to be more confident and competent has made me think about how I got that way. It made me realize that I actually am both. Admittedly, most of the time when I’m behaving in a confident way, I’m faking it, but that’s a shockingly important skill. I may not have a clue what I’m doing, but at least I know that I’ll eventually figure it out. I’m still at a loss as to how to teach her, but I guess it’s a good place to apply my faking-it skills.
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