An invitation can make a big difference to a newcomer
[This is a super old draft blog post that I wrote years ago. I never posted it and just rediscovered it, so I dusted it off and am posting it now because I still agree with the takeaway!]
My third day at work in Heidelberg, I got an e-mail advertising “PSF Coffee” in the Horsaal (main auditorium) and, despite not knowing what PSF stood for, I decided to go along and check it out. So there I was, in a big auditorium, looking around the room and counting a total of Zero familiar faces. I pulled out my journal and a pen and began a diary entry, and continued writing even as Casey -- the guy running PSF Coffee that day -- stood up and asked if anyone had news, announcements, or new people at the institute to introduce.
Uh oh, new people. That’s me!! My pen hesitated. But can I introduce *myself*? Would that be weird? I decided to keep my head down and keep writing.
“I think I got one e-mail from a new person,” Casey continued, scanning the crowd. “Anna?”
OH, NO. THAT’S ME. My pen froze. “Um, yes, hi.” All heads turned. “Yes, I’m new.” A woman in the front row barked, “who are you working for and what is your project?” Oh, goodness! “I’m working for - [OH GOSH WHAT’S HIS OFFICIAL TITLE? PROFESSOR? DIRECTOR? PROFESSOR DIRECTOR?] Professor Rix, on...” I hadn’t come up with a succinct one-liner describing my project, so I babbled for a bit about Galactic disk formation. Oh, man.
My diary entry from that evening reads, “I’ve been very shy here...it sucks. It feels unnatural. I hope that it’s just a first-week thing.”
Turns out it wasn’t just a first-week thing. Pretty soon it was December and I still felt socially awkward at work. I remember wondering what kind of barrier this was, this thing preventing me from simply sticking out my hand and saying “Hi, I’m Anna, I don’t think we’ve met. What do you work on?” On the bus in the morning, I sat surrounded by colleagues but didn’t say a word to anybody, and when I went to eat lunch in the cafeteria I looked for people I knew from my office or research group and sidled over to sit with them.
So then it was December and I was in Barcelona for a conference. And the e-mail that made the difference didn’t have any words in the body, just a subject line. “Dinner plans?” Sent by a post-doc at the MPIA (who we’ll call B) to two professors, two post-docs, and me. I wrote back saying that I did not. He wrote back, saying that a group of people were going out to a bar that evening, and invited me to come along.
After that evening, I had friends. The next day at the conference, I had people to talk to, and just knowing a few people gave me the confidence to go up to new people and a introduce myself.
A little under a year later, I moved to Pasadena. When I arrived, B was actually there too, for a conference. There weren’t a lot of people I would have been happier to see. He had spent a few years at Caltech, so knew a lot of the people in the astronomy department, and made a point to introduce me to his former colleagues.
I hope that when I’m the one who’s been around here for years, I’ll think of B, and remember how much of a difference it can make to extend an invitation to a new face.
Chasing the Cow: an explosion unfolds in a distant galaxy
On June 17, I got an e-mail alert reporting a flash of light in the sky. This by itself was not unusual. Those of us who study the deaths of stars find flashes all the time; supernovae, the brilliant cosmic explosions that accompany the deaths of stars, are actually pretty common, and on any given night the night sky holds dozens of them. However, this particular flash appeared remarkably quickly for a supernova, and it was so bright that it was difficult to explain as a normal explosion.
In science, we try to be slow to accept that anything extraordinary has happened. I thought this was a lame attitude until one of my first projects in grad school, when I spent months pursuing a cosmic flash thinking it was an extraordinary extragalactic explosion (that is, an explosion outside our galaxy), only to find out that it was actually a star in our own galaxy, flaring up and tricking me into thinking that I was seeing something more distant. I was bummed. My advisor reassured me that this was just part of the scientific process. But I learned my lesson -- don’t get too excited too quickly. It’s probably not what you’re hoping it is.
Every new flash in the sky is given a name, a random sequence of letters based on how many flashes have been discovered so far that year. This new flash was called AT2018cow, and pretty soon everyone was calling it “The Cow.” The Cow was “most likely a foreground [star],” said the e-mail alert. However, “to rule this out [as] being a very unusual [explosion]...or (more likely) confirm it as a foreground [star], a spectrum is required.”
A spectrum is a more detailed observation than a picture. And although we were all telling ourselves that this was probably just a star, telescopes all over the world pointed at The Cow, not realizing that this was the first act in one of the most intensely observed cosmic events in history, probably second only to last year’s neutron star collision.
The Cow was not a foreground star. I was walking out of a classroom when I received the news on my phone, again via an e-mail alert. A team from another part of the world reported “evidence that the transient is associated with CGCG 137-068,” the name of the galaxy, and said that “Further spectroscopic observations are encouraged.” Translating the professional science-speak: “THIS IS REALLY IN ANOTHER GALAXY!! THIS IS REALLY AN EXTRAORDINARY EVENT!!! AHHHH!!!!! EVERYONE, POINT YOUR TELESCOPES IN THAT DIRECTION!!!! WOOHOOOO!!”
I turned around, walked back into the classroom, and held up my phone to my advisor’s face. He said, “Oh! Well.”
We sprang into action. Looking at the AT2018cow folder in my inbox, I have two e-mails from June 18, one e-mail from June 19, and over fifty e-mails from June 20, when it was confirmed to be a real explosion. One of the e-mails is from my advisor, telling me to “please be on Skype,” meaning that I needed to be on-call at all times. Many are e-mail alerts by other teams of astronomers around the world, reporting their observations. Another was from my teammate Dan, telling me that the telescope we wanted to use was currently shut down for maintenance.
Here’s how observing works in astronomy. You might have your own telescope that you can use anytime you like. Most likely, this is an optical telescope, meaning a telescope that sees visible colors of light (red through purple), or maybe it’s a radio telescope, meaning a telescope that sees radio waves (which are actually just an “invisible” color of light, beyond the red end of the spectrum). Or, you might have guaranteed access to an expensive national facility, like a telescope in space (like the Hubble Space Telescope), or an enormous telescope on the ground (like Keck), or maybe a telescope that can see “invisible” segments of the electromagnetic spectrum, like X-rays or radio waves. For access to these national facilities, you have to write an application, saying “hey, I have this great idea for an observation, please allow me to point your telescope at this location for this amount of time.” If it’s a serious emergency, like something that will disappear within a few days, you can submit a special kind of application, saying “I REALLY NEED to point your telescope at this location for this amount of time, RIGHT AWAY.” This gets reviewed by a committee, and if they give you the green light, you can actually interrupt someone else’s observing program to do your thing. Resources are scarce, and all of these application processes are very competitive.
There are a lot of considerations in choosing what telescope to observe with. Some are more flexible for emergencies than others, some are more powerful (meaning they can see fainter things) than others but more oversubscribed, some observe one part of the electromagnetic spectrum but are blind to others. It depends what you’re trying to do. In our case, we gambled, and went with the SMA (Submillimeter Array), a telescope that observes millimeter-length waves of light. In my field, the study of stellar death, this is a very unusual part of the electromagnetic spectrum to observe in: the success rate for catching millimeter waves from cosmic explosions is low. Also, most explosions that do produce millimeter light are faint, and the SMA can only see bright things. But The Cow was obviously unusual, and it was nearby and bright. Teams of astronomers all over the world were observing The Cow all across the electromagnetic spectrum, so why not try something a little unusual?
I immediately contacted the SMA team, and within a few hours we had approval for observations to begin that night. That day, I also wrote two other applications to use other observatories. One was rejected and the other was accepted. In the meantime, The Cow continued to stun us, and my inbox was overflowing with alerts from various teams of astronomers, reporting more observations, including the spectacular discovery of bright X-rays and radio waves. There was also an e-mail from Mansi, a professor in my department, who was aware of all the craziness unfolding and noticed the unhealthy timestamps on the e-mails I was sending. “Hi Anna,” she wrote. “Get some sleep. It has been a long day for you.” It’s good to know that people are looking out for you.
Through this rush, it was fun to take a step back and consider the perspective of the universe. Dinosaurs evolve into existence somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy. Shortly thereafter, something violent happens in CGCG 137-068, a totally different galaxy -- maybe a star explodes, maybe a black hole rips a star to shreds. The violent event is bright. Light travels from this event, out of CGCG 137-068 and across the universe. Two hundred millions years later, the dinosaurs have gone extinct, and curious humans have taken over the Earth. Their species-long effort to understand their place in the cosmos has led to the construction of telescopes, enormous technologically sophisticated eyeballs placed over the ground and in space. These artificial eyes can even see light invisible to the human eye, like ultraviolet light and radio waves and millimeter waves and X-rays. It’s in this era that the light emitted in this violent event reaches the surface of the Earth. A telescope in Hawaii notices it, names it The Cow, and issues an alert. Astronomers receive the alert via this thing called e-mail. And then they all go crazy, pointing their telescopes in the direction the light came from, trying to understand what violence unfolded 200 million years before they came into existence.
It was a lot of fun to be one of those humans going crazy. At the end of our first night of SMA observations, I got an e-mail from the observing staff saying that the source was easily detected. Translation: The Cow is bright in millimeter waves. THE COW IS BRIGHT IN MILLIMETER WAVES!!! The next night, we observed it again, and it was EVEN BRIGHTER! The number was 33 mJy (if that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry about it, it’s just a measure of brightness, and that is REALLY BRIGHT!) I had the following highly technical and scientific e-mail exchange with Dan:
Me: “33 mJy?!”
Dan: “Yes, it's madness!!”
This was actually the first time any cosmic explosion had been seen brightening in millimeter-wave light. We had our foot in the door, and our investigation had begun.
In the early 80′s, physicist and professor Rush Holt arrived on Capitol Hill to begin his year as a AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow. He encountered scientist-politician culture shock right away. On Day 1 of orientation, a speaker from the Office of Technology Assessment (abolished in 1995) said that “we’re in Washington, where facts are negotiable,” and on Day 2, another speaker said that “you have to understand that here in Washington, facts are up for debate.” These first two days were a wake-up call to think deeply about the relationship between scientists and what we deal with, and policymakers and what they deal with.
20 years later, it was the fall of 2001 and Dr. Rush Holt was now Congressman Rush Holt, serving his second year as a representative of New Jersey’s 12th congressional district. (He was a congressman for 16 years, and retired in 2015.) Someone had mailed anthrax to news media companies and congressional offices, and Holt was approached by colleagues who said that “you’re a scientist, you must know about anthrax!”
Finding himself the local anthrax consultant taught Holt two things. One: it is a prevailing view that scientists are the keepers of facts. Scientists “know things” and have access to a repository of knowledge -- which includes knowledge of anthrax. Two: many non-scientists feel that they cannot and will not know these things, because they are not scientists.
Today, Holt is the Chief Executive Officer for the AAAS, and this afternoon he sat with us in the library on the 2nd floor of Kerckhoff, Caltech’s building for Laboratories of the Biological Sciences. His visit was thanks to a joint effort by the Caltech Y Social Activism Speaker Series and a student club called Science and Engineering Policy At Caltech (SEPAC). We sat facing him and a wall of books; I strained my neck to see over rows of heads. “I’m pleased and impressed to see such a big turn-out,” he said. It shows “an interest in science and public life.”
He warned us that non-scientists are distanced from science. People think that to do science, you must be really smart -- and probably arrogant, too, set aside from ordinary people. “This might be flattering,” he said, but “it’s also really dangerous.” And now we’ve come to a bad place (“I would argue, we have a crisis”) -- a resistance to the idea of evidence, in part because of this distance between scientists and the rest of the public. Somehow, we need to improve the public’s attitude towards evidence, and help them see that the pursuit of scientific understanding is not beyond their grasp.
And now we have a strange phenomenon: a March for Science. “This is the first time in my career,” Holt said, “I have seen...the spontaneous desire to stand up and defend the idea of science.” In particular, it’s the first time he’s seen a demonstration on behalf of “science,” broadly speaking. He went on to say that he thinks it’s because “people recognize we’re in a crisis,” acknowledged that some of his colleagues worry that this will “only alienate the majority party,” and added that “it might.”
Why would a scientist run for Congress? “Well,” Holt said, “I’ve always been interested in how the world works -- that’s science. And I’ve always been interested in how people work -- that’s politics.” As for the choice to get involved, “it’s too important not to.” Holt learned from his father (a senator from West Virginia -- and the youngest senator ever, who post-election had to wait until his 30th birthday to take the oath of office) that through politics you can help people. So, “how could you not do it, if you had the chance?”
Of course, there are many ways to get involved short of an all-consuming commitment to run for office. One way is to communicate with your local representatives and staffers. Asked how to navigate these conversations, Holt told us that “there’s no one way, there’s no right way, and it’s not even clear that there’s a best way.” But he said that during his time as a congressman, he was most influenced by moving anecdotes and a surge of phone calls about a specific issue. He encouraged us to communicate regularly, because this builds rapport and trust, and increases the chances that one of the anecdotes you send in will particularly resonate.
On a longer timescale, he suggested developing policy ideas and ideas for implementation. Bring any special expertise to bear. To learn how to communicate your idea to non-scientists, you can take a course in science communication or do a AAAS policy fellowship.
During the Q&A, someone asked about tensions between his personal ideologies and issues he had to get involved with on Capitol Hill. This was the only question that he seemed to struggle to answer. After sharing a bit about being a Quaker, he finally settled on a response: “I think you’re all old enough to know that life is never pure.” He laughed and looked around. “It’s all compromises, all the time.”
Hi Anna, i was at one of your talks and you are amazing! Your enthusiasm is catchy. Will you be able to come and talk to a group of elementary, middle and high school kids in Culver City, please?
Thank you! I would be happy to. Just send me an e-mail at [email protected] -- I don’t check my tumblr messages very often.
Hi Anna, I love reading your blog posts. I've been following your posts since your time at MIT. You haven't been blogging lately. Are u blogging somewhere new ?
Thanks for your message! I unfortunately lost the habit, but now I’m trying to get back into it :).
You have two minutes to craft a story about laughter.
Originally written on 10 June 2016, and finished much later!
Yesterday afternoon, 15 of us crowded into a conference room designed to accommodate 10. Kishore Hari, the loud and animated director of the Bay Area Science Festival, told us that we were going to tell each other personal stories. “Are you all on board with that?” Well, sure, I guess, even though none of us had never met each other before.
Kishore handed the first volunteer a card, and she flipped it over. It read, “My Crazy Family.” The volunteer now had two minutes to improvise a story on that topic. So, the first thing I learned about this person I’d just met was that her family loves playing pranks on each other, that her father is a hunter, and that for a while a running prank in her family was to hide a dismembered turkey’s foot in someone’s pillow or shoe. This led to an awkward moment during a sleepover in 7th grade, when a visiting friend found the turkey foot in her bedsheets and didn’t find it funny at all.
Another volunteer, C, got the card “car.” So, the first thing I ever learned about C was that when she was 15, nearing the end of her Driver’s Ed course and feeling a little overconfident, she took the family SUV on a 5-minute errand and got it crushed in a gate.
This is part of the Communicating Science Conference (ComSciCon), a national workshop for graduate students in science fields who want to become better communicators and help make science more accessible to the public. The event is a mixture of panels with experts representing fields from government policy and law to journalism and K12 education. After the panel on Communicating through Creative Outlets and Storytelling, we split off to get some hands-on practice.
My partner was K, and the card I flipped over read, “laughter.” The result was that the first thing I ever said to K was “Hi, I’m Anna,” and the second thing was “I’m going to tell you about the time I laughed the hardest.” I told K about an incident from my 9th grade Comparative Cultures class. Our teacher was very intimidating, and we used to have to give in-class presentations while she sat at the front of the room and stared at us over the rims of her glasses. One time, my classmate got a long serrated wooden stick stuck in his afro at the beginning of his presentation, and our teacher had to pull out scissors from her desk to cut it out.
In return, K told me that she and a friend once listened to the same Jack Johnson song 46 times, over two hours, without realizing that it was the same song, while remarking to each other that all Jack Johnson songs sound the same.
After telling our stories once, we gave each other feedback by answering three questions. What words do you remember? Jack Johnson, friend, iTunes, same, “46 times.” What emotions did you feel during the story? Surprise, familiarity (I also think that all Jack Johnson songs sound the same), silliness. What questions were you left with? When did this happen? Do you still listen to Jack Johnson? Do you even like Jack Johnson? And which song was this? I was surprised by the words K remembered from my story; my enthusiasm for certain details somehow didn’t serve to emphasize them, and some of what K noticed most were things I hadn’t noticed I’d said.
With that in mind, we told our stories again. And again. And then performed them for the rest of the group.
I don’t remember where my fellow ComSciCon attendees are from, what they study, or how many siblings they have -- usual questions from a gathering of graduate students. But I still have a strong sense of their personalities, their sense of humor, their families, and their friends, not only from the choice of content of their stories, but of the way they delivered them.
The session was short and too few stories were told. I found myself wanting to carry the cards around with me (other cards in the deck included “unsupervised children” and “a time I felt embarrassed”) to use the next time I meet someone. I think it’s nice to start with a story! And I think it’s nice that the first thing K and I did together was make each other laugh.
I used to think of decision-making as a complicated optimization problem. There was some quantity I wanted to maximize (say, my happiness, or the good I could do for the world) and would maximize, if I could only be prescient enough to solve for the best combination of choices. Once solved for, I could plan my future by laying these decisions out in front of me; once in place, I could follow them where I wanted to go.
So there I was one afternoon at MIT, talking to Dumbledore in his office, outlining the pros and cons of some decision. I guess my anxiety gave away my obsession with getting it all exactly right. "Anna," Dumbledore said, "Let me tell you a story." One day, as a young man, he got in an elevator. Another person got in the elevator. It was a slow elevator, I suppose, so they had time to talk. That person became a mentor to him, encouraged him to go to graduate school, and the rest is history.
That anecdote probably got over-simplified while making a home for itself in my memory. But I think that the moral was this: you can try to micromanage your future, but ultimately you can’t predict or control what will happen to you. Your decisions set the initial conditions, and chance encounters will deflect you. You should work hard so that you’re prepared to take advantage of what comes (like a chatty stranger in an elevator) but that’s fundamentally different from, say, choosing the “right” major or the “right” career. I think that sometimes we reconstruct our paths in our memories so that it all flows logically, but I suspect that there’s more chance and arbitrariness than we’d like to admit. Could I have majored in something else and been just as happy? Probably. Could I have a different job right now and feel just as “right”? Almost certainly. Is that something to agonize over? No. At some point, there’s too much scatter between a set of options for you to be able to predict which one is “best.” You narrow things down to a reasonable set, then pick one and run with it.
I picked grad school in astronomy. As a result, the contents of the binders on my bookshelf have narrowed in scope. They used to contain arrow pushing diagrams from organic chemistry, notes on plays by Tom Stoppard, and equations describing every conceivable combination of springs and swinging pendulums. Now, it’s all space physics: notes on the fate of stars, on how galaxies form and evolve, on runaway thermonuclear reactions, on the thermal history of the universe.
This would horrify undergrad Anna, who was afraid of specialization, the consequence of making decisions. But it feels good to specialize. As a grad student, I'm responsible for every detail of a project. I own it, even if goodness knows it wasn’t my idea. When my colleagues grill me on my research, it's satisfying because I know the details. I did the details, I am the expert. It’s a kind of high, being so deeply engrossed in a topic. And I get to take this depth with me when I discuss science with the public. Last weekend, I gave a talk for the Santa Monica Amateur Astronomy Society, and the audience asked me questions I couldn't have answered a year or even a few months ago. I answered, and then I answered the follow-up questions, and was surprised to find that I could go deeper and deeper. I’ve found fulfilment in expertise and joy in obsession.
Another reward of specialization is the community, united by the kinds of problems you think about or the approaches you take, and even a shared language. When I arrived in Germany (I spent a year there on a Fulbright, after I graduated) I remember thinking to myself that I had to learn two foreign languages: outside work I was surrounded by German, and at work I was surrounded by stellar spectroscopy and galaxy evolution. I had no idea what anyone was talking about, anywhere, anytime. I slowly picked up both languages, and now I find it oddly comforting to hear German, the same way I find it oddly comforting to hear particular astro-lingo.
There is a danger in this: you might forget how to speak other languages. It’s eerie to ask someone what they work on and get a response that is technically correct English yet totally incomprehensible. It’s in your interest to be able to effectively translate what you do, to your colleagues and to the source of your funding. And it’s your responsibility to effectively translate what you do to the public, to do what you can to improve science literacy. Earlier this summer, I went to a workshop where the goal was to train graduate students how to effectively communicate their science with the public -- part of this was reminding ourselves what language we used to speak, before we arrived at our respective specialties.
Another danger of specialization is to one’s self esteem. I’m only a year into grad school, but my impression is that an all-consuming occupation like research can sneak its way into becoming the sole way you judge yourself. Research progresses slowly, so the timescales on which you are rewarded are long, and in between you can feel aimless and frustrated.
So, it's important to pursue hobbies and interests that routinely make you feel happy, on a timescale much shorter than the timescale on which research rewards you. I identified what those pursuits are for me while I was at MIT: engaging with the public about what I do by giving talks, teaching, volunteering. It’s not that “hard” in the sense that over time I’ve built up a set of materials that I can use over and over again, and I’m not scared of questions because I either know the answer or know how to find it. And it’s always immediately rewarding, and sometimes even deeply rewarding on longer timescales, when I stay in touch with old students and watch them grow.
It is harder to pursue other interests now that I’m no longer an undergrad, where anytime I left my room I was bombarded with more interesting things than I could handle (and the interesting things even sneaked their way into my room, via a zillion mailing lists). But I’ve taken strands from MIT in hand, and pulled them with me to grad school. My senior year, I was bummed when the Paradise Lost seminar didn’t fit my schedule, and Prof. Arthur Bahr generously offered to read it with me. After I graduated, Arthur offered to put me in touch with a medievalist at Caltech “whenever you feel like your feet are planted enough to resume thinking about medieval literature.” Now, I have a reading group with this professor and two of my friends (including Becky ’12, another former student of medieval literature at MIT!) We’re making our way through Pearl, a beautiful haunting poem from the 14th century about coming to terms with love and loss. The reason I suggested Pearl is that Arthur wrote an essay (and is maybe even writing a book?) on it. I’m excited to finish the poem, read Arthur’s essay, then write him a note to let him know that Becky and I caught the Medieval Literature bug from him, big time.
These other activities give me the chance to climb out of my specialist hole, dust myself off, have a look around, and remind myself what else is out there to be enjoyed and learned. That's what I'm doing right now, writing this at a cafe near Caltech. I’m just starting a new research project, and it’s frustrating to be a beginner again; I felt like I had a handle on my old project, and it’s tempting to hide in that old project forever. But I know that it’s good for me to do something new. And it’s an exciting problem (gravitational waves and merging black holes and radio interferometry, anyone?) but UGH, I've been banging my head against the wall for the past couple of weeks. So, thanks for the excuse to take a break and blog, Chris. This afternoon, I’ll dive right back in again.
Maybe I’m excessively conscious of the purpose of Fulbright, but I often feel the pressure of an invisible nametag on my chest that says “Hi, I’m Anna! I’m here in Germany representing America” -- no matter how casual the social context. I want to draw an asterisk next to “representing” and scribble “I’m one small data point from a country of over three hundred million people. Please do not draw generalized conclusions about America or Americans as a whole from any of my actions.”
It’s strange to imagine that my personality or behavior could - does - leave impressions of America on the people around me. That maybe, years from now, one of my friends will reply to an opinion on America with “well, I knew this American on a Fulbright in Heidelberg…”
It’s even stranger to imagine that these anecdotes might come from situations as informal as the regular lunch with my officemates (there are eight of them, all Germans.)
There are more formal ways to be an anecdote. The Rent an American program, for example, brings American students to German schools. The idea is to learn about German culture and the German school system in exchange for a first-hand perspective on American life, culture, education, politics. My first school visit was in Bietigheim-Bissigen, a quaint Medieval town near Stuttgart, and my second took place a week ago in Heilbronn.
The visit had a bumpy start. I bought a ticket for a bus that didn’t exist and (unrelatedly) the Deutsche Bahn went on strike, but somehow I still made it to the train station, and Ulrike - my host teacher - picked me up in her car. On the drive to school, we chatted in German. I addressed her as Sie - the formal form of address - and she immediately corrected me, complaining that “ich bin nur neunundzwanzig!” I’m only 29! So, from then on, she was a du.
Ulrike became a teacher through her interest in foreign languages. She studied English and Spanish in school, which brought her to Essex for an exchange semester and to Malaga for another. She likes kids and decided that teaching would be a stable and secure career, so she prepared for the exam that all aspiring teachers in Germany have to take. She passed the exam and although she didn’t get the position she wanted - apparently too many people want to teach English and Spanish in German Grundschule - she’s happy with her job.
That said, she thinks the time will soon be right to pick up and move. There’s this one teacher at the school, she said, who was a student there, got her degree as a teacher there, and is still teaching there, decades and decades later. “I don’t want that to happen to me,” she concluded. I nodded and tried to assemble a response in German. As so often happens when I’m conversing in German, I had lots of things I wanted to ask and lots of things I wanted to say, but what emerged from my mouth was vapid. “Wow, she must really like the school!” Oh, well.
“By the way,” Ulrike said. “Can I ask how old you are? The students were asking me; they’re curious.” 22, I told her. I get asked my age a lot, here in Germany. I think it’s because Germans expect me to be younger than the typical German who’s just graduated from university - and they’re right. Germans take an enormous variety of paths through their school system, so their ages and the variation in their ages at the time of graduation (from High School or university) is generally higher than it is in the US. It’s common to spend a semester or a year doing an exchange program in another country, it’s normal (and until recently was required) to spend a year after High School doing civil service, and some students begin in one tier of the school system and switch to another, which adds additional time. Almost everybody I graduated with from my American high school was 17-19 years old; the students I met in Heilbronn were 17-25.
I had heard about these tiers before arriving in Germany. I knew that your tier is determined around the age of ten, that your tier in turn determines whether you go on to university or instead pursue an apprenticeship and vocational school. Even though I hadn’t met a single person who had gone through this school system, I felt quite indignant about it: how could you determine a child’s future based on his or her academic performance at the age of 10?
Then I got to Germany. I learned that the top tier is called Gymnasium, the middle tier is called Realschule, and the bottom tier is called Hauptschule. I was shocked when I heard the students themselves state matter-of-factly that Gymnasium is for “smart” students, and that Realschule and Hauptschule are for less smart and even less smart students respectively. The students I met in Heilbronn, themselves graduates of Realschule, were very open about saying that they simply weren’t “good” enough for Gymnasium; it didn’t seem to bother them.
I also learned that many students feel positively about their school system. If you attend a Gymnasium, you’re with peers of a similar academic and motivation level. One of my officemates was a bit of a late bloomer and the system enabled him to proceed at his own pace; he went to Realschule and then his academic interests kicked in, so he earned a switch to a Gymnasium and went on to study physics at university. Switching schools means he’s 24, a bit older than the typical American university graduate - but why force everybody to march along in sync, when people develop so differently?
I heard a similar story of flexibility from the Heilbronn students. I explicitly asked whether they thought it made sense to be judged at the age of 10. What happens, I asked, if your dream is to become a PhD scientist, and you get sent to Hauptschule or Realschule? The students insisted that it was possible, that the placement isn’t rigid: that if you start in a lower tier and decide you want to go to university, you can work hard and move up to Gymnasium.
If all this isn’t confusing and complicated enough (at least, to an American who’s used to a pretty set track for everybody) this school I visited in Heilbronn is unusually complicated, even by German school system standards. It consists of 2,000 students attending totally different forms of school. Some are part time students, doing an Ausbildung (vocational apprenticeship) and attending school a couple of times a week, some are Gymnasium students studying full-time and preparing for university, some have already completed an Ausbildung and are now preparing to study as a Fachhochschule, which as far as I understand is like a university except that one studies specialized, more “practical” subjects like computer science, business, healthcare, or social services.
I met two classes of around fifteen students each. Both groups went to Realschule and are now in a Berufskolleg, which means that they’re studying in preparation for Fachhochschule. However, one class came straight from Realschule, while the other did three years of Ausbildung in between. One girl in the Ausbildung group - who did an apprenticeship in some kind of laboratory chemistry - said that she was grateful to this school for giving her the opportunity to go to Fachhochschule. I heard a similar story from a boy I sat next to during breakfast. He did his Ausbildung as a chef but decided that he wanted to continue with studies, so he came to the Berufskolleg in order to have the opportunity to go to a Fachhochschule.
The visit was rushed because of the morning’s transportation troubles, and consisted of three parts. First, I ate a big German breakfast, prepared by the students. Then I gave a presentation on my visit to Congress during my senior year of university. Then Ulrike and the students gave me a tour of their school.
The tour began in the common room. “Do you guys come here often?” I asked. A nod passed around, and one of the students pointed to the vending machine and offered “there’s candy here!” as an explanation.
Then they took me to see a chemistry lab, and ushered me through the door while they waited outside. I found myself standing in front of a Gymnasium chemistry class. The teacher said something to me in German that I didn’t catch, and then the whole group stared at me, obviously waiting for me to say something. “Um...hallo,” I began, and then, after a long silence, “What are you all learning?” The teacher said, “metals,” and gestured to the board. I turned around and saw a diagram of, surprise surprise, various kinds of metals. “Oh!” I said. Silence. A couple of students giggled. “Well...” I looked desperately at the door. “Tschuss.” Bye. I scurried out of the room.
I was also led to meet the headmaster in his office. He was a big tall man in a suit and glasses, with a very firm handshake. “Well,” he said, in German. “And how do you like our school and our students?” Um. It felt like all of my German language skills had suddenly escaped out of my ears. I stammered out something like “they are all very nice!” and then “thank you for having me here!” I shook his hand again and fled back outside to the students, relieved to be back with familiar friendly faces.
When we arrived back in the classroom, the students clustered around me for open Q&A. One of them asked, “Is Germany really different from the US?” I explained that the US is very diverse, that, in my opinion, parts of it might even be more similar to Germany than to other parts of the US. The girl smiled, and replied “yes, it’s very different, isn’t it” - I guess she heard what she expected to hear. I asked what they liked the most and least about their school. They all giggled; one of them, glancing at Ulrike, said “the teachers are great!” But, he continued, it’s school, so we don’t like it.
One of the last questions they asked me was, “What’s your favorite thing about Germany?” A taut silence, during which faces of people I’m going to miss very much flashed through my mind. I said, “the people.” That elicited a chorus of “awwwww.” I’ve made wonderful friends here, I said, and it’s going to be difficult to leave in July. One year is very short.
They gave me a gift: a basket with two German books, Die Verwandlung and Die Besuch der Alten Dame, German chocolate, German bread, Sauerkraut, Rotkohl. Traditional German cuisine and literature in a basket. Then I gathered up my belongings and a group of students walked me to the bus station. On the way we chatted about books, language learning, and traveling. They deposited me at the station and I was very sorry to see them go -- in a couple of hours they had become comfortable company. I suspect they don’t know how much of an impression they left on me. I wonder if they were conscious of the “Hi, I’m ___, and I’m a German! Please ask me questions about my life and my education system” sticker that I saw on their chests - and if they realized that just by being themselves, they contributed to a warm feeling I took back to Heidelberg with me of German teenagers’ curiosity and hospitality.
Well, I met this teacher and these students in Heilbronn...
I had a lot of plans for Thursday evening. I was going to take the bus home from work, grab my climbing shoes and a bag of chalk, then go bouldering with a group of coworkers for an hour. I was going to go straight from the Boulderhaus to the Altstadt, for the weekly pub trivia at the Brass Monkey pub.
I made it as far as the bus to the Boulderhaus.
When I got on the shuttle home from work, I pulled out my Kindle to read as usual; I was about a quarter of the way into If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. I read on the commute home, grabbed my climbing gear, then read on the bus to Bismarckplatz, where I changed for the Boulderhaus-bound Straßenbahn. It was raining, now, and I leaned my shoulder on the window. I reopened my Kindle. "Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost,” the narrator was saying. “But then you go on and you realize that...on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing what it is.” As the Straßenbahn pulled away I had a sudden, very disturbing vision of what was going to happen when I arrived at my destination: I would have to stop reading. In a panic, I jumped up, pressed the button and dashed out the doors.
I tucked my Kindle into my jacket to shield it from the rain and hurried back to Bismarckplatz, stopping to grab a bread roll at a bakery stand. The bus heading in the opposite direction was already waiting; I jumped on. At the student Mensa (cafeteria) I walked straight up to a table, ignored the stools, and stood standing and reading while tugging off pieces of roll with my teeth, tapping the screen rhythmically to flip the page.
The corner of the Mensa has some red couches; I bought a cup of tea, took off my shoes and curled up there for an hour. Then it was time for pub trivia. Stepped back outside into the rain, a moment’s pause - pub or bus home? “The traps are one inside the other,” the narrator said, “and they all snap shut at the same time.” Bus home.
There was a 20 minute wait, and it was still raining. I stood under a shop canopy waiting, reading, while the dry patch slowly filled with commuters. A woman bumped into me and got halfway through saying “excuse me” (”Entschuld-”) when she glanced at me and realized that I wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention. I was paying just enough attention to notice that she didn’t finish apologizing. On the bus, I was vaguely aware that it was crowded, but I found a spot by the window and hugged my backpack on my lap so that neighbors could come and go without disturbing me. I read while walking from the bus stop to my apartment (sorry, other pedestrians; I was at a section about starting over in new places and accumulating pasts. Can you blame me?)
There was an intense satisfaction in knowing that I could, on whim, jump off a bus and take an evening to curl up on a couch in a crowded room in the company of an old friend.
I read On A Winter’s Night A Traveller around seven years ago, during high school; one afternoon, between classes, I was visiting my beloved English teacher in his classroom to chat when he pulled open one of the white cupboards and turned around brandishing a book at me. "Read this,” he said. Following his example, I’ll end this post by saying “Read this,” and give you a preview by listing the titles of the chapters, which I think are lovely.
This was the shadow cast by my hand on Friday morning:
And this was the shadow cast by a bush:
No, I didn’t stuff little wads of paper between my fingers. And no, the leaves on that bush aren’t shaped like crescents. The shadows looked funny on Friday because the Sun looked funny. Here’s a view of the Sun on Friday morning, as projected through a telescope. Around 70% of it is blocked out by the Moon: a partial solar eclipse.
Here in Heidelberg, up on the Königstuhl where I work, we had a beautiful cloudless morning the day of the solar eclipse. The Haus der Astronomie set up telescopes outside, and about two hundred people - members of the public as well as scientists at the institute - came to watch 73% of the Sun disappear behind the Moon (we would have had to travel to the Faroe Islands or Svalbard to see a total eclipse - and I use the word “see” here loosely, since it was cloudy over the Faroe Islands.)
Back to the shadows. Why is it that all shadows don’t become crescent-shaped? Why doesn’t everything become distorted?
Well, first of all, shadows ordinarily don’t tell us anything about the shape of the light source. A square light casts the same shadows as a circular light, like the Sun. And a half-blocked Sun might cast weaker shadows, but the shape of the shadows for the most part isn’t affected, because of the shape of the objects casting the shadows hasn’t changed.
Don’t think of the little crescents in the pictures as crescent-shaped shadows: think of them as crescent-shaped Suns. They are actually pictures of the Sun, projected onto the ground through small gaps - like the gaps between my fingers, or the gaps between the leaves - which work as cameras.
This principle is the reason why, today, we use the word “camera” to mean “a device that captures images.” “Camera” actually means “chamber” in Latin. What does a chamber have to do with the ancestry of the camera? Well, if I poke a small hole on the side of a dark chamber, and point the hole at the Sun, a picture of the Sun will appear on the opposite wall. This kind of early camera, which consists of a small hole and a dark chamber, is called a Camera Obscura (”dark chamber”) or “pinhole camera.” If you want a cheap way to "take a picture” without having a fancy camera, you can focus the light source through a small hole onto a piece of paper, and trace the image. The size of the hole you need depends on the size of and distance to the light source you are trying to photograph.
Cost-saving photographic techniques aside, a pinhole camera is simply a great way to watch a solar eclipse without frying your retinas. The next time a solar eclipse takes place in your neighborhood, find some item in your house with small circular holes - or take apart your coffee machine, as a colleague of mine did - and cast a picture of the solar eclipse onto a flat surface.
I'm sitting alone in a classroom at the Haus der Astronomie (HdA). It's a white building shaped like a spiral galaxy (M51, to be a precise) with a planetarium where the supermassive black hole should be and sloped hallways running along the spiral arms. Along the hallways are classrooms, offices (including those of the Sterne und Weltraum editorial team) and storage rooms (maybe a better word is "libraries") of educational equipment and kits.
The HdA is next to my workplace, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA). Together, the two sit on top of the Königstuhl, 400m up over Heidelberg's Old Town. 400m may not sound like much, but it's enough that there's zero snow in town and a full-blown märchenhaft winter wonderland out the window to my left. It looks like somebody poured sugar icing on the trees, and I can see hardy plants poking through the snow.
One of the HdA's goals is to engage its research scientist neighbors in education and public outreach, and today I'm co-teaching a cosmology workshop. My students are currently in the planetarium, and I'm eavesdropping on their travels through the loudspeaker. The microphone is presumably either attached to or held by the presenter, but when the audience is loud enough I can hear them too. A few minutes ago the presenter said "I think it's time to go to the moon" and after a few seconds of silence (I pictured a crater-ridden landscape rushing up to fill the dome) I heard a chorus of "oooooooooooh."
Now they're visiting Venus, and I just finished setting up the classroom. I'm teaching the second half of the workshop: my co-teacher is going to spend the first half talking about what the universe is like now (composition, scale, density, etc) and then I'm going to discuss how it's changing: the nature of its expansion.
I started preparing a few weeks ago, and the workshop I had in mind when I first e-mailed my supervisor an outline bears almost zero resemblance to what I have planned for today. "My first impression," he wrote, "is that this is more of a lecture/presentation than an (active) workshop, and we should talk more about involving the students actively."
He was absolutely right. I have a Comfort Zone problem with PowerPoint presentations: they're what I'm used to, they're what I've done in the past, so they're how I continue to do things. Unfortunately, PowerPoint lectures are generally "brains-off" for students (to use my supervisor's term). So, I started over and told myself: no PowerPoint this time.
9:50am -
They're in Jupiter orbit. I paused writing this blog post to tune in, and just heard the presenter introduce "a cold world." "It's covered by ice," she's saying, "but there's an ocean beneath this ice, and some astrobiologists think that there could be life in this ocean." Europa, I guess? Tuning in and out of a planetarium show is like playing astro trivia.
When you don't use PowerPoint, your classroom looks way more exciting. There's a cart in front of me with a setup for measuring the inverse square law of luminosity: a flashlight, a detector, a luminosity meter, a stand that slides along a ruler. I put the spectrometer setup at the table in the back. You can point the little camera at a light source, and a spectrum is immediately plotted and displayed on the laptop screen. My plan is for them to learn how astronomers use redshifts to measure the recessional speed of galaxies. I have some galaxy spectra printouts on the table here with me, and the idea is for them to measure several redshifts, calculate the speed, and re-derive Hubble's Law and Hubble's Constant.
9:56am -
Sounds like they finally left the solar system. "The Sun is in a very quiet place in the Milky Way...We are happy to live in such a peaceful corner!"
At the risk of saying something obvious, when you want students to use equipment, you need to know how to use it yourself, and when you want students to get a result, you need to get that result yourself. I was here yesterday doing a full practice run with my friend Eric, who very generously rode the bus up the Königstuhl with me to play the role of student. Hiccups included: (1) Forgetting the password on the HdA laptop and having to run upstairs to bug my supervisor, (2) Not telling the spectrometer that I wanted to use the camera instead of the computer's webcam, and taking a (very uninteresting) spectrum of myself instead of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling (that explains why there was a live feed of my chest on the screen...), (3) Measuring a Hubble's constant an order of magnitude smaller than what it ought to be, and panicking for fifteen minutes before realizing that I had made a units error, (4) Discovering that the flashlight on the luminosity stand didn't have a bulb, then forgetting to turn off the lights in the room and measuring a not-inverse-squared luminosity law because of all the background noise.
Oh, boy. Distressing as it was, every mistake yesterday was one fewer mistake for today.
10:05 -
It just started snowing outside, and the presenter just said "we've finished our trip." They'll be coming to the classroom any minute now. I'm pumped.
Saturday Jan 31
(It's the last day of January? How is that possible??)
I remembered the laptop password, spectra were taken of the fluorescent lights instead of human bodies, Hubble's constant was beautifully measured, I brought my headlamp (+ two extra bike lights, just in case) to use as flashlights.
I didn't do everything I was prepared to do and instead took longer with each activity. And I didn't stand there and describe laws and methodology, like I would have done with the PowerPoint: they derived and explored laws and techniques themselves. It was cool.
Even cooler, maybe, was this feeling that my co-teacher (another MPIA researcher) and I brought something to this workshop that the students wouldn't get at school or from a textbook. We're astronomers! Towards the end of class, we had ten extra minutes and I asked whether they would like to learn about something else (we had extra material prepared) or whether they would just like to talk about becoming and being a scientist. Their eyes lit up and they nodded feverishly: so we had a mini-Q&A about studying math and physics, how it is we "knew" we wanted to become astronomers, what the day-to-day skills involved are, etc.
When I was in high school, I knew that I found science interesting, but in retrospect I had no idea what Being A Scientist entailed. I would never have guessed that as an astronomer I would spend most of my time programming, some of my time reading papers, writing papers, going to talks, participating in discussions at conferences and research meetings. I associated much of the scientist skill set - writing, critical reading and information synthesis, discussion, presentation - with the humanities, because I developed these skills in my "humanities classes" at school, not my science classes.
Our students are currently high school seniors, so are going off to college next year. If our workshop left the students with an idea of what it is my colleagues and I really do - the skill sets we draw from, what we spend our time doing, what we love about our jobs, what we don't love so much about our jobs - then that, I think, is just as important as guiding them to see for themselves that the universe is expanding.
Through the window of the instrument café in Kreuzberg, we could see a keyboard and a wall covered with guitars and banjos. Curious, we wandered in. A bell tinkled.
After taking a few steps I stopped and thought, we made a mistake. There were zero guests and all the staff were sitting at a table in the back; they had been smoking and drinking, and now they were staring at us. Oh, boy, I thought. Perhaps this isn't a café. I looked around a little bit; there was an impressive collection of trinkets clustered on the bar counter and on the keyboard, which sat in a corner by the banjos, an ornate couch, and a couple of armchairs. Perhaps, I thought, we've just wandered into some quirky instrument-collector's living room. Nathan evidently felt a little uncomfortable too, because he turned around and said "I think we should leave."
Just then, a big man with a big black beard - the owner, I surmised - walked over. He wasn't smiling. Was kann ich für Sie tun?
Um. Nothing, we were just leaving. I didn't get a chance to say that, though (and anyway I'm not sure I could have said it in German) before Eric, cheerful and unintimidated as usual, stepped forward and pleasantly inquired whether this was a café. Yes, said the owner, this is a café. Well, Eric boldly continued, do you have any ice cream here? ICE CREAM? asked the owner. His face took on a mixture of wonder and disgust. Why would you want ICE CREAM in this climate?
Emboldened by Eric, I took the baton and asked the owner where he was from. Greece. Oh, I said, I have a friend from Thessaloniki. That thawed him; he went on for a while about how he used to visit family there, and how polluted it is. Feeling ever braver, I asked whether he played a musical instrument. Yes, of course, do you? Yes, we do! Eric there plays the piano very well, Nathan sings.
Then, before I could stop myself, my mouth opened and I asked: "will you please play something on the piano for us?"
He stared at me for a moment, then his face relaxed and he laughed. Sure, he said, I'll just wash my hands. Please, take a seat. The boys took the armchairs and I sat down on the on the couch by the keyboard. We all held each other's gazes for a moment, in a silent "what is happening?" exchange.
From then on, the memories of the night are musical fragments. The owner playing the keyboard. Me offering up Eric's services by pointing and saying he plays the organ very well! The owner cheerfully changing the keyboard settings to organ. Eric performing. Me asking the owner to play something for us on the guitar, Nathan taking a turn on the piano, Eric setting a percussion accompaniment and improvising a jazz piano accompaniment. The owner handing me a bongo drum and telling me that to hit it I should lift it in the air and brace it between my knees. Eric playing the Legend of Zelda theme and attracting this attention of a couple of other staff members. They didn't speak much English or German, just Greek, but apparently enthusiasm for Zelda transcends linguistic barriers.
One of the two who joined us stuck around. Sitting on the couch, he picked up a guitar and played the beginning of "Tears in Heaven" over and over again. He had a wide, tanned face, black hair, and a big white grin, and despite our linguistic differences he so earnestly tried to connect with us; he wanted to play songs we would know, and when he found out that Nathan and I were American he squinted and said "hmm, American songs!"
Suddenly, Eric took the Bongo drum between his knees and began to tap. Our new Greek companion looked delighted, and strummed with renewed gusto. He would play for a while, then pause and look meaningfully at Eric, who would obligingly tap out a solo, and then the two would endeavor to reconnect. Nathan and I watched silently and for a few minutes not a single word in English, Greek, or German was spoken.
Eventually we all ran out of steam, and it was time to go home. We stood up to go. At the door, the owner shouted: "bye! see you next time." "See you next time!" we shouted, even though we knew that there would not be a next time. "And next time," he continued, "buy something to drink." We nodded sheepishly, put on our hats and gloves and scarves, and the bell tinkled again as we walked out into the dark.
This day in the life was stitched together using moments from September (when I first arrived at the MPIA) through December.
Heidelberg's Number 30 bus line is nicknamed "The Science Bus." Every work day, the little white shuttle leaves Universitätsplatz at 27 minutes past the hour (every hour except 13:27) and rolls over the cobblestones past the student cafeteria and the old (as in, from 1388) university library. Then it makes a sharp turn and rumbles up the Königstuhl, past the dramatic ruined Heidelberg castle and into the forest.
On this particular autumn day, the forest is red, orange, yellow, green, and brown. Somehow the colors all blur together into a dark gold. The bus pulls up and fifteen or so colleagues and I pile on. For once, I manage to snag a seat; the Science Bus is by far the most efficient way to get to the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, so it's usually very crowded in the mornings. Standing is no fun since the ride involves a lot of dramatic inertial changes.
As we rumble along, the guy sitting in front of me is deep in conversation with two guys standing in the aisle. We will call the one standing next to me, G. They're talking about science fiction, and my ears prick up when I hear the word Foundation. "Wait!" I stick my head underneath G's outstretched arm (he's holding the handrail) and peer out at the other two. "What are you guys talking about?" The Asimov Foundation series, they say. I read the series over the summer, and the four of us spend the rest of the bus ride discussing the series and recommend other science fiction authors to each other.
Eventually, the bus pulls into the MPIA parking lot, and we all trickle off the bus into the building. Ordinarily, we would now diverge and head to our respective offices, but since today is a Thursday most of us walk up to the Seminarraum for Galaxy Coffee.
The MPIA has two departments: "Planet and Star Formation" and "Galaxies and Cosmology." Each department has a weekly seminar, dubbed "PSF Coffee" and "Galaxy Coffee" respectively. It's an opportunity to share our work with each other, exchange ideas, ask and answer questions. Each coffee features two speakers, who give a ~15 minute presentation, followed by open Q&A. Attending is a good way to take the department's pulse.
I'm the second speaker at today's coffee and I'm so nervous I feel like I might throw up. So, I skip my usual routine of getting in line with the others and getting tea and cookies from the tables outside the seminar room. The first speaker's talk is a blur, and suddenly I'm standing in front of ~40 colleagues. A few familiar faces stand out: my post-doc advisor, an officemate, three post-docs who I became friends with at last week's institute field trip, some colleagues from my research group, G from the bus this morning. They all smile reassuringly. "Hello," I say. "My name is Anna Ho. I arrived here at the institute two weeks ago." I give a one-sentence explanation of who I'm working with and what I'm working on. "But today," I continue, "my goal is to introduce myself to all of you, by presenting the work that I did prior to arriving here." And then I launch into pulsars and forget to be nervous.
After Galaxy Coffee, I stick around outside the Seminar Room and answer more questions about my presentation. Colleagues are enthusiastic and have helpful insights and suggestions. Turns out that giving a talk on your research is a very effective way of integrating yourself into the social fabric of a research institute.
Eventually, though, I really do have to go get some work done, so I say thanks and jog down the stairs to my office. I say Guten Morgen to my officemates (bachelor students at the University of Heidelberg), hang my coat on the back of my chair, sit down, and log onto my computer. Yesterday, I made a plot describing two physical characteristics of a set of 553 stars, and found eight outliers. I want to know what's up with these eight stars. One possibility is, as always, that I simply did something wrong, so the first thing I do is check over my work. Looks okay. Is there anything unusual about these stars? Is there something wrong with their spectra? I plot their spectra, overlaying them on top of "normal" stars, and carefully scan the plot. I have some more ideas for tests, and the morning is spent programming and making more plots.
I eat lunch at 12:30. The cafeteria is only open for about an hour and a half; I like this idea, because it means that everybody (more or less) eats at the same time. The cafeteria is always crowded. Today I carry my tray over to some unfamiliar faces. S is an administrative assistant at the 'tute, and F is a post-doc. They're both German and I ask them to please speak German with me. S tells us about an author she likes, Jaron Lanier, who recently won one of Germany's most prestigious publishing prizes. F tells stories from his Zivildienst (in Germany, it used to be mandatory to do either a year of military or public service). He worked at an institution that helps immigrants make the transition to life in Germany. He says that he would never want to do that kind of job full-time, but it was a precious, eye-opening experience, and he's glad he did it. And since he was there for a full year, he had the opportunity to make a lot of meaningful personal relationships. Recently, he was walking down the street when a man he didn't recognize stopped him to thank him for his work all those years ago.
When our plates are empty, we get up and put our trays away, say "nice to meet you!" and disappear off to our offices. I return to investigating my misbehaving stars. At 3:30, I run upstairs to take advantage of the half an hour of free hot chocolate in the first floor coffee room. Then back to programming. I take the 5:48 Science Bus back to Uniplatz, and by now I'm too exhausted to socialize, so I pull out a book and read. The evening bus is typically much quieter than the morning bus, but the company is still comforting.
When people speak German to me, I usually get the gist, so sometimes I pretend to understand more of what has been said to me than I really do.
In other words, I cheat. And sometimes, I get busted.
One morning, I was helping my host mother Charlotte set the table for breakfast while she explained our plans for the day. I nodded and said das klingt wunderbar! that sounds wonderful! More precisely, the gist sounded wonderful: we were going to drive for thirty minutes to some pretty landscape (did she say the word 'lake'?) then walk for a while and have a nice cup of coffee. I didn’t understand any of her description of our destination, but I figured that I’d find out once we got there. Then I walked into the kitchen, where my host father Friedrich was standing. He asked whether I had heard the plans for the day. “Ja!” I replied. “Ich habe gehört.” Yes, I heard! “Oh, yes?” he replied. “Und was hast du gehört?” And what did you hear?
UH OH. Whomp whomp.
“Ummmmmm.” Behind my blank stare, my brain declared a state of emergency. It frantically tried to reconstruct Charlotte’s words. Unfortunately, it’s one thing to understand what’s being said to you, and it’s an entirely different thing to repeat it. And it didn’t help that I hadn’t really understood what was said to me in the first place. Finally, a single phrase came together. I parroted, “We will drive for thirty minutes.” And then I forgot the rest. Friedrich laughed and repeated the plans to me while I shuffled around red-faced. I acknowledged understanding and hurried out of the kitchen carrying the cheese platter.
* * *
I lived with Charlotte and Friedrich in Hamburg for four days. It was my first time attempting what I would call a “German language marathon,” and I learned that a marathon is a very different beast from daily sprints.
Here’s what I mean. In Heidelberg, I speak German in sprints: with my teacher in language class, with German colleagues over lunch, with German friends while out for a walk or playing board games. At the end of these episodes I’m exhausted and allow myself the luxury of switching back to English. It’s easy and tempting to do this, since everybody around here speaks English way better than I can speak German.
But speaking German during a night out doesn’t prepare you for stumbling out of your bedroom first thing in the morning and being greeted with guten Morgen! and hast du gut geschlafen? And it doesn’t prepare you for coming home at the end of a long day, when all your brain wants to do is hang out in comfy English territory, and having to use German to describe how your day went.
I fell asleep exhausted at night, and in the morning I would wake up, look at the inside of my bedroom door, and think: there is no way I can speak German today. Heute kann ich überhaupt nicht Deutsch sprechen. The feeling reminded me of a multi-day hiking trip during my senior year of high school, when I would sit up in my sleeping bag each morning and think: there is no way I can hike today. But somehow it happened anyway; I would sling my enormous backpack on, and on that first uphill walk from the cabin my legs felt like jelly. I staggered on over the dirt and rocks with tiny steps.
* * *
Friedrich and Charlotte Lichtner live in a small apartment in Hamburg's Eppendorf district. During my first morning there, Charlotte and I went grocery shopping and on the way I got a tour of the neighborhood. She explained that this used to be a hub for young people, full of discos and nightlife; "now it's less fun," she added, a little sadly.
Their family has not spread far. As we crossed the street and turned the corner, Charlotte pointed out her parents' home (where she grew up) and gestured toward her brother's apartment. Friedrich's parents live a ten-minute drive away. And, until recently, both of the children lived at home, but Lisa got married in May and now lives with her husband in another neighborhood in Hamburg, and Sina is a few months into her first semester studying economics at the University of Heidelberg. In late September, they drove the six hours from Hamburg to Heidelberg to drop her off and help her settle in.
That was the same weekend I moved to Heidelberg. My parents flew in from London to visit and help me settle in, and the evening the Lichtners arrived we were sitting in a small cramped restaurant in the Altstadt eating Spätzle and Maultaschen. The Lichtners walked through the door and the waiter directed them to our long wooden table. I noticed that the three of them were wearing nearly identical glasses - dark frames, square, rounded at at the corners - and lifted my wine glass to my lips to hide my smile.
Soon, our families were chatting. With Friedrich as translator (Sina and Charlotte are very self-conscious about their English) we exchanged travel stories, and discussed politics and our respective home countries. When we stood up to leave, we all shook hands and Friedrich handed me his business card. "If you ever come to Hamburg," he said, "let us know." And, with a gesture towards Sina, "we have an extra bedroom!" I said danke schön and when I got back to my apartment I taped the business card to the wall above my desk, next to postcards and ticket stubs.
Two months later, I registered to attend a Fulbright meeting in Hamburg, and after staring at the wall for a few minutes weighing pros and cons, I figured warum nicht and peeled off the business card.
It was a little awkward at first. Lisa picked me up at the train station, and seemed to assume that I could speak German. I could understand and reply just fine, but making conversation was very difficult; I have a very limited menu of options of conversation starters. At some point, desperate, I asked her how her weekend was. She gave me a funny look, probably since it was a Thursday and nobody was asking about anybody’s weekend anymore.
At home, we looked through family pictures and I learned about Toni the dog and the family farmhouse up North, where Lisa got married. The arrival of Friedrich and Charlotte from work was Lisa’s cue to leave, and on her way out she remarked to me – and her parents – that I was very mutig. Friedrich and Charlotte nodded enthusiastically and I smiled, pretending to understand while running a word recognition search in my brain. Came up empty. “Sorry,” I said, looking around at everybody anxiously. “Wie heißt ‘mutig’ auf Englisch?” Laughter. Friedrich said, “it means brave.”
* * *
Here’s one way to break the ice: blow your nose into a tissue and then toss it into the neighbor’s rolled-up rug.
On my first day, Charlotte and I walked to the grocery store to buy ingredients for breakfast. On my way out the door, I blew my nose and tossed the dirty tissue into the garbage can in the hallway. Charlotte's wide eyes, raised eyebrows, and "um..." made me do a double-take and realize: That is not a garbage can. That is the neighbor's rug, which is rolled up and standing on its side just outside their door. From the corner of my eye, it looked an awful lot like a garbage can. Horrified, I scrambled over and stuck my head and arm into the rug, on a mission to retrieve the tissue. The two of us didn't stop giggling for five minutes. Somehow that made it a lot easier to chat.
We went to Charlotte’s favorite bakery to buy bread, and then to the grocery store to buy shrimp, meat, cheese, and fish spread. I quickly learned to stop pointing at things and asking “was ist das?” because that inevitably led to another item being added to the shopping cart. Charlotte was delighted, I think because it’s refreshing to see your daily routine through the eyes of a newcomer. I was particularly fascinated by the sliced meat section; I had never seen so many variations of what I would call salami and am not sure I ever will again.
We brought enough food home to feed a hungry family of six. I waited for Charlotte to start eating so that I could mimic how she cut her bread and layered meat and cheese (the answer: begin with butter!) She offered me something called Philadelphia and I was totally mystified (they have something called Philadelphia in Germany? Why?) until she pulled out a very familiar-looking box. I laughed and said that "auf Englisch, man sagt 'Cream Cheese.'" While we chatted in German at the breakfast table, I thought back to dinner in Heidelberg, when Charlotte was very quiet and directed all comments through her husband. This is what learning a new language is for: suddenly a whole new set of people become accessible.
* * *
My spot on the L-shaped sofa in the Lichtner's living room is by the door, facing the window. Charlotte nestles in the corner and Friedrich takes the other arm of the L.
We convene there in the evenings, eating Zimtsterne and chocolate, drinking peppermint tea. One night we watched a weird German game show called Schlag den Raab and another night we watched world heavyweight boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko from Ukraine knock out competitor Pulev from Belarus. Pulev fell backwards and Friedrich yelled "VORBEI!" while Charlotte and I gasped.
We spent my last afternoon in Hamburg hanging out there in the living room, hiding from the rain. I felt completely at-home, and had a little panic attack when I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that these four days were a small blip in my year in Germany, that up next are six years in graduate school, and that this year in Germany will one day also be a blip.
For comfort, I thought about the stalagmite.
That morning, we had gone to the Galerie der Gegenwart (literally: gallery of the present age, or Museum of Modern Art). All of us agreed that our favorite exhibit was the Tropfsteinmaschine, Dripstone Machine. The dates on the sign next to the exhibit are: 1996-2496. Here's the idea: rainwater is collected from a gutter on the roof of the building, and absorbs carbon dioxide and calcium carbonate on its way to the exhibit. "Over a period of 500 years," the placard reads, "it will be possible to observe the formation of a stalagmite in real time. The machine will then be turned off, and at the end of this complex process the stalagmite will be no more than five centimeters high, providing a marked contrast to the multitude of events that otherwise take place in the space of 500 years."
I jumped up from the couch and asked whether anybody wanted peppermint tea. Friedrich raised his eyebrows and asked if I needed help; I insisted that I knew where everything was. I boiled the water, took the little magnetic timer off the fridge and set it for six minutes, plopped the tea bags in. I delivered everybody his cup of tea, and started the timer. Gute gemacht! Friedrich said, while Charlotte stealthily slipped into the kitchen and retrieved the little white ceramic bowl from the cabinet, which they always use to put their tea bags in. Rats! I'd forgotten that. Friedrich read the newspaper while I curled up with Christa Wolf's The Quest for Christa T. I could hear clattering in the kitchen while Charlotte began preparing lunch, and crinkling as Friedrich unwrapped a piece of chocolate. I could also hear the rain. Despite all the running-around I did in the city - seeing the tourist-y sights, accompanying Charlotte on various shopping errands, attending a solar energy workshop and two full days of Fulbright events - my whole experience in Hamburg is that still-frame in the living room.
(Note: I invented all the names in this story, for privacy.)
This piece of colloquialism breccia has personality
Two weeks ago, I was sitting in the Mensa (cafeteria) with my German friend Patrick when he asked me what the expression "fair enough" means.
I was stumped*. And I was embarrassed about being stumped, because I say and hear "fair enough" all the time. I had just never paused to actually think about what it meant, or in which contexts I would or would not use it. After I had stared at the wall behind his head for a full thirty seconds, imagining various scenarios in which I would or would not say "fair enough," I said that I personally use it to mean "I get the logic behind what you are saying, and accept that your point of view is valid for you, even if I personally do not choose to see it that way." But, I added, it would depend on the person and the tone. I know people who use it as an appeased "ah, yeah, ok, I didn't agree before but now I do" but I also know people who use it as a dismissive "ugh, you're totally wrong, but I don't feel like arguing about this anymore." What's that? You use "fair enough" in your own distinct way that's different from mine? Fair enough.
*While we're talking about weird colloquialisms, can we take a moment to appreciate what a weird word "stumped" is? I have a mental image of getting asked a tricky question and promptly turning into a tree stump.
Colloquialisms are subtle and so, so tricky. In English, "really?" could mean "you just did something awful" or "wow, that's amazing!" Similarly, "right!" could mean "I don't believe you at all" or "I completely agree." As if that weren't bad enough, some people are fond of saying "NO" or "GET OUTTA HERE," not to mean "I REJECT WHAT YOU ARE SAYING" or "LEAVE THE PREMISES," but to mean "wow, that's really surprising!" And let's not forget that "I'm not sure about that" could mean "I'm absolutely sure about the fact that you are wrong."
Talk about a nightmare for English language learners. And in my opinion, you have to experience these subtle colloquialisms to really get, intuitively, what they mean. Much better to have somebody - who is clearly angry - say "really? REALLY?" than to have a textbook inform you that "in a hypothetical situation in which you have done something that has made somebody else angry, he or she might say 'really?', which is not an expression of disbelief but rather short for 'did you really just do that? It was such a bad thing to do that it is hard for me to believe that you really did it.'"
Of course, every language is rich with its own subtle little colloquialisms, that native speakers use with each other without a second thought, but which newcomers find baffling. One could argue that this is a higher-order skill, and that one should first concentrate on getting a solid handling of vocabulary and grammar. But I would argue that if you're living in a foreign country, wrapping your head around colloquialisms and assembling your own set should be a priority. I've only been learning German for eleven weeks, and goodness knows that there are many, many verbs I don't know the meaning of, let alone know how to conjugate into past tense. But even so, since getting to Heidelberg five weeks ago, I've made colloquialisms one of my highest linguistic priorities and have been richly socially rewarded.
One of the challenges in speaking a foreign language is imbuing it with your personality. It's difficult to sound like a person and not a walking Google Translate. Last week, my friend texted me saying that a plan to watch a movie sounded "ganz geil." Google Translate says that ganz geil means "very horny." Fortunately, I wasn't misled by Google Translate into being shocked and appalled, because I've hung out with enough young German people to know that ganz geil is slang (albeit slang you wouldn't use with your grandmother or your boss) for "super great" or "very awesome."
I learn colloquialisms from my friends. I bug them to teach me interjections for surprise, shock, anger, frustration, sorrow, sympathy, excitement. I used to formulate my questions as "how do you say ___ in German?" (for example, wie heisst "dang, I'm really sorry to hear that" auf Deutsch?) but found that the response was usually puzzlement. Instead, I've found that it works much better to formulate the question as a situation. For example, I might say instead: "Imagine that your flatmate comes home late in the evening, complaining about how awful the traffic was. What would you say?" And all that said, it works best to just...live. When I experience situations with my German friends, I see and hear how they respond. Another helpful trick is texting and e-mailing; collecting colloquialisms that way has the added bonus that I actually have them written down, so I can study them later. Last week I went to a jazz concert with a friend, and he texted to say "gut, bin gleich da" which means "great, be there soon." Good to know.
A weird consequence of this learning-through-living is that I can attribute every single one of the colloquialisms I use to an individual. I've only spent a substantial amount of time with 5-6 different native German speakers. These speakers use colloquialisms in their own way, just like English speakers use "fair enough" in their own way. So, in a sense, I'm becoming an amalgamation of the Germans who I spend the most time with. I'm taking bits of slang and colloquialism, pieces of personality, from each of my friends. I'm a walking chunk of linguistic and cultural breccia.
The reward for all these efforts is that when I interact with others, I feel like I'm expressing my personality. Sure, maybe I'm a person with limited grammatical skills who often has to ask "sorry, could you repeat that slowly?" or even "sorry, could you repeat that in English?" but when I finally do understand, I can respond with "WHAT? NO WAY!" instead of "That is surprising." My friends know of my efforts to speak colloquially, and often say "actually, if you want to be cool, you can say it this way: [colloquialism I would have never thought of]."
Sometimes I toss in an interjection in a totally inappropriate context. It can be very embarrassing, but the worst thing that happens is that everybody laughs. I laugh too, reach inside, and adjust the tuning knobs on my colloquialism - and my personality.
Three days after I moved to Heidelberg, I found myself bent over in a forest, using a muddy stick to inspect the underside of a mushroom.
In the car that morning, Eric had explained that we were looking for spongy rather than lined underbellies. He grew up in the German countryside and goes mushroom picking every year, so the rest of us relied on him to prevent us from poisoning ourselves.
I was having no luck. Kein Glück. I straightened up, squinted, and felt rainwater trickle out from the creases down my cheeks. We had been hiking around for an hour, my pants were splattered with mud, rain was dripping from my sleeves onto the ground, and through the steady shhhh of rain hitting leaves I could hear my companions - Eric, Mathis, Marin, and Raphael - chatting away in German.
You should realize that when I moved to Heidelberg, I had studied German for six weeks. The class - a component of the Fulbright program - started with basic introductions (hallo, ich heiße Anna, ich komme aus den USA, ich studiere Astrophysik) and swiftly marched through half of a textbook. I emerged equipped to approach a German speaker and do the following: order at a café or restaurant, recite the names of various classroom items (ex. "pencil" and "eraser"), name European countries and European languages, describe various living situations (ex. "my farmhouse in the countryside is very large and not modern!"), make an appointment ("no, that time will not work. Do you have an opening on Friday at 8pm?") and ask for directions. In other words, I could do very well at a round of "common classroom items" pub trivia, but I did not feel linguistically prepared to socialize.
Yet here I was, in a forest, listening to rain and snippets of the German language.
Listening to my new friends talk, I began to recognize words and realized that today I would obtain a new set of vocabulary: Pilze suchen gehen for mushroom picking, Wald for forest, nass for wet. Mathis studies particle physics, so suddenly I knew the word Teilchenphysik, and learned that the suffix -chen is often used to describe something small (like -ette or -let in English). I was also learning how people talk; nay for "no", ja, das stimmt! for agreement. (Two weeks later, I learned that stimmen is actually the verb for "to tune," as in, tune an instrument. So, I guess, when something sounds right to you it sounds in-tune. Isn't that lovely?)
I thought, this is how you learn a language from scratch. I wished that the Marburg language course had taught me how to conjugate a regular verb in present and past tense, then locked me in a room for six weeks with a group of Germans under strict instructions not to speak a word of English.
Eric's the one who initially invited me to join the mushroom picking adventure. He's my Tandem partner. The idea behind the Tandem program is as follows: I want to learn German and am a native English speaker, Eric wants to learn English and is a native German speaker, so we can help each other.
The University of Heidelberg keeps a database of students in the program, and to find a buddy you sit in a room in one of the administration buildings and click through profiles. While I was clicking, I saw that Eric was a physicist, and felt a little gush of comfortable familiarity. So, I sent him an e-mail, and he immediately invited me to Pilze suchen gehen with him and his friends.
At the end of the afternoon in the forest, Eric and Mathis had been by far the most successful; I don't think any of the rest of us had found a single edible mushroom. We slid (literally, in my case) down the hill back to the car and drove back to the apartment complex where Marin, Raphael, and Mathis live. You can guess what Mathis lent me for the evening, since I now know that die Hose are "pants" and die Socken are "socks."
We cooked dinner together and my vocabulary expanded to include the cutlery I set on the table (die Gabel, das Messer, der Löffel) and the salad ingredients I chopped (der Paprika, die Karotte, die Gurke). I made salad dressing using Honig from Marin's great-uncle's farm.
I was a child again, taking delight in pointing to everything I touched and smelled and ate and asking "wie heißt DAS? und wie heißt DAS?" And I think that my new German friends took some satisfaction in seeing their world and their words through the eyes of someone learning names for the first time. I weighed each new word on my tongue; some, like die Petersilie for parsley, felt particularly weird.
At dinner, we discussed our respective customs. Eric was dumbfounded to hear that, among Americans, "we should get coffee sometime!" is often a polite formality rather than a sincere request. I felt guilty explaining it to him.
When it was time to go. I said danke schön für dein Gastfreundschaft and explained to Eric that the English phrase is "thank you for your hospitality," not "thank you for your hostility." Mathis looked up bus times for me, and we realized that one was coming in six minutes. I bolted out the door. While I was peering at a bus sign, I heard a shout: "OTHER SIDE!!!" and dashed across the street. I looked up; Mathis and Eric were looking out the window and waving. The bus came, I waved, and got on.
So, my year in Germany began with Gastfreundschaft. For a while, I felt embarrassed about that evening; I joined in their outing, ate their food and drank their beer. I received and received and couldn't think of how to pay them back. But then I remembered Marin's face while she talked about her High School year abroad in Minnesota. I had been astonished ("Minnesota?! Why?!") but yes, Marin had had a wonderful time in Minnesota, and when she talked about it her eyes lit up and she seemed to be looking at something that hovered above the dining room table and was visible only there to her. I think that she saw that experience in me as she very patiently helped me with my German. I wondered which Minnesota local invited a nervous Marin to dinner, made her feel welcome, made what could have been a lonely week into a grand adventure. Seeing Marin talk about Minnesota made me realize that this is a Pay It Forward thing, not a Pay It Back thing. Some day someone new will move to my neighborhood, and I will chatter on about Germany with a dreamy look in my eyes. They'll wonder what I'm seeing and will never guess that in my head I'm holding a muddy stick and folding a mushroom over.
