That's some Sirius bandy

I've made it to two bandy games this season, both in Uppsala and featuring local team Sirius. Bandy, you might recall, is a fairly Scandinavian-specific sport, played outside, on a soccer-sized field covered in ice; the players wear skates and carry clubs that they use to smack around a soft-ball sized orange ball that's made of golf ball material. On the evening of 10 december 2008, in heavily falling snow, German student M. and I drove over to Studenternas IP, paid our 60SEK, and found a good place to stand just behind the fans of the away team, who had arrived in a bus, ready with their drums and banners. It was quite cold, but the glögg and lussekatte at halftime helped, and any sport that requires the halftime services of both a snowplow and a Zamboni must be good, right? Sirius won handily, beating the visitors from Örebro 7-1. An Örebro supporter (who was at least two sheets to the wind) turned to congratulate M. and me on our team's win. Geniality among the fans is another hallmark of the sport, something I appreciate.

Sirius did much better than expected in the regular season, finishing third in the league, and earning a play-off spot. On 18 mars 2009, we went to Sirius' semifinal game against league winners and last year's champions Edsbyn. Most bandy games are rather sparsely attended, and we should have gone much earlier to this one, which ended up having 8900 fans.The stadium organizers were clearly not ready for so many people, and had not opened up the north and south stands: the east and west ones were already packed, and we got rather pressed into a corner, while trying to find a place. So... the fans started getting into the stands anyway, crawling through rails or leaping over them, as dictated by youth and vigor, a near riot by Swedish standards.

But "a near riot by Swedish standards" is not, by any means, a riot in the usual sense. With all these people crowding in next to each other, no one was actually touching each other; no one pushed, no one rushed. And when they inevitably did bump into one another, it was okay: the bumper was too embarrassed to admit they had bumped, the bumpee, too embarrassed to admit they had been bumped into. In some places you might worry when two burly strangers collide and spill each other's beers, but here, the two immediately look away from each other. No words were spoken or exchanged (heaven forbid!) between strangers. (This shyness is so extreme that it leads me to wonder how on earth these people ever manage to reproduce, but that's a topic for another time perhaps.)

We ended up in the southern stands, in the extreme southwest corner of the field, a not so great vantage point from which to see what turned out to be the worst bandy game I have seen. Good thing we had thought to bring along a thermos of Irish coffee with which to pass the halftime; the respectable looking couple behind us were openly pouring whisky into a camping cup and sharing it. (It's a little more traditional to try to mask the alcohol in a thermos.) In the northeast corner, in a brilliant marketing ploy, someone had set up a giant hot tub, from which a number of lucky people watched quite intently. They had about as good a view as we did, and were a little warmer (it wasn't that cold, really), but the end result was the same: Sirius crashing out of the tournament with a 1-7 loss, in a mirror image of the game from december. Sic transit Sirius.

Oh, there was one advantage of being in the corner: we got to be on TV! That's Joe, in the yellow jacket to the left, and half of J!, to his left, in the white hat. Don't confuse Joe with the ball boy (who also in yellow but on the ice) or J! with the player taking the corner (who is also wearing a white hat, but is on the ice, has skates, and a club in his hands)...

Teaching Part 2

Many of you who may be reading this have been or are teachers yourselves, and the rest of you are acquianted with at least one teacher, so you know pretty well the highs and lows of this noble profession. Teaching university students in Sweden is much the same... but different. See the paragraph at the end of this post for more general observations about students overall (it turned into a little bit of a rant, thus its banishment to a footnote).

So when last I left you, K. and I had suddenly realized that we were about to shoulder a little more responsibility for students in Evolutionary Genomics than we thought. Back when I didn't think it would be so much work, I and "my" PhD student Z. volunteered to give a project to the students of another class, Applied Bioinformatics. Initially five people in two groups signed up for my project in EG ("Yes, we all know your project was the most popular," someone grumped at me when I mildly whined about it—that shut me up quick), which was later reduced to three after the course instructor came to his senses; meanwhile a group of three signed on from the AB class. The EG class would be two weeks of lab work, followed by some computer work; the AB class, all computer work.

To take the last one first, the AB class was totally new for me. They were all computer students, with little interest in biology per se. Therefore I have now had the experience of being a project leader, a "big idea" person with absolutey no clue about small details, like what on earth my students did for two weeks. It's all over and I still don't know what they did, exactly—did it take them the whole time? did it take them one afternoon?—all I know is that the programs they wrote seem to work. Oh, I can't run them, but Z. can, and that's good enough for me. Lake Project AB students passed with flying colors, having learned to not tell the client more than is absolutely necessary.

Meanwhile, the EG students turned out to have not quite so much lab experience as we had been led to believe; therefore, I felt I had to sit with them a little bit more, and we had some long days indeed. They were touchingly pleased when their clones worked, and then touching distressed when all their efforts to sequence those clones failed. I dug up some old data for them, and they rallied round their last-second revised project, and I even learned a thing or two about the potential of my own project from their presentation. Lake Project EG students passed with flying colors, having learned that research is sometimes a lot of work for very little result.

And what have I learned? I have learned that, if I must teach, I'd rather teach here than UM. And that it's not so bad to foist all the heavy lifting off onto PhD students (thanks to Z. for handling the AB students, and E. for showing them some of the lab stuff that I didn't know myself).

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Here's a quick recap of the relevant ways in which Swedish university is different than the American universities that I'm used to:

1. Neither parents nor students are paying for education.
2. "Grades" as such don't really exist.
3. Classes tend to be short and intense; group projects at the end seem ubiquitous.
4. Most students are a few years older than American undergraduates—many young people take a year or more off after high school to travel, or earn money, or (the men at least) serve their mandatory stint in the military.

What all these points add up to is that you have somewhat mature, quite relaxed students who are only taking a class because they want to, and who expect (and are expected) to spend all their time working on their projects. This is almost exactly the opposite of most students I've taught before, who have been twitchy, demanding, stressed out, whiny, and distrustful. In a word: pre-meds at UM.

I actually rather liked all these students, as people, and it was interesting to get to know some more Swedes. For instance, two of my male students had been done their military service with the Royal Guard, from which you can correctly infer that they are straight-backed and good looking enough to be stationed outside the palace in Stockholm in dress uniform; they figured that they are in thousands of pictures taken by tourists.

The March so far

I asked my officemate S. today whether there were any specific phrases or poems or songs in Swedish about the month of mars, because it seems to me that mars in Sweden is a time of change and upheaval, of good and bad, and there are no half measures. Till exampel: last year in mars we had the fire that destroyed the lab; I went to my first bandy match; I got sick and had to visit a doctor for the first time; we had to move at the end of the month. Some of what happened last year can be accounted for by acknowledging that it was the second month of living in a new place, but so far, the twists and turns and highs and lows of mars 2009 are on a par with the last one, and not just for me.

T. ex., in temporal order: The weather was quite cold and wintery, and it snowed a lot; I started teaching for the first time in years; I came by my office one morning to find a woman gazing into it, and when asked if she needed help, she replied that she was moving into it soon and wanted to see what the furniture was like; I tried out a radical new way of getting to work that I don't much like; the local bandy team made it to the country-wide semifinals then crashed out in a terrible game that we saw in person; the Swedish women's soccer team beat Germany for the first time in seven years (and then beat the US, to win the Algarve Cup); my abstract was accepted to a conference and my advisor was so pleased that she told me that I should try to go to another conference this summer too; all of my students' lab experiments failed; various acquaintances both here and in the US have had surprising news about their employment status; I found out that one of the immigrants in my Swedish class had his cousin shot to death in Stockholm last weekend; another classmate, brought to Sweden by a lover and since abandoned, is now broke and has nowhere to go; my cousin had her baby and we have a new first cousin once removed (welcome C.S.!); my students gave their presentations this morning, only to be told that they also had to turn in written reports, which nobody knew about, and there was a lot of last-minute scrambling; the clouds parted and the sun shone bright and clear all day.

The answer to the question that started this post is "No, there are no particular saying about this month; april is usually considered the month of great change and turbulent weather." So that leaves it to me to make my own translation: Mars började som ett lejon; jag vill att det sluta som ett lamm.

Lagom

It's exam week again here at old Uppsala U. Not so much for me, actually; my semester is a little strange, with two classes that have no exams and another two that last all semester instead of just one half, which leaves just two normal classes. Of the latter category, the class that ended last week also happened to have it's exam on last Wednesday, before classes for the period actually ended. Long story short, while I've still got plenty to do for the period, my exams are, thankfully, over for now.

For all that, I suspect that my sole exam this period was not my finest examinatory hour. I feel confident that I stand a decent chance of passing it, but I doubt I will pass with much distinction. Not that that seems to matter so much here. I think I've mentioned before the grading for exams (and classes) here, which runs: U, 3, 4, 5. I may not have mentioned what, exactly, the grades stand for, namely: failed, passed, passed with distinction, and finally passed with lots of distinction (translations may be somewhat approximate). Now, I naturally tend to think of these grades as being equivalent, respectively, to F, C, B, and A, and roughly speaking I think that's true, but the "Average" and somewhat disapproving nature of a C doesn't seem to quite mesh with the "Passed" quality of a 3. To illustrate, allow me to relate two anecdotes, both of which occurred in the week leading up to my exam:

Firstly, one afternoon a Swedish classmate and I were discussing the various classes we had taken at the same time over the last couple of periods, and as tends to happen in such conversations, we began commiserating about one class which had ended with a particularly challenging exam.

Now, I'm pretty pleased with my result on the exam in question, which perhaps colored my expectations as my classmate said, "I'm very proud of how I did on that exam. It took a 50 (out of 100) to pass, and I got a 51!" I must confess, I wasn't quite sure how to take this at first, but as the conversation progressed I could tell that he was quite serious. He had done almost exactly the minimum required to pass the exam, and he took this as an indication that he had learned exactly the right amount from the class.

The second anecdote is Jennifer's, and happened within a day or so of mine. She was having fika with her lab students one afternoon, and they were discussing their most recent exam period when it came up that one of her students was rather cross about the exam in one of his classes. Had it been too difficult, perhaps? No, it turned out the problem was that the poor fellow had gotten 38 points (out of 50 possible), when only 30 were needed to pass. "It means I spent more hours studying for the exam than I needed to, and I'll never get those back," he mused.

Swedes have a word for this, which doesn't have an exact analogue in English. They call it lagom, which roughly means "sufficient," but with an implication that sufficient is, in fact, just right. You don't want any less, but more would be a waste.

So, how'd I do on my exam last week? No guarantees, but I'm shooting for lagom.

Fika småpratar 1 (small talk from fika): Sauna

Joe and I have each been unusually busy of late, and so not only have we not had much time to write, but frankly we haven't been doing too many fascinating things. I will therefore take the opportunity to start what I think will be a series of shorter posts, covering the odd topics that tend to come up at fikas.

I may have mentioned before that we have a sauna in our work building; I still have not used it, nor has anyone that I know. "It's mostly those botanists who use it," I was told at fika a couple weeks ago. "Oh, by the way," post-doc K. said, "Did you know that there is a Sauna World Championship? There is. You can watch a video. I think they have had to drag people out, because they pass out before admitting defeat. These Finns are crazy," she said, shaking her head.

Vasaloppet 2009

"I fäders spår för framtids segrar"
—In the footsteps of our forefathers for the victories of tomorrow, motto of Vasaloppet

Vasaloppet was this morning, the 90km cross-country ski race commemorating the return of Gustav Vasa and his followers to the city of Mora (Joe wrote a summary of the history of it last year). We did our Patriotic Duty and got up early to watch the mass start, which is quite entertaining when the "mass" numbers thousands and thousands of people—it takes well more than ten minutes just for everyone to get past the starting line, and of course there are tangled poles, improperly fastened skis coming off, bags of discarded outerwear that must be navigated around, and so forth. (In the picture above left, the clothing is being shoveled into a front-end loader after the starting area cleared out.)

The serious competitors are seeded and placed in the front of the pack, so that they can focus on their race and not be distracted by the far more numerous skiers who are perhaps hoping merely to finish. TV reporters find most of the people willing to be interviewed at the back of the group, including a couple fellows dressed as faux Vikings, in furs and horned helmets (and, incongruously, bright red fanny packs); a guy who had to do the race wearing a Swiss hockey jersey because he lost a bet on a hockey game; a pensioner whose starting number was 19,082 and who was skiing this race for the 30th time (his best finish was 6,265th). Performance-enhancing chemicals, in the form of blueberry soup, are freely handed out along the course, and race officials estimate that thousands of liters of the stuff are consumed. This year we had some blueberry soup for breakfast, in a gesture of solidarity. I guess the soup works as a stimulant for athletes working hard in the cold; however, for this observer (ensconced on the couch under a blanket in a nice warm apartment), that cup of blueberry soup was a one-way ticket to nap-ville.

But I did manage to wake up in time to see the winners, who finished around three hours after starting. In the picture at left, the female winner is being greeted by a rosy-cheeked handsome smiling youth dressed in historical costume, who is about to hang a laurel wreath around her neck as she skies past. The finish line remains open for 12 hours past the start time, and as I write this, at 8 hours past, skiers are still streaming into the finishing gate in downtown Mora, each pumping a fist in the air in joy, or relief, or both...