Hello Everyone! 

In case you haven’t heard, on February 2nd, Punxsutawney Phil emerged from his burrow and saw his shadow, meaning that there will be six more weeks of winter. Whenever this time of year rolls around, I get a hankering to watch the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, about a cynical weatherman who finds himself reliving the same day over and over. I love movies that embrace the concept of reliving one particular moment of time repeatedly, iterating over and over to get a “perfect day”. 

As this is the newsletter post that kicks off the second year of What’s Up With Will, it is also the first with a repeated yearly holiday/pop culture event. And while the one-to-one nature of reliving a singular day is quite different from experiencing events year to year, it has me thinking about the repetitive nature of life. I can not turn back the clock, but maybe each day provides the opportunity to live it completely different than the year before, allowing us to embrace our own Groundhog Day-esque fantasies.

Anyway, with that out of the way, let’s find out What’s Up With Will…

As we are now in the spring semester, I am actively trying to figure out what to do over the summer as far as work is concerned. While I have started applying to roles that do not necessarily align with my long-term goals on the off-chance I can say I got to work for XYZ big company, I am really trying to get something that would make the most sense for my career path going forward. To get some footing, I tried talking to a career counselor at SFSU. The major takeaway is that the job market is rough, and the job market for education is even rougher. Essentially, I was told to focus more on roles with teaching experience, so getting my foot in the door as a GTA is a good thing, but a lot of the opportunities that I was shown focused on people who have already completed their master’s or are about to complete it.

In the class I taught, we focused on building community agreements, which are a set of principles to establish a respectful and productive classroom environment co-created by everyone. It is a practice that I have never seen done outside of SFSU, but I like it as a way to imagine how we collectively want this education space to be. Additionally, we also discussed tips and tricks to act and be more confident. 

While on the topic of teaching and confidence, the biggest lesson that I am trying to take away is to stop equating the level of classroom engagement with my aptitude as a professor. I noticed that my immediate response in my brain when no one tries to answer a question was that I am a bad professor, but the truth is that classroom engagement can be the result of many different things. After discussing this with my fellow GTAs, Rylee, and scouring the internet, it seems the best piece of advice I found was to embrace the silence, something that I am not the best at doing. I want the space to be filled with something, but research shows that increasing wait time was associated with the overall quality of student responses and decreased failures to respond (Rowe, 2003). It is just like the old saying goes, Silence is Golden.

In my methods class, we worked on systematically breaking down each step involved in research, a lot of which needs to be considered long before you start collecting data. It starts with asking yourself fundamental questions like what do you value (axiology), what is there out there to know (ontology), and what and how can we know about it (epistemology). Only once you figure out these overarching questions can you start to develop a research question to guide your methodology and methods (which are two separate parts of the research process). We also talked about the importance of crafting a strong research question, and oftentimes multiple questions, drilling down to pinpoint the “why” or “how” to understand a lived experience of identity.

As it is a mixed research methods class, we briefly touched on observation as a method of research. What people say they do is not always what actually happens, and observational studies can help us understand what people do rather than just what they self-report. In order to practice our observational skills, we were assigned an observational study of a place of our choosing. Within this study, we were tasked with describing the physical space as well as the social roles that are found within that place.

I have been toying around with the idea of researching wine within the lens of communication studies, so for my observational field study, I went to a place that I had been to a while ago, Residual Sugar Wine Bar, and tried to apply a more observational approach to my experiences. Here are some of my notes:

Residual Sugar Wine Bar is a natural wine bar on Locust Street in Walnut Creek, just off Civic Drive. It has slightly tinted windows and a small blue sign with a “Best of the East Bay – 15 Years” sticker marks its reputation. The space includes a heated outdoor patio and a long, rectangular interior painted burgundy and lit with warm, candle-like lighting. A floor-to-ceiling wooden wine rack lines the right wall beside high-top tables, while the left side features brown sectional seating and an elongated bar displaying magnum bottles, glassware, and a TV playing ESPN. There is constant conversation among curated music tracks ranging from lo-fi rock to classic alternative rock, and then to lo-fi western rock, and then finally alt-pop. Additionally, you can hear the clink of glasses and the pop of sparkling wine.

Two primary roles structure the space: customers and wine educators. Dressed mostly in black, wine educators move briskly between bar and tables, checking in with guests, offering recommendations, and sometimes inviting groups to make a wish before opening a bottle of sparkling wine. Their interactions range from brief service exchanges to intentional, extended conversations where they ask questions and guide wine selections. Customers vary in dress and demeanor, from casually dressed individuals reading alone to formally dressed groups celebrating occasions (including birthdays and even one group with a dog). While customers remain in designated seating areas, wine educators have full access to the space, reinforcing subtle boundaries. Together, through collaborative conversations about taste and preference, they co-create the wine bar’s social and sensory experience.

There were also a few interesting pedagogical ideas we talked about throughout the week:

References:

Rowe, M. B. (2002a, November 30). Wait-time and rewards as instructional variables, their influence on language, logic, and fate control: Part one--wait-time. Journal of Research in Science Teaching. https://eric.ed.gov/?q=EJ773454&id=EJ773454

San Francisco was alive and well (or unwell with the amount of debauchery happening) this weekend, receiving a massive influx of approximately 1.3 million visitors due to the Super Bowl. Little did I know, though, that a few of these visitors would be some of my friends and family!

I got a call from my Cousin, Matt, telling me that he was going to be in town from Seattle to cheer on the Seahawks with a couple of friends, and asked if we were able to meet up. I was like, “Heck Yeah! Are you staying in SF or down more towards San Jose?”, to which he responded: “No, actually, I’m going to be staying in this small town a bit outside Oakland. I think it’s called Walnut Creek.” What are the odds????

Anyway, we ended up getting dinner at The Rooftop in downtown Walnut Creek together. As the name implies, it is a rooftop bar and restaurant, but as it is winter time, the space was all tented to keep in the heat. As we caught up with Matt, met all of his friends, and slung insults at the New England Patriots, I sipped on a Georgia Peach Mule (staying true to my Georgia roots) and ate a lovely pappardelle bolognese with freshly made pasta noodles. Not the most conventional pairing by far, but 1: each item was individually wonderful, and 2: I have never been the most conventional guy.

What I found hilarious was that Matt’s friends were shocked that we did not have a southern accent from living in Georgia (this has me wondering if that is everyone’s reaction when I tell people that out here in the Bay Area).

The next morning, we got a text from Hunter telling us that he was in town for the weekend, not for the Super Bowl, though, and asked to hang out.

Hunter and I ended up getting lunch at Hakashi Sushi in Walnut Creek for some tried and true California and spicy tuna rolls. I always see these crazy rolls at sushi restaurants, but at the end of the day, I could live off of California rolls, so I rarely get any of the fancy things. Hunter and I both love ginger, so we were low-key beefing over how much ginger we both got. Rylee met up with us later, as we walked around Walnut Creek together. We made a pitstop at Boba Studio, where I got a black sugar boba tea with cream cheese foam. It’s a lot of words, but I am a sucker for both tapioca boba and cold foam.

We also met up with Hunter, Ken, and Jessa in the city that night, and boy, was the city busy. Our first stop was Spec’s Twelve Adler Museum Cafe, a historic bar popping up around the Beat and counterculture movements of the 1960s, adorned with artifacts and heirlooms from around the world. According to the internet, it has ties to City Lights Books and the Beat Museum (a place that I visited a while back). That bar got too crowded, so we went to find another spot. Practically, every single bar was packed except for the one, Otherwise Brewing, the gluten-free brewery that became our second destination. It seems that people would rather be in a room with wall-to-wall people than drink gluten-free beer.

To wrap up our weekend, we visited Ken’s Super Bowl Pizza Watch Party, BYOT (bring your own toppings).

As you might have surmised already, I am not a Patriots Fan. It’s not to say that I even care that much, as pro football just is not my sport, but growing up, everyone was a bandwagon fan for the Patriots, so I always felt that I had to root against them. That, in addition to Super Bowl LI, where the Patriots came back from a 25-point lead to beat the Atlanta Falcons, and that I had relatives visit from Seattle, I could never be a Patriots fan. However, it just so happened that we ended up in a Patriots household to watch the game. It was a real pity party with the Seahawks winning 29-13.

The house, full of what appears to be former frat bros, quickly pivoted to betting on seemingly everything else. I heard some bets that an Allstate commercial would air, and a surprising amount for the money line on Carol G making an appearance at the Halftime show.

One of the main reasons I watch the Super Bowl is for the ads. Here is my favorite ad, with the extended cut being better than the 30 second snippet. I would love to hear which ad was your favorite?