Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

I'll be singing (along with dozens of others in the group) in a concert tomorrow. I've been in music ensembles almost non-stop since third grade, and so I think I've been in close to 100 concerts by now.  I enjoy the preparation, starting from scratch with most music and rehearsing until it is muscle memory with the tunes running through my mind unbidden. One of the joys of aging is that I know that things go well during concerts. I had so much insecurity when I was younger. Facing it head on has been good for me. I played some JV soccer when I was younger but was never really athletically coordinated. I never thought of sports in terms of teamwork; musical ensembles were already my template for working with others on different tasks that when done well coordinated into something beautiful. How could playing a game with a ball compare with that?

When I was much younger I read Garry Wills' Lead Time , a collection of articles he had written organized around the view he had of his growth as a journalist. One of the things that he touched on was the benefit of not commenting instantly but rather waiting long enough to be able to make more sense of what you are describing. More recently the NPR show/podcast On the Media  has been putting out some good, succinct handbooks to help listeners to be good consumers of news.  One of the ones that I have shared with my students from time to time is the  Breaking News Consumers Handbook . The first guideline:  In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong. There have been other influences on me over the years, encouraging me not to invest emotion and not to encourage others to invest emotion in what may be a premature interpretation of what is going on. This applies in many ways to my blogging. At any given point in time there are a number of things going on...

As a student and now as a teacher I have used math books regularly as part of my work. They serve different purposes, aim at different readerships, are used for different types of courses, and so on.  There is a long history of using examples in math books that reflect the culture of the authors and possibly what they think the mainstream audience is. Many of the probability and statistics books that I have read over the years were very heavily gendered, using male and female as the easiest example of two related populations. In more recent years I've noticed that statistics textbooks were more willing to use as examples whether or not there was enough evidence of bias to justify a lawsuit being successful.  Such lawsuits are a more common part of our culture, and the books reflect that. I don't think I've seen any math books that I would call radical or outside the mainstream. While the profession has diversified a good deal during my time in it (thank God) it does not oft...

I regularly have students who do not meet deadlines for assessments. Sometimes there's not much I can do---if they try to turn work in after the semester has ended for example (which has happened).  Most of the time it's my decision whether or not to offer extensions. There are two main factors in that decision and a relatively minor one as well. The first is fairness---a student who has more time for an assessment can have an advantage over the rest of the class and the grade measures different things for the late student and the class. This is not that big a deal in my experience for homework and projects but for exams and presentations it can seriously change a grade in a way that is biased.  Fairness works both ways---if the student has been ill and works with me on a schedule to catch back up then fairness requires that I give her/him more time. The second factor is whether or not the extension is encouraging students not to take deadlines seriously. This happens regularl...

Aside from the spoken and written word I use a lot of body language. My face is not naturally expressive and I compensate. In my classes where I am eager to hold my students' attention I will move around the classroom to imitate any motion that we are discussing; I constantly gesture with my fingers to indicate magnitude, small or large.  I've been doing it long enough that I take it for granted. My first recollection of doing this is a crystal memory. As a graduate student I was standing on a corner waiting for the light to change before crossing. Across the way I saw a car at the front of its lane with a turn signal on that would have led against one-way traffic. There were not many cars out and probably not much would have happened but such things can turn bad quickly and unexpectedly. The car's windows were up, preventing the driver from hearing me, so I stepped next to the one-way stop sign on my corner and pointed to it rigidly while facing the car. The turn signal we...

I have a vivid memory from my teenage years. I had some good grades in high school and the local American Legion chapter was giving me an award (I think about $100) for it. My mother and I went to one of their meetings to accept the check.  I was (and still am) shy so it was not easy for me to sit through; it was worse for the person leading the meeting cracking jokes that made white males feel smarter than other kinds of people. I wonder now if the jokes were less offensive or more than I remember. I remember after the ceremony wanting to return the check. Did I? I doubt that I had that much courage in my convictions. The entertainment at the meeting was something I had heard of but not seen; a guest lip-synced to a record. The recording was one by Andy Griffith, a routine that he had done that had been popular early in his career where he acted as if he was so rural that he did not understand the football game that he was attending ("them boys in the green uniforms, they seemed ...

Honor is a hard concept. It used be thrown around a lot more casually, now not so much except perhaps in school honor codes and in military society. I don't know that I have a good definition of honor. It permits lying such as when particularly good people hid Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust. It permits killing in self-defense and in the defense of others. Honor is distinct from a strict list of things not to do and is (as most things are) dependent on context. For me in my day-to-day life it comes up particularly in the context of power, namely how dangerous it is to give power to people without a sense of honor. This happens routinely; voters enjoy being lied to about easy solutions to long-term problems and we elect folk who lie not to save others but to gain power for themselves. This seems to be a clear-cut example of dishonor. In my very small part of the world, academia, I run across (rarely, thank God) administrators who have gotten their rank through some form of ...

I've been appointed to a second term as Faculty Ombudsperson.  I've had a few other roles on my campus where I've served a second term. There are some differences to approaching a responsibility that you've had before and some opportunities for reflection. When you are in the midst of doing a job it can be difficult to be active as opposed to reactive. Particularly when chairing a department or an active university committee there can be fires to put out seemingly daily. If you care about the thing you are doing then you want to put these fires out, i.e., find good solutions to emergency problems. Part of the crisis can be delegated---that is what it means to lead a group---but the leader is ultimately responsible and that has always weighed heavily on me. Approaching a second term affords the opportunity to plan for how to lead forward while still dealing with the day-to-day crises. This often involves setting up structures involving colleagues that can deal with the b...