Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

As soon as a writer refers to "The Left" or "The Right" as a group of people who all believe the same things and act the same way I know that they are writing lies and move on to something else.

I was intrigued when I was taught the distinction in French class between savoir (to know something with your head) and connaitre (to know something with your heart). That's an oversimplification but I'm a simple person. I was thinking about this just the other day. The statistic varies from year to year but the National Sexual Violence Resource Center estimates that one out of five women experience sexual assault. I've known this in the sense of savoir for most of my adult life. As to connaitre, I met more women in my first year as faculty ombudsperson who identified themselves as past sexual assault victims than I had in my previous 57 years of life. It isn't something that was talked about much when I was growing up, and now I am very sensitive about that fact when around elderly relatives, particularly women (who live longer) who continue to downplay sexual assault as a problem, reflexively blaming any victim who actually does experience rape. For them the problem i...

The first day of classes is the least fun day to teach. Much of the time is spent on describing the logistics of the class, and the students aren't really prepared to do any math.  On the other hand in the Fall semester a lot of students have more energy and enthusiasm than they have in the Spring Semester at the beginning, and it's fun to be swept along by them.

Most things, good or bad, tend to cluster. Partly that's because of how probability works. It is just unlikely for things of note to be evenly spaced out. A separate reason is that when something bad happens we are more sensitized to other bad things that are happening in that time period; similarly we are more open to blessings once we start articulating them. Right now I am experiencing a cluster of cancellations. I have had meetings cancelled for three work days in a row. I try to be positive; cancellations are a gift of extra time, and the preparation is rarely a complete waste.

I'm re-reading this collection of essays (edited by Bowling and Hoffman) about the qualities of successful mediators. I read it some years ago before I became Faculty Ombudsperson, while I was chairing our university's Curriculum Committee. It was a position with some negative power in that I could (inadvertently) delay passage of curricular changes if I wasn't competent; on the positive side when there were conflicts between affected parties on campus I could on a good day help mediate them. Among the qualities that I aspired to based on the description in the book were active listening and a good sense of humor. It is amazing the power that active listening has on people; many go through their professional lives for long stretches without really, really being heard, partly because of their difficulty in articulating what is pent up inside them. If you can listen attentively, accumulating questions or hooks to come back to and follow up, you can watch someone's barrier...

I often credit the book Normal Accidents  by Charles Perrow as changing my career. I knew that I wanted to teach mathematics for a very long time, but this didn't have anything to do with math. It was a book about the properties of systems that caused them to malfunction. It took a while to assimilate because this wasn't what I was trained in, but once I started looking at the role of systems in day-to-day occurrences instead of treating every event as a local one it opened my eyes to how to effect change that is much more long-lasting. I have spent most of my career in trying to effect change, whether it be in my department, in my university's management, its curricular reform, or even my professional society. I'm not sure if something else wouldn't have come along and triggered that response in me if I hadn't read Perrow's book but it is a bend in my career that is easy to identify.

For personal and professional reasons I've been on the road living out of a suitcase (actually some nice hotel rooms) most of the past month. Now I'm back with a long to-do list and a couple of weeks before classes start. And yet:  I seem to be firing on all burners. Being away from my job has left me with energy to do it as well as a lot of thought about how to approach it.   I would not call the past month a vacation; caring for ailing relatives, a training course, and a math conference. Sleep has been inconsistent, I've had minimal control over my diet and exercise. And yet, I do feel fired up. I'm 60 and I still really enjoy my job, more than ever.