Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

It's a weird concept, at least to me, but I find myself saying things to other folk that I did not realize that I had thought and/or articulated that well.  I don't know much psychology but if I use the terms as descriptors I would have to say that my subconscious is a whole lot smarter than my conscious mind is. I've actually been able to count on this, but not in a magical way. I spend a lot of time reading things on impulse that at the time I don't understand why I'm interested in them, only to hear ideas formed from that reading coming out of my mouth. I put the time in; I'm just not in control of that ship the way that I like to pretend that I am. I've played with this idea a bit with the New York Times crossword puzzles. The Sunday puzzle is large but not the most difficult; the easiest is on Monday and grows in difficulty until the hardest one comes out on Saturday.  Particularly late in the week I will try the puzzle in the morning and get practicall...

I've got another one coming up, turning 61. Today is my son's birthday so we give him most of the attention since birthdays are a bit more just-another-day's for me than they are for him. When I arrived at Elon back in 1988 our monthly newsletter listed birthdays for the coming month. It just seemed to be a nice thing so I would always tack that page next to my computer and send emails to folk who knew me (a much smaller number then than the number of folk I knew) wishing them a happy birthday. It seemed a low-cost way to keep in touch and surprisingly folk seemed to appreciate it disproportionate to my effort. The newsletter moved online eventually and I started accumulating birthdays in my Google Calendar (through entering them in my Google Contacts) on a monthly basis. It became a nice way to start the day sending out 3-5 birthday wish emails and again folk seemed to appreciate it in a way that was out-of-proportion compared to the effort it took on my part. At some poin...

Once again I am proctoring and grading exams. I've gotten into a comfortable routine of monthly exams and weekly problems sets to give lots and lots of feedback to my students. I am regularly caught off-guard by two kinds of questions from students who are stressed and not thinking clearly. The first is any variation of "can you remind me how to do this", which, outside of the exam, I would be more than happy to do. The second is a variation of "am I on the right track" which is subtly different from the first but still asking for an unfair advantage over other students. There are many factors other than student ability affecting their exam grades; health, distractions from their personal life, misreading a couple of questions, etc. I do not like to base too much of a term grade on any individual exam, usually aiming for 10% for a monthly exam and 20% for a final exam.  To base too much on a final exam or a final and a midterm is lazy, inaccurate assessment and ...

I have more things on my to-do list then I have time in my life. I'm ambitious that way. I regularly play around with how I approach the tyrants of calendar and task list. I enjoy trying different ways of triaging. I enjoy algorithms and setting decision points for myself. This term I've fallen back on alternating between doing the thing that seems most urgent to me with doing at least some small thing with the oldest task. I've done it before and I'll probably go away from it in a few months and come back to it later. I've had many protocols for managing workload and there is no best way to do it. Different ways are pleasing in different ways.

Sadly Trump has been in my mediasphere most of my adult life. Before deciding to make money off the presidency he as a private citizen committed many resources to self-promotion and so his name was in the things I read, mentioned in the radio I listened to, etc. Most recently he prevailed upon a judge to delay legal proceedings about his theft of government documents. Many were classified; a classification of Top Secret is based on how much damage their removal from secure storage could cause. By definition his possession of them in a resort hotel with minimal security has caused our nation damage. We may never know who visited and managed to read them. We may never know how many intelligence assets were captured and killed because of his actions. In any event Trump seems yet again to be able to manipulate the legal system through delay. I remember how he was able to defraud contractors who worked for him in Atlantic City by making them take him to court to be paid and then delaying pr...

My university holds classes on Labor Day. I used to raise a fuss---quietly ignoring Labor Day despite it being a federal holiday was a passive denigration---but backed away when others took up the torch. COVID took away the momentum and we are back to quietly ignoring the date. Now that I am faculty ombudsperson I try not to raise this kind of fuss to avoid alienating potential visitors.  I think a good deal of my support of unions comes, childishly enough, from really disliking the people that oppose them. They tend to be rich, greedy, and without compassion for the folk that work for them, quite willing to use the levers of power to suppress them legally and in the media. It's hard not to root for a movement with those kinds of challenges. I've never been a member of a union and I'm 60 so there's that. My father was proud of his work in his union, never hesitating about where his loyalties were, and I absorbed a good deal of that in trying to emulate him. Sadly, it...

In Jacksonville, Mississippi, a primarily African-American community, the citizens have no drinkable water. Their water-processing plants have broken down after years of neglect. Whatever local, state, and federal resources for upkeep managed not to be used for them.  It is rare these days to have a smoking gun about racism; folk (other than right-wing pundits) rarely write down or say in public that they will mistreat people for being of color. It is in comparison with others that we see the differential in treatment; how many predominantly white communities do without potable water. Present tense:  people need safe water to live let alone thrive. It sounds as if massive amounts of bottled water are being delivered but it is a drop in the bucket. More resources are needed; perhaps the powers that be could be persuaded to treat the city as if it were all-white. Future tense: a massive investment into bringing their water-processing plants up to standard is needed. Again the po...