Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

For an introvert I seem to have sought out a number of opportunities to stand up in front of people and talk. This is one of the fundamental tensions in my life.  Because of my introversion I rarely speak in front of folk unless I am leading them, either formally or informally. Given a role to play I can sidestep my insecurities and do the job. So I've had more than a few leadership roles. One of the things that I have tried to do (not always succeeding) is to exercise authority through my actions and not my job title. If I am willing to put the time into consulting with folk about issues, building their input into my plans, and then asking them to implement those plans, most of the time folk are willing to buy into those plans.  It takes time, and so I am mindful that none of my interactions with others is intended to be the last, that every relationship is intended to be ongoing. This magnifies my trustworthiness and people tend to respond to that. I can't will people into a...

Most of what I know about non-mathematical technology comes from my students. A student showed me the first thumb drive I ever saw. Another student took pictures of a markerboard full of notes and now I do that when saving data from students on the board. Websites that I regularly use to increase my productivity are ones I learned from my students. It is right and just that teaching should flow back and forth between us, with our different life experiences. It is satisfying to have it go both ways. My children and the culture they grew up in have taught me a lot about gender and sexuality. I don't accept everything uncritically nor do I block what I am unused to. We talk about things and I learn. It is right and just that teaching should flow back and forth between us, with our different life experiences. It is satisfying to have it go both ways.

I'll be singing in an ensemble holiday concert in a little over a week. I've been in concerts since the third grade, not every year but most of the half century since then. The stress/anxiety/insecurity has faded a good deal over that time. I tend to focus on doing the best I can, minimizing errors, and most importantly recovering from errors.  I think about that a lot when I coach students on giving presentations, particularly ones of moderate or great length. Mistakes happen. How you handle them is what's important; despair can strike suddenly and you can fear that you can't recover. As with most things preparation can help. Practice sets a rhythm, and one of the things you can do with practice is recovering the beat, the rhythm of successful exposition when something goes awry. Coming to a full-stop is a temptation with no benefit whatsoever. Every now and then I and others have to face hostile audiences. I am grateful that for me that has been very rare. Facing folk...

One of the things that I have learned over the years is that in the face of tragedy most details of news reports are incorrect in the immediate aftermath; nonetheless it seems clear that a number of trans folk were shot and killed in Colorado Springs this weekend and that it was a hate crime. In my sheltered life I have always heard that trans folk face the most physically dangerous prejudice, that they are the most likely of folk to be the victims of hate crimes. Hate and fear of trans folk abound, encouraged by hatemongers in elected office and in the media. They will of course disavow any responsibility for this latest violence, because they are irresponsible to the core, like folk who drive blindfolded without "intending" to kill anyone. Trans folk were created in the image of God, and remain in the image of God. This is part of my core belief. May all the people of God support those grieving this latest tragedy (the present), support efforts to find and punish those resp...

I used to blog a bit on Facebook and Twitter. They're not really blog applications but I used them that way, practicing writing about things both silly and serious.  I withdrew from Facebook after the umpteenth time it was reported that they had lied about promoting controversial and false posts to drive more hits and to be paid by foreign sources to do so. On a personal level my mother suffers from dementia and she started believing more in her Facebook feed than reality; I just couldn't be a part of that system anymore. I had used Twitter more to practice my jokes to be honest. The comedian Steven Wright has been a big influence on me over the years; his gift has been to craft terse jokes such as "I wouldn't want everything; where would you put it?" and I wanted to use the word limit on Twitter to hone my ability to turn a phrase. When Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016 by encouraging people to hate people of color, etc. I lost a lot of my...

When I was a younger instructor I would assign work over Breaks such as Thanksgiving. Usually light and not due the day when the students returned but I didn't want them to go for too long without thinking about the class. I'm not young anymore and I'm much more aware of the cracks in my students, the broken places. COVID really drove this home. Encouraging the students to rest as much as possible on Breaks, at least from class, seems to help them to be more resilient when they return, maybe even to perform better in class as the semester ends and final exams approach. Part of me wonders if I'm just getting soft. There is some machismo at work among instructors on this topic, but of course it is a selfish machismo that passes the cost on to others.

Our son has been working in Colorado on an election campaign, and now that the election is over is driving back home with his luggage. It's a bit like the cycle when he was still at university, having him home sometimes and at other times talking to him over the internet.  Family is like that; over time the length of the gaps between seeing folk grows but still when we get back together we quickly recover the immediacy of the relationships even as they evolve along with us. Part of growing up is modifying the definition of family to include more folk, and at times to trim back the number. Families of choice will always be special in the way that adult affirmations of faith are more meaningful than infant baptisms, at least for the infant. Some folk look to replicate their birth families in their chosen families; others try to go in the opposite direction. I rarely know folk who find an angle between 0 and 180 degrees.

Because we can't predict with complete certainty what courses students will enroll in I will be changing two of the three courses that I had planned to teach for the rest of the academic year. One was a special topics course that I hadn't taught for many years, another was a course in my specialty that I teach many times. For different reasons there is sadness in saying goodbye to my initial course preparation; the courses that I will pick up to replace them are less interesting in terms of content and more challenging in terms of teaching---they will be for students who need them to graduate rather than for their careers. I've been teaching for over 33 years; this happens, pretty frequently. If I can't roll with the changes then I'm not capable of doing my job, which I am. Based on past experiences it will be less fun and that is what is foremost on my mind.

The election was Tuesday; many of the races have been decided and yet we still don't know which party will control the houses of Congress.  It's as if the electorate coordinated to keep the results as close to 50-50 as possible. So the Democratic pundits are happy it wasn't a Red Wave; the Republican pundits are still claiming that they will take over Congress. Ballots are still being tabulated. Very anticlimactic. Ever since Bush-Gore dragged on for months in 2000 I haven't really set my hearts on knowing the result the next day. There doesn't seem to be nearly as much talk about candidates refusing to accept the results; the turnout opposing new candidates running only on their refusal to accept the results did not go well.

There are three weeks left in our Fall semester. I have spent a good deal of time this past weekend pondering what to include and what to jettison from my overall semester lesson plan for my classes. This morning I met with a research student that I see weekly; we have two meetings left after today as I reminded him; that took him aback. I have goals for committees that I lead for this term; there is not much time left to bring that work to some form of conclusion before the holidays. One of the things that I like about academia is that there is a rhythm to it, peak periods and slack periods with a sense of direction. It is daunting to see retirement in less than a decade in the same light as the above. There are things about my career that I need to start jettisoning so that I can focus more on others. Deciding what I value not at the moment but in the long run is daunting, but I've always had a set of process goals that I've applied to the different and often unpredictable op...

I often think about a novel written years ago by the actor Hugh Laurie entitled The Gun Seller . It is many things at once, including well-written, suspenseful, funny; one of the key plot points (at least to me) had to do with prioritizing the Ten Commandments. Specifically, the protagonist interacts with a character who he doesn't get to know well but likes and respects to the degree that he does know him. This character is killed and a forgery arranged to make it seem as if he had been responsible for a purchase. The purchase is not huge in and of itself but is the linchpin in a series of events leading to a large number of people being killed if permitted to proceed unimpeded. The rest of the novel then follows the protagonist in his attempts to impede these events. The victim had been working to prevent such things from happening; putting the purchase in his name was an act of cruelty by the antagonist to his memory. The protagonist at a point of despair wonders if bearing fals...