Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

I have always enjoyed the rhythm of the academic year. The variety of the pace is in and of itself exciting to me. I've just finished some tasks that required lengthy preparation. There are many things yet on my to-do list and yet I feel freer to choose among them with less of a sense of urgency. This is one of the many lulls in the academic year, between the second and third exam in the Spring term. I have fewer students scheduling meetings with me, and the ones who do actually show up.  For me March always involves a conference (this year two) and the first part of April is busy with exams and projects. This year I also had a concert at the end of March and a Title IX hearing this week where I served as faculty advisor for the complainant. Ad hoc but there always seems to be something ad hoc in the first half of April every year. There are fewer meetings toward the end of the month; people being people most monthly meetings are scheduled in the first or second week. I am trying n...

I am scheduled to participate in a Zoom conference today of indeterminate length that has kept me from scheduling anything else at work.  It is important for others that I give my full attention to the proceedings. Zoom has facilitated my having more meetings than I would otherwise have done because of COVID certainly but also because of travel cost, etc. The pandemic got us used to virtual meetings (mostly on Zoom for me) and our thought of what a meeting is has evolved. It is worth noting how much information is cut off by not having meetings in a given room where posture and body language provide many clues as to what is going on that is unspoken. I have trouble identifying at the time who is not speaking (and hypothesizing why).  I am not very facile with the chat feature and find it hard to have side-conversations going on; I've been this way in live meetings and have never been able to process having a note handed to me. On the plus side I believe that I do speak much mo...

When I was young I was pretty good at improvisation; fortunately when I stopped being good at it I had some small failures and enough time to change course. Through most of my adult life I have been a planner. Sometimes folk who plan are presented as being comically inflexible as a cliche, but that is actually a sign of poor planning when you don't give yourself margins for dealing with the unexpected (which happens fairly predictably). I plan my courses well, with goals that I share with others combined with goals that make more sense to me individually. I adapt to the students in the class as best I can and adjust what the course does as best I can to meet their needs. I am teaching a course this term for the first time that is upper level and refers to theory underlying something that is used in an awful lot of technology. I had one plan for how to demonstrate that flavor of technology after covering the theory as I planned the course. Mid-semester I attended the International C...

As our political discourse has degraded in my lifetime I have struggled with the overwhelming of signal (facts that are not open to dispute) by noise (loud opinion unmoored by any verification). I am accountable in my profession at all times to offer signal, and I would be justly denigrated if I did otherwise. I feel the need to carry that over, imperfect though I am, to my personal life. This often requires that I (and others) withhold comment on issues before facts are known, and I painfully feel the rush of propaganda to fill the vacuum of legitimate commentary. Yesterday Donald Trump was indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney. Until the charges were unsealed there was nothing factual to discuss beyond the truth that Trump was being indicted that day.  Somehow the media by and large seemed to spend innumerable collective hours on that vacuum of information, offering well-dressed and well-paid seers prognosticating about the future and those thought-draining video recordings...