Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

I've always been a reader. My first genre that I remember liking as a genre was biographies. I like learning about how different people led their lives as I tried to make sense of my own life. I gave a little more thought about that going to some family funerals when I was young but mostly I tried very hard to be respectful to the grown-ups around me who were grieving.  At some point once I left home I started going to more funerals. During the start of my teaching career I went many times a year to funerals for students (whether I knew them or not), almost of all of whom died in drunk driving accidents. The eulogies all sounded the same in their attempts not to address the role that drinking and driving played in ending a life full of potential. Eventually our university started a van program that students were encouraged to call and the number of student funerals dropped a good deal. I was first department chair in the 1990's; I felt responsible for my department members and ...

I have started taking cello lessons as a registered (non-degree) student from a member of my university's Music Department. I have been a part of music ensembles for most of my life since the third grade, now over 55 years ago. I played clarinet for thirteen years, classical guitar for nine months, and have been in choral ensembles almost all of my life. For each of these activities I started as a simple beginner and am one again. I think aside from growing personally in music that I adore I like to think that it is useful to students in these ensembles to see me be a student though I am a teacher in other contexts. It is sad to think of all the adults who chose to stop learning, that they know enough. I have long loved the sound, the timbre of the cello, both in ensembles and as a solo instrument. Its range feels right for my vocal range as a bass singer, and so these notes are familiar to me. Something about the agility of the instrument in the lower range seems to imbue its musi...

One of the things I've learned, very slowly, over the decades is that my subconscious is much smarter than I am.  It's very unsettling, like something out of a science fiction story. I'm a lay person with respect to psychology, although 37 years of marriage to a psychologist may help a bit. I use the term "subconscious" to refer to the processing that my mind does that I am unaware of and only observe in retrospect. I've had to do a fair amount of public speaking in my time. It is one of the greatest tensions of my life, being painfully shy but seeking opportunities for service that include a significant component of public speaking.   I prepare a lot for things; my rule of thumb has always been that the more anxious I am about a future experience the more preparation I do for it. For public speaking the preparation involves some time thinking about what I want to say and revising the list to include only what I need to say.  Often my list of wants includes di...

I have been teaching for a while now. It was clear early on that aside from the personalities of individual students each class has its own distinctive set of behavior patterns collectively.  Most groups do although in all cases it takes experience and contemplation to discern them. With any group the temptation is to identify the group with the members of the group that are most vocal. They provide a good deal of data quickly about the group but it is by definition not representative . Ideally I get to work with a number of student outside of class and get to know them a bit even if they are quiet in class. That adds to the overall picture and helps it be better informed. The same process applies to larger groups, such as the subset of the faculty that attends our faculty meetings. If you don't talk to the non-speakers outside of the meetings you have a non-representative sample of their behavior if you just rely on what is said. And yet, it is not the speakers in faculty meetings...

Every now and then I feel a professionally responsibility to send an angry letter.  I try not to give in to anger casually, so ideally this is when other attempts to conjole and convince have failed badly enough over serious issues to cause me to doubt that the recipient and I share the same values. I often try to modify the behavior of others; I am a teacher so that's a given. It's harder when you try to do so with others who do not share your values---there's far less of a common ground. Almost always my angry letters have a nontrivial audience, including at least one other person beside the target but not a large enough audience to make the recipient(s) feel cornered. In my experience people behave differently in front of witnesses. I was taught long ago that it is not enough to be angry; you must be angry enough to make things better. This is nontrivial and requires an anger that is pure, as free as possible of ego and other distractions. It is draining, the times that ...

My university has always preceded the beginning of classes with a week of planning meetings as long as I've been here. That begins today for this academic year. Traditionally we have the awarding of medallions to retirees of distinction, followed by an address from each of several administrators. They have yet to finish on time in my presence (year #38 starting) followed by an abbreviated time for break-out sessions on different topics in different locations. This afternoon the College of Arts and Sciences along with the professional schools will meet to introduce new faculty and discuss priorities for the coming year. I have had different roles (department chair, chair of Academic Council, chair of the Curriculum Committee) that involved me leading meetings with various groups during the rest of the week. Now that I am Faculty Ombudsperson I have a lower profile; I will send a gentle reminder of that role to the faculty via email later in the week. There is a loss of the peace and...

I have been a member of the Mathematical Association of America for 48 years. They hold a national conference called MathFest every August; this year it was in Boston. There are still events going this afternoon but I have a dinner with my brother-in-law tonight and a 1:30 AM wake-up time for an early flight tomorrow so I'm resting/napping this afternoon a bit. In my youth I was overly burdened with nervous energy and thought little of all-nighters for work, seeing friends, etc. But now I am about to turn 65 and one seventh of the planet's occupants are sending me mailers about Medicare Supplemental insurance plans and things are different. So I've changed over the decades of attending these events.  Some of the changes make me more grateful for the conference and the ongoing work of the MAA throughout the year. When I was younger I focused more on mathematical talks and avoided a lot of organization-related sessions for fear of boredom. Now that I am older and have a bette...

MathFest is this week in Boston. I've done a lot of work getting ready for classes beforehand hoping not to be too frenetic when I return. I have wonderful memories of MathFest and the Joint Mathematics Meetings over the decades and so there is a confidence that the time will be well-spent being challenged in the company of friends. One of my university roommates went to MIT for grad school and so between visiting him in the previous millennium and my brother-in-law and his family in a suburb of Boston, I have confidence that I will enjoy Boston, especially outside of its 11 winter months. As always it is a bit hard to focus on the here and now as the logistics of travel (flight schedules, hotel booking, compensation paperwork for the trip) take residence in my mind. I don't really unclench even after all these years until I am unpacked in my hotel room and feel free to explore. I am not as ambulatory as I was when I started my career, both in terms of stamina and in having two...

There is a pretty good reason we frown on people with financial interests in government policy giving money to the people who decide that policy. Primarily because those decisions may not be made on the merits of the choices but because of self-interest, and secondarily because citizens will doubt the wisdom of those choices even if they (occasionally) turn out to be good even with the bribery. One of the disappointments of adulthood was realizing how much white-collar wrongdoing is legal. Many policy makers are elected and the primary mechanishm in my adult years has been legal, through campaign contributions. John McCain was a mix of good and not-so-good intentions; one of his issues was campaign finance reform. He once stated that nothing could ever improve in government without such reform, and he and Russ Feingold passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002 which made things better. It was often criticized by corrupt politicians for not fixing everything because since it mad...

I like building parsers.  For those of you unfamiliar with the word, a parser is a program that interprets an input string, validating that it is of the correct form and extracting data from it when it is.   When I ran my own website for my students, before my university started using professional content management systems, I regularly wrote small data files to describe the behavior of the website and used parsers to read them. Parsing techniques fascinate me. They all start with the notion of a grammar such as I was taught (in simple form) for the English language back in grade school. The language of acceptable input inevitably has structure and grammar seems to be an easy way to describe that structure. A sentence may be a simple noun verb  for example, and a grammar rule for this one kind of sentence would be of the form sentence -> noun verb . For any meaningful language there are many grammar rules (called productions) using nonterminals (names of structu...

Today is the 250'th anniversary of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. I do not know of any other national holiday celebrating the reading of a document prepared by a bunch of lawyers; I believe it is one of the many things that makes the US unique. What other day could we celebrate?  Washington fought a war of attrition against the British. Celebrating the conclusion of the Battle of Yorktown would perhaps lead to a discussion of how many years of battle led to it. The Treaty of Paris? More conclusive but, you know, French. In any event all of my life there have been many celebrations on the day but very very little discussion of what we celebrate. Fireworks, parades. Not much about the freedom from the parts of British rule that are explicitly listed in the Bill of Rights. Not that much about liberty most years, although my memory of the bicentennial fifty years ago seems to include a good deal of discussion of it throughout the year. But, we have Trump a...

Although I often fall short of my own standards I have led a fairly disciplined life. I've tried to keep my body in some kind of reasonable shape. I've acquired skills, studied several academic disciplines, yada yada yada. My leisure activities almost all involve some kind of self-improvement. People who know me sometimes comment that I plan ahead. I don't think that I do much planning. I try to anticipate outcomes that I can foresee and prepare for them, but one thing I've learned over the decades is how unlikely it is that a long-term plan will unfold the way I think it will. Rather I try to anticipate opportunities on my horizon and if I've had success at all it is a measure of my ability to see opportunities, quite often where others don't. For me that is the point of discipline; preparation, both mental and physical, to seize the opportunities that I've been blessed with. They rarely arrive with the skies parting and a dove flying down to the sound of t...

Some years ago, after reading a quote from the classical guitarist Christopher Parkening about being drawn to Christianity as a convert because of his experience with Bach's music, I found out that our university library had a boxed set (many boxes) of all of Bach's music. It took a couple of years but I went through that boxed set disk by disk. I knew of some of Bach's music beforehand; I am a huge fan of his Cello Suites and have many albums of Parkening playing transcriptions for the guitar. I knew going into it that I would not master that huge volume of music; how could I, even if I didn't already have a full life? But I was patient, and disciplined, and after a little more than two years of listening while working in my office I finished. Discipline is the word that appeals to me here; it was with intent from the beginning a spiritual discipline. I had a little familiarity with some of Bach's liturgical music, enjoying a live performance of his Weinachts Orato...

I'm unfazed by a lot of memorials; so many seem to be about remembering the person's name and some very brief reason for remembering them. Some, about famous people, assume you know why to remember the person (I'm looking at you Washington Monument) which seems to miss the point unless the point is a really huge phallic symbol. For me the peak memorial is the Lincoln Memorial, not because of the big seated statue but because of its proximity to inscriptions of the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural address, both classic statements of who we should be as a country. The words have meaning for me and have for most of my life. The inclusion of many more details in the museum underneath the memorial is icing on the cake; the words state a devotion to fundamental decency to all, and are truly inspiring. Others have felt so; Marian Anderson performed there after the Daughters of the American Revolution denied her a venue because of her skin color; MLK's "I Have a...

I am able to foresee the future pretty well about what's going to happen in my vicinity, going out about a half a second.  Further out than that it becomes a matter of subjective estimates of probabilities based on my life experiences. At a certain point in my life I found myself repelled by more and more pundits, for claiming that they knew what was about to happen or could read the minds of people they disagreed with. I just haven't encountered seers or telepaths in my life and assume if they existed they would find a better use for their talents than becoming opinion vendors. I do follow a few pundits; I mostly seek folk who provide context. I think of them more as journalists in that way but their job descriptions often downplay that identity. When folk talk of foreseeing the future they often refer to it in a way that feels disconnected, as if something will happen and nothing we do beforehand is relevant to that happening. Again, that just hasn't been my experience in...

All my life I have been familiar with the concept of a work ethic: a devotion to the successful completion of a set of tasks. My understanding of what that means has evolved based on my experiences but the notion of work ethic makes my life seem to me to be more of a vocation than a set of accidents that happen to me. It wasn't until I was in my thirties that a work colleague, Jim Drummond, introduced me to the notion of a leisure ethic. It clarified for me things I had felt for some time. Leisure, the part of life separate from our work, includes things that strengthen/weaken us, things that heighten/deaden our senses and perspectives, things that lead us to be more/less reflective, the list is endless. What is most important for a leisure ethic is the realization that along many different scales our leisure lifts us up (whatever that means) or helps us to sink (whatever that means). Exercise versus sitting still; seeking new ideas versus reinforcing old assumptions; viewed in the...

Recently a federal judge has pointed out that the Kennnedy Center for the Arts was created as a memorial to JFK, our slain president, and that by law it could not be used to honor any other individual. For most of my lifetime that seemed pretty straight-forward. But our petulant child-who-would-be-king was offended by a building that honored anyone but himself; fired the board governing the Kennedy Center and installed his own minions, who promptly renamed it putting his name in front. Artists performing there joined the chorus of complaints, bookings fell apart, and eventually our child molestor-in-chief ordered the thing closed for two years ("renovations") out of embarassment. John Thune and Mike Johnson, the Republican leaders of the Senate and House, refused to intervene for reasons that honorable people have trouble fathoming but seem to be consequences of their invertebrate nature. So: Joyce Beatty, a House democrat who had been on the fired board, brought suit in fede...

I've attended two commencements in the past eight days; the first was my son's and then yesterday my university had its commencement. University life, of which academics are a part, is a different phase then what preceded it (with some overlap in classes and other activities in secondary schooling but usually with family oversight) and what follows it. Afterward preparation takes a back seat to activity, and socializing required much more effort. When we make life transitions it important to note them and not pretend that they don't happen. It happens with relationships (some of which are long-term), it happens with changes of jobs, it happens with moving. We always hope that the transitions are for the better but there is never any certainty. So we celebrate the transition. Hopefully the celebration eases the transition, brings to the fore all the uncertainties and says that they matter less than the love and support present in your life from your various communities, fami...

Masters in Public Policy to be specific. 

It seems strange to me but I had more patience when I was young. I've heard that it goes the other way and I expected that.  In my youth it gave me an advantage in many discussions---many people who fervently felt things that seemed wrong to me often withered if I let them talk long enough.  But the world has shifted and now we are immersed in media and loud opinions that don't wither but just seem to go on and on and on. One of the differences between being an audience member and a participant in a discussion is the ability of the latter to ask follow-up questions. Loud opinions often fail the most basic standards of fact-checking such as the W's (who, what, where, when, why, how) and gently asking these words at the right moment often stops someone with hateful momentum if they can still hear them. But in the media none of the interrogators seem to ask these questions, permitting folk to talk around issues without ever actually discussing them. So much of discerning a mor...