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...

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.

I found my self paraphrasing these to my daughter out of context and realized that they are not as well known as they should be. This version of the laws is copied from  here : According to Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are  three great virtues of a programmer ; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris Laziness : The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Impatience : The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hubris : The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.

I present as an older white male faculty member at my university.  Through my entire life folk have listened to my counsel and allowed me to exercise power by default aside from my qualifications and competencies because of this accident of birth; this has only increased with age. Because I am the beneficiary of a power imbalance long in the making I bear some responsibilities: I must encourage the younger, the non-white, the non-male to take the spotlight whenever possible. I have already had more than my share of the spotlight. When a risk needs to be taken in my community, after a due pause to see if anyone else wants to take it on, I should put my neck on the line rather than play it safe. I have more power and as Stan Lee wrote, with great power comes great responsibility. Or to quote William Sloane-Coffin, what's the point of having tenure if not to use it to fight for justice? Because silence in the face of bigotry leads to more bigotry, I must never be silent when I witness...

I have a short gap at home between travels. My wife and daughter did laundry right before leaving our family visit and so I didn't really unpack so much as repack upon our return. I don't feel much enthusiasm for any tasks requiring deep thought. In many ways my mind has already departed. I'm feeling ruthless with my to-do list, moving many tasks to the day after I return. New tasks keep arriving via email; I am performing triage. I frequently encounter folk who live their lives this way as a rule. I prefer having a firmer foundation from which to build toward my dreams. But, I have been working hard in the same trenches for a while. It will be good for me to immerse myself in my next two trips (one after another) and try to shake loose a bit, see what new ideas I bring back with me. No cooking this weekend.

Yeah, I read the Thomas Wolfe novel for a high school class. I think the title is all I retained. My wife and I are back in PA visiting my mother, siblings, and their families. Our daughter will be joining us. The building has been sold, so if home is the building I grew up in, then yeah, going home again would be trespassing. Long before the building was sold it was renovated multiple times so as to be nearly unrecognizable. Traces of my occupancy have been long gone. So if the surroundings were home, that ship sailed a while ago. No, of course home is the people. But I left home roughly four decades ago, so the people both are and aren't the people I grew up with. My mother suffers from memory loss and my siblings have found their destinies by and large since I left home. I love my birth family, but home is with my wife and my children and the folk I work with. Being with them is being at the home that I created since I left PA four decades ago.

I've been asked to serve as a Title IX advisor. For all kinds of reasons I can't discuss the details.  It is an ad hoc responsibility; I do not know the duration but it is not a permanent addition to my job description. A lot of what I do in my job is service that is not explicitly in my job description, but is done in consultation with folk who supervise me. I do not often get explicit additional compensation. There is an indeterminate connection to my merit pay raises. By virtue of my seniority I get approached to do some things; other times I see a niche and volunteer for it. What I do this year is mightily different from what I did decades ago. The job is fluid in a way that keeps it interesting. Some parts don't change; I have my courses that I'm good at teaching (not all of them, there's room for growth). I serve on departmental job searches as they occur as well as task forces. Some gigs are long; most of my service as chair of something or other averages aro...

Years ago I subbed for my yoga instructor when she was in the hospital. We went over goals for each class and I felt mostly prepared. What caught me off-guard happened during final relaxation, as folk were encouraged to go deep into meditation. Regularly a fraction of the class would begin weeping. My instructor confirmed that this happened frequently. Often meditation affords us the room to grieve pains too deep for us to deal with on the surface. As I have dealt with some tragedies over the years I have found this to be true of myself. The grief is not vanquished but it is less to be feared when confronted and acknowledged.

I noticed as a child that we spent a lot of time waving flags and having picnics on July 4th each year. There were parades sometimes, television specials, lots of talk about how special we as a nation were. The word "free" was used an awful lot. I also noticed that particularly at this time of year no one ever wanted to talk about what the word "free" meant. Asking about it made my elders uneasy and prompted rejoinders not to spoil the celebration. Now I'm one of the elders in my family, and I do spend a good deal of time discussing what the word free means. There are some basics:  if you are a slave you are not free. Our country started with slavery in place, with slaves counted as 3/5 of a person (in the Constitution before it was amended) for apportionment of Representatives, etc., but not for anything resembling citizenship.  So, the word "free" means something very different to folk descended from slaves and/or still bearing the burden of institut...

The fact that SCOTUS was planning to overturn Roe v. Wade was not a secret, even before the draft opinion was leaked. The supporters of Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanagh, and Barrett were quite open about wanting them to overturn Roe v. Wade even if the judges claimed during their confirmation hearings that they had open minds. I am against abortion, so let's get that out of the way quickly. But as with most things that I am against, there is nuance. I do believe that health considerations for the mother are relevant. I do believe that rape-induced pregnancies require a good deal of thought.  I believe that if we want a child not to be aborted we need to provide health-care, day-care, all of the support services that the affluent take for granted and the rest lack. There is nuance. Most importantly in this discussion, I do not believe that making abortion illegal stops abortion. The history of illegal abortions in this country prior to Roe v. Wade does not go away; if anything, med...

I find myself doing what I saw older folk do when I was younger, longing for a (mythical) time when ... Different people fill in the ellipsis differently; some folk hearken back to a time when white males were treated as more fully human and of higher citizenship than everyone else. The MAGA folk are pretty explicit about it. Some folk long for a simpler time, when more people died from poorer medical treatment. They don't phrase it that way, but yeah, my kids were both premature and I most emphatically do not long for a time when their early births would have led to their deaths. Me, I long for a (mythical) time when folk cared more about the truth than they do now with our great rushing flood of disinformation at our fingertips. As bad as things are now, I don't think there was ever a time where reason and reasoning ruled. Since I've spent my life in academia that's the mythical golden age I long for. What will my children long for?

The hearings of the January 6 Committee so far have exceeded my expectations, which were of a repeat of the second impeachment hearings. I think we have Kevin McCarthy to thank for this. Given an opportunity to have a bipartisan committee investigate the mob that attacked the Capitol building and killed five police officers that day (more died later) while bragging that they would kill elected officials that had displeased Trump (such as Pence and Pelosi), McCarthy submitted names such as Jim Jordan who had disrupted the impeachment hearings. To her credit, Pelosi said no to Jordan and Jim Banks because of their disruptive behavior, while accepting the rest of the names that McCarthy suggested. Again:  Jordan and Banks had publicly and on video interrupted witnesses and other representatives.  Rather than suggest alternatives McCarthy refused to allow Republican representatives to participate in a bipartisan committee.  Cheney and Kinziger have joined the resulting Select...

Recently I saw an excerpt from Sarah Polley's forthcoming memoir.  I know that she has had a good acting and directing career but I'm afraid my awareness of her work has been limited to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.  It is a film that I have enjoyed on many levels, watching it many times, and so it was disconcerting to read that she felt that the director, Terry Gilliam, had put her and the other actors at risk of physical harm during the filming. She states specifics and given these specifics I am inclined to believe her. I have loved The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and one of Gilliam's other works, Brazil (a wonderful updating of 1984 through a kaleidoscope). For a while that love extended to Gilliam, but, and it is an immovable but, Gilliam derogated the #MeToo movement consistently from its beginning. I have had to try to separate my love for the art from the artist. This is not the first time. I am a huge fan of Kevin Spacey's work but it is clear that he ...

Link to powerful Dowd piece:  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/opinion/trump-january-6.html

A number of years ago I was at a low point. I was searching how to work through some issues at work. My two children were not sleeping through the night and I was struggling to be fully awake. My diabetes had just been diagnosed and between my work, my hour commute, my commitment to be a good parent and co-parent, I found myself before dawn each day at the local YMCA trying to lower my blood sugar. I was very clear about one thing that day. The day before I had been tired and in pain; that morning I was tired and in pain; the rest of that day I would be tired and in pain; the next day I would be tired and in pain. That component of my life was ascendant. As with many folk at the gym I brought tunes with me to keep me moving. I had just bought Steely Dan's live album Alive in America (which was released in 1995 but I might not have gotten it right away) and was still learning how the live renditions went.  Reelin' In The Years came on, a tune I had learned by heart as a college ...

My fortieth college reunion is this coming weekend; I am not attending. I've struggled with mixed feelings about that huge part of my formative years spent at Yale. I went there as an undergraduate and stayed to get my doctorate in mathematics. The graduate schooling was more monomaniacal and easier for me to assimilate, but I turned 17 my first month as an undergraduate and the experiences were much harder to process. I grew up middle-class; my time at Yale was the first time that I felt poor. I knew that I wasn't, intellectually, that I never went hungry involuntarily. Still, I was surrounded by a student culture that treated the large disposable income that I lacked as the norm.  After my first year I found a circle of friends who were like me, and from there I felt the presence of a support net socially. This was the first time where I was challenged intellectually as the rule and not the exception. I had taken math classes at a local college while finishing high school, an...

Our Lieutenant Governor has spoken: women are not to lead.   https://www.wral.com/nc-s-lieutenant-governor-we-are-called-to-be-led-by-men-not-women/20318578/ Very sad and sadly not that unusual. Despite all of the biblical examples of women who have led (despite cultures that viewed them as property) a lot of weak men cite Christianity as a justification for their version of Affirmative Action:  all citizens are equal but men are more equal. Despite my (many) flaws I have been mentored by a large number of women in my career and this is one of those things that I feel pretty strong about:  women are blessed with leadership skills in commensurate proportion as men. So what can I do as a person of faith, as a citizen in a democracy (not a theocracy), as a father/husband/son/brother/uncle? 1) This shit needs to be laughed at more and ridiculed. Men who need affirmative action in a culture as misogynistic as ours are pathetic. 2) Folk that cherry-pick proof-texts from th...

When I was in high school I found myself feeling strongly about some issues. I grew up near a state mental hospital and I found myself trying to articulate the spectrum of helping folk with mental illness and taking away their sovereignty when they are a threat to themselves and others. This was long before I married a psychologist who works in a (different) state mental hospital but as I type this I realize that they are probably connected in some way. And that there is writing to learn about myself.  In high school I started journaling because trying to articulate non-trivial thoughts in my head wasn't successful, but writing them out helped me to be clearer to myself. As a parent, as a teacher, as a sometime leader, as a sometime ombudsperson, I feel the need to be grounded in what I believe. Not stagnant but neither adrift. Writing to learn about myself has an invaluable tool for me for self-discovery. It has also helped my writing in general and I am immensely grateful for tha...

By and large I am a proponent of free speech; when free speech is not permitted, bad things ensue. There is a correlation there if not a causality. For that reason I am nervous about protesters preventing folk from speaking. Protest is necessary because we live in a world of real evil, for which the status quo is not a defense. That protest does not by and large have to prevent folk from stating their piece; it can ensue, in an asynchronous dialogue. This past week, after the horror of the massacre of school children and teachers in Uvalde, TX, Governor Abbott and Senator Cruz appeared at a press conference. Both of them have taken large amounts of money from the NRA. Both have resisted every effort to stop these massacres from recurring. (Good people can differ on how to prevent them, but doing nothing is evil, pure and simple.) Beto O'Rourke, Governor Abbott's main rival in his reelection campaign, disrupted the press conference.  He called all on the stage out for not doing ...

It's kind of hard to put words together. It hurts so much that elementary school children and their teachers were killed in an act of violence that was totally preventable, and that evil politicians and lobbyists are already working to enable the next mass shooting.  

So many of our transitions are gradual. My hairline has taken years to recede to its current location. I became really good at dicing potatoes after decades of cooking.  Rarely is there a before and after; there is only progression along a timeline. Tomorrow is my university's Commencement, when we pay attention to something that does have a before and after. Before the Commencement, the participants are students at the university, and after they are no longer, at least not in the same degree programs. There is hooplah, speeches, fancy outfits. We do all we can to draw attention to the fact that for this one thing there is a before and after and we want to be able to remember it vividly. I attended Commencements of older students before my own and being in academia I have attended many others since then. I spend time looking at the faces of the students who are the focus of this rite of passage, since however jaded I may be it is new for them. Many students are indifferent to the c...

To be concise:  to permit the sale of weapons of mass slaughter such as was used in Buffalo a couple of days ago, the burden of proof should be on the seller to ensure that the purchaser does not want to kill people with it. The idea that the burden of proof goes the other way, that unless there is evidence that the purchaser will kill with the gun the seller bears no moral or legal responsibility is dangerously stupid.

It is unclear to me why we name buildings, cities, roads, etc. after people. The names persist long after any common knowledge of the people exists.  Inevitably the people that things are named after are flawed. All are human and have fallen short of the glory of God. If the flaws turn out to be egregious, things are sometimes renamed after other people and the process begins anew. Honoring people by perpetuating their names alone and not the qualities that made them worthy of honor seems to miss the point. Completely.

Most of my work for the semester is done. I have one more class to give a final exam to and grade.  My schedule that used to have class meetings every weekday is now free.  My task list has shrunk to one third of what it used to be. I'm going to hold off a bit more before starting summer things (class preparation for the Fall, reading on topics in my field, getting back to a paper I half-started) to try to really unclench. In yoga I was first introduced to the notion of counterpostures, to help maintain flexibility by stretching in ways opposed to the stretches you just did. For me it's important to have mental counterpostures as well. I have a good book on financial mathematics that overlaps with the probability that I teach every other year. I want to spend time on it, work on some exercises, do something different than what I taught this year. COVID permitting I will be going to my first national conference in years this summer. There is as much to do preparing for it as I ...

Our university, like many others, has a Reading Day between the end of classes and the beginning of final exams. It makes sense not to ask students to go straight from classes one day to cumulative final exams the next day. But: many of my colleagues no longer give final exams. Some classes do not naturally lend themselves to exams. I have taught our first-year general studies class a number of times and there is a limit to what can be assessed in that class on exams. Many classes use the time for single- or group-presentations. That leads to brinkmanship when someone is sick and sidelines a whole group, leading to incompletes for students who are ready to complete. Many faculty offer lightweight academic experiences (just get together for a shallow discussion) that are not assessment. I'm older than many of my colleagues, and I'm a bit less flexible about such things. I like the idea of a cumulative final exam as a way of trying to put the entire course in context. In particul...

I met with a student this morning who had to face the fact that she had not passed my class. This was obvious to me as their average for the semester over 15 assessments was below 20%. I had repeatedly asked her/him to meet me in office hours or by appointment to go over the content. They had managed to think that it would all work out without doing so. When working with someone in denial, I always second-guess myself; did I communicate enough, or fervently enough? I have been in denial at times in my life. Most folk have. How do you help someone in denial? Here are some thoughts: 1) There is no approach that will make either of you happy. If that is your metric, all choices are bad. 2) The urge is to run away when someone is not hearing what you are saying about reality. That doesn't solve things and has to be resisted. 3) Bad is bad but few things are as bad as they appear to be when adjusting to reality. Life really does go on. There are options. The problem seems more to be abo...

I have a senior who is failing a class with me that (s)he needs to graduate. Mine is not the only class that will keep her/him from graduating, but it still feels bad. What does it take to fail one of my classes?  Few students do so. I provide weekly feedback as to their progress in the class so a primary filter is the deadline for withdrawing from the class early enough to prevent the F from appearing on their transcript. I typically offer around twenty assignments per term, so failing one of my classes requires consistent failure across a large a number assessments.  It is possible to do poorly on all of my exams (which typically add up to 50% of the term grade) and still pass assuming that there is something on the exams worthy of partial credit. So I'm having a meeting (at the student's request) later this week with a student with a 12% overall average. It's not going to be a happy meeting, and there's nothing I can do in terms of preparation other than make sure I ...

I'll be singing (along with dozens of others in the group) in a concert tomorrow. I've been in music ensembles almost non-stop since third grade, and so I think I've been in close to 100 concerts by now.  I enjoy the preparation, starting from scratch with most music and rehearsing until it is muscle memory with the tunes running through my mind unbidden. One of the joys of aging is that I know that things go well during concerts. I had so much insecurity when I was younger. Facing it head on has been good for me. I played some JV soccer when I was younger but was never really athletically coordinated. I never thought of sports in terms of teamwork; musical ensembles were already my template for working with others on different tasks that when done well coordinated into something beautiful. How could playing a game with a ball compare with that?

When I was much younger I read Garry Wills' Lead Time , a collection of articles he had written organized around the view he had of his growth as a journalist. One of the things that he touched on was the benefit of not commenting instantly but rather waiting long enough to be able to make more sense of what you are describing. More recently the NPR show/podcast On the Media  has been putting out some good, succinct handbooks to help listeners to be good consumers of news.  One of the ones that I have shared with my students from time to time is the  Breaking News Consumers Handbook . The first guideline:  In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong. There have been other influences on me over the years, encouraging me not to invest emotion and not to encourage others to invest emotion in what may be a premature interpretation of what is going on. This applies in many ways to my blogging. At any given point in time there are a number of things going on...

As a student and now as a teacher I have used math books regularly as part of my work. They serve different purposes, aim at different readerships, are used for different types of courses, and so on.  There is a long history of using examples in math books that reflect the culture of the authors and possibly what they think the mainstream audience is. Many of the probability and statistics books that I have read over the years were very heavily gendered, using male and female as the easiest example of two related populations. In more recent years I've noticed that statistics textbooks were more willing to use as examples whether or not there was enough evidence of bias to justify a lawsuit being successful.  Such lawsuits are a more common part of our culture, and the books reflect that. I don't think I've seen any math books that I would call radical or outside the mainstream. While the profession has diversified a good deal during my time in it (thank God) it does not oft...

I regularly have students who do not meet deadlines for assessments. Sometimes there's not much I can do---if they try to turn work in after the semester has ended for example (which has happened).  Most of the time it's my decision whether or not to offer extensions. There are two main factors in that decision and a relatively minor one as well. The first is fairness---a student who has more time for an assessment can have an advantage over the rest of the class and the grade measures different things for the late student and the class. This is not that big a deal in my experience for homework and projects but for exams and presentations it can seriously change a grade in a way that is biased.  Fairness works both ways---if the student has been ill and works with me on a schedule to catch back up then fairness requires that I give her/him more time. The second factor is whether or not the extension is encouraging students not to take deadlines seriously. This happens regularl...

Aside from the spoken and written word I use a lot of body language. My face is not naturally expressive and I compensate. In my classes where I am eager to hold my students' attention I will move around the classroom to imitate any motion that we are discussing; I constantly gesture with my fingers to indicate magnitude, small or large.  I've been doing it long enough that I take it for granted. My first recollection of doing this is a crystal memory. As a graduate student I was standing on a corner waiting for the light to change before crossing. Across the way I saw a car at the front of its lane with a turn signal on that would have led against one-way traffic. There were not many cars out and probably not much would have happened but such things can turn bad quickly and unexpectedly. The car's windows were up, preventing the driver from hearing me, so I stepped next to the one-way stop sign on my corner and pointed to it rigidly while facing the car. The turn signal we...

I have a vivid memory from my teenage years. I had some good grades in high school and the local American Legion chapter was giving me an award (I think about $100) for it. My mother and I went to one of their meetings to accept the check.  I was (and still am) shy so it was not easy for me to sit through; it was worse for the person leading the meeting cracking jokes that made white males feel smarter than other kinds of people. I wonder now if the jokes were less offensive or more than I remember. I remember after the ceremony wanting to return the check. Did I? I doubt that I had that much courage in my convictions. The entertainment at the meeting was something I had heard of but not seen; a guest lip-synced to a record. The recording was one by Andy Griffith, a routine that he had done that had been popular early in his career where he acted as if he was so rural that he did not understand the football game that he was attending ("them boys in the green uniforms, they seemed ...

Honor is a hard concept. It used be thrown around a lot more casually, now not so much except perhaps in school honor codes and in military society. I don't know that I have a good definition of honor. It permits lying such as when particularly good people hid Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust. It permits killing in self-defense and in the defense of others. Honor is distinct from a strict list of things not to do and is (as most things are) dependent on context. For me in my day-to-day life it comes up particularly in the context of power, namely how dangerous it is to give power to people without a sense of honor. This happens routinely; voters enjoy being lied to about easy solutions to long-term problems and we elect folk who lie not to save others but to gain power for themselves. This seems to be a clear-cut example of dishonor. In my very small part of the world, academia, I run across (rarely, thank God) administrators who have gotten their rank through some form of ...

I've been appointed to a second term as Faculty Ombudsperson.  I've had a few other roles on my campus where I've served a second term. There are some differences to approaching a responsibility that you've had before and some opportunities for reflection. When you are in the midst of doing a job it can be difficult to be active as opposed to reactive. Particularly when chairing a department or an active university committee there can be fires to put out seemingly daily. If you care about the thing you are doing then you want to put these fires out, i.e., find good solutions to emergency problems. Part of the crisis can be delegated---that is what it means to lead a group---but the leader is ultimately responsible and that has always weighed heavily on me. Approaching a second term affords the opportunity to plan for how to lead forward while still dealing with the day-to-day crises. This often involves setting up structures involving colleagues that can deal with the b...

At some point as an adult I realized that when I went to a funeral, the mourners remembered that I was there. It was of meaning to them, no matter how limited the interaction was. I am a shy person by nature, but it seemed to me at that point that showing up for the important things (graduations, weddings, baptisms, funerals) was something that was worth my doing because the meaning that it had for others was way beyond the cost to me, and so I started committing to showing up. Sometimes logistics prevented me, but almost all of the time they didn't and I chose to show up. I've been to two funerals this month. Perhaps my age leads me to have more funerals than I used to but that's not obvious to me. In neither case did I know the decedent that well, which is pretty common. My relationship is usually with someone mourning, for whom I want to be present. I do remember when I was department chair many years ago going to funerals for the death of a department member's paren...

I enjoy programming and I find that the projects that I program directly support my mathematical interests. I first programmed seriously to generate examples for conjectures that I proved in my dissertation.  It's been 35 years and I still turn to programming to surpass what I can do with paper and pencil. For most of that time I have been influenced by a methodology known as Test-Driven Development. For ill-defined or non-obvious problems, it can be difficult to articulate what parts or all of a program should do. It becomes difficult to see a path forward, and you never really know if what you are doing is correct when correct itself is ill-defined. My understanding of TDD is that for parts and wholes of programs, I start my articulating what I want to achieve and then write a clear-cut test that tells me if I succeeded. Then and only then do I try to write code that will accomplish that goal. Goal first, supporting work second. Almost all of my programming has been with Object-O...

I don't handle vacations well. I enjoy working until I am tired, and then I enjoy relaxing. It is hard for me to go straight to the latter skipping the former. So I go into my office on school breaks and work. I don't have the adrenaline-panic of my usual schedule, so I work at what I think of as a vacation-pace. I go in later, I spend more time on breaks surfing the web between tasks, etc.

I think I first was a leader when I became department chair in 1994. Other positions (squad leader in marching band, etc.) had far less serious repercussions if I made mistakes. I felt good about my skills on one level, knew that the people I led wanted me to succeed, and that there were mentors available for me to learn from. On an emotional level I struggled with insecurities and I still do from time to time in different contexts. One thing I picked up from my father is that it is easier to do hard things once you rule out the alternatives as being unacceptable. I developed a mantra:  "My insecurities are a luxury that the folk who depend on me can't afford."  Insofar as I feel a sense of duty it is tied into that sentiment.

I have been programming in support of my work (research and teaching) for over four decades now. I started in APL, then move very briefly to C and then for a while in C++. A lot of the C++ concepts have stayed with me in terms of programming style, but I then moved to interpreted languages for a number of reasons, first to Perl and now to Python for decades. Python allows me to at least try to write elegant code and appeals to me aesthetically, although as time goes by I do tend to focus more and more on C++ concepts of interface design, hiding implementations, test-driven development and programming by contract. (Java came along later to these things and I never warmed to Java.) Now that my retirement is in sight (I'm about 80% of the way through my career) I've been trying to articulate my programming style. I want programs to be correct but also demonstrably correct; clarity and programming by contract are more and more at the forefront of my mind. For the last few years an ...

 Quite a good explanation of what too many have forgotten: http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2202/index.html#x220220

I serve as faculty ombudsperson at my university (Elon) but the title of this post refers to another ombudsperson, Jim Huegerich (for the town of Chapel Hill, NC) who passed away recently. His website gives a nicely detailed description of his work in that setting, that I wanted to share. I've been seeing testimonials since his passing to the warmth and compassion he brought to the job, definitely a role model for me. Why Ombuds? The Ombuds Office helps residents, visitors,  and Town employees navigate their experience of living and working in Chapel Hill. We do this by helping people tell their story in a way that it can be heard, and by identifying options, strategies and resources that help people thrive.  We want to hear from you if you have an idea that would be helpful to the Town, or if you have an issue or concern that you want to discuss.     Ombud’s Role The Ombuds will provide a safe place for anyone  to share their concerns and explore stra...

In political parties it is often hard to separate the politician from the message. Supporters tend to support people and not platforms. There is party identification certainly. It's flipped since the Republican party threw in with Trump. Today the House Republican members voted to censure the two of their members willing to sit on a committee investigating the riot that killed five policemen in their building. We've seen the video. It's amazing more people weren't killed or injured. They were censured for daring to question Trump's actions in directing a mob to overturn the election. No principles seem to be involved other than a thirst for power.  Will those involved look back later and wonder what led them to all this?  

In my personal and professional life I have to have difficult conversations from time to time; most people do.  Avoidance and denial often get in the way of seeing through the conversation to a good outcome, and yet in my better moments I have managed, following the example of various role models in my life. A long-since retired colleague, Jim Drummond, shared with me a checklist for such conversations many years ago. I lost it, of course, but have seen variations of it on the web. If you Google "Difficult Conversations Checklist" you can find various revisions.  Feel free to try  https://www.thefbcg.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/A-Difficult-Conversation-Checklist_Handout.pdf . One component of the checklist is a systematic approach to empathy:  what is the other person's narrative? Without some understanding of that, there is no good outcome that I can see. Sometimes it requires a series of conversations to achieve that; sometimes it's there immediately in an angry...

I have been reviewing how to do some programming in Mathematica. I use Mathematica, a mathematical computing environment, intensely in one of my Spring classes---Multivariable Calculus.  The class focuses on techniques from a more qualitative perspective---many real examples can't be done by hand and so we use the technology to extend what problems we can discuss. Very little of my knowledge of Mathematica programming is discussed explicitly in class. This is pretty common---my comfort level as well as my knowledge base in teaching relies on having a firm foundation that is rarely relevant in a direct fashion. I am reminded of working with an adjunct once who knew that (-1)(-1) = 1 but was a bit shaky on why. The why is a fact from abstract algebra that does not need to be discussed explicitly with students but can easily be used to motivate an explanation that helps them to build intuition.

Aside from two winter storms this past week I've been involved in conversations related to moving my mother from her house to an assisted-living facility near my siblings. Let's just say my attention has been elsewhere. More later.

We have had another fierce winter storm come through. There is a fatalism about it; it's the weather, what can you do?  They salt the roads before and after. People die in car crashes. Poor folk die from the cold. Was it as bad as the last one? Debate. And yet: fatalism is learned. Changing weather patterns grab more moisture and bring it across more stretches of land as the atmosphere has more energy pumped into it. This is what scientists have been talking about since the 1970's, the impact of our polluting the atmosphere. We are doing this. In theory we can stop. Any action that requires the cooperation of literally millions of people requires political leadership.  So, fatalism is learned. US politicians are too tied to the fossil fuel industry to turn our policies away in a meaningful fashion. Our politics are too corrupt for citizens to have an influence. Fatalism is learned with every media churn that tells us that there is nothing we can do.  Apathy and cynicism w...

My father passed away fifteen years ago this month. My mother's health has been declining and she will be moving out of the house that I was raised in.  My siblings, who still live nearby, are coordinating the sale (and are just in the beginning stages). I was born in 1961 and didn't get my own place (aside from a university dorm) until 1983, so this was my home for almost a third of my life. The memories are of the people I grew up with more so than the building itself. When I was small and agile it seemed big; now that I am old and clumsier it seems crowded to walk through without knocking something over. Since then I've had homes (only one of them a house) in New Haven, Brooklyn, Chapel Hill, Pittsburgh (a suburb called Turtle Creek), and Carrboro. The memories of the homes themselves fade more quickly than I expected that they would; it's always been the memories of the people who were part of my life that I have held on to. I keep expecting some twinge at the thoug...

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of losing candidate Donald Trump assembling a mob in Washington DC and directing it to attack Congress to stop the votes of his successor Joe Biden from being certified in hope that he could stay in power.  Most elected Republicans supported his actions before and/or after the fact. Insurrection Day, a new day to remember for citizens of the USA.

I am seeing retirement in the distance and want to gradually start to winnow out my office possessions.  The most obvious area to work on is my collection of math and computer science books. All of them were treasured at some point. Computer books related to specific applications and languages are easy to part with, given how quickly they become outdated. For the math books I try to maintain some diversity of content if only to have books to lend students, but that rules out books that I don't think are clear enough for undergraduates. The older I get, the more I feel that I belong to my possessions instead of the other way around. The fewer I have, the fewer masters I answer to.

At the end of the semester and during break it is difficult to establish work momentum. When having to triage it is more exciting to focus on the urgent at the expense of the long-term important tasks. It is natural not to want to miss opportunities, for that is what urgency is about---a sudden loss in value for a given task if deferred too long, but unfortunately it makes it easy to ignore the more important long-term planning and projects. So I have given myself a couple of days to try and winnow out easy tasks from my to-do list so that I can look at the things that are hard and make the difficult choices about what to focus on.

Another road trip come and gone. 425 miles to PA, 130 miles to NY, 529 miles back home to NC. Observations: 1) My wife's car handled well for its first road trip with full passengers and luggage. 2) No snow until we came home, much appreciated. 3) Light traffic on the way home on New Years Eve, again, much appreciated. Glad to see long-absent loved ones, but we are struggling to provide care for an elderly relative who has fallen several times and is refusing ongoing care. There are memory issues from head injuries from the falls, and the relative is stubborn about passively seeking death on a number of fronts. Sigh.

I would really like to change our country so that police do not regularly kill people of color, let alone mistreat them on a regular basis.  It felt as if we were on the cusp of some systemic changes with high-profile cases of police casually killing POC in front of cameras. If the movement to change this had consulted with their opponents such as the police unions and politicians that have built their careers on the rhetoric of "law and order", they could not have come up with a worse slogan than "Defund the Police". This has given their opponents such a gift in terms of rhetoric, in terms of fundraising, in terms of turning undecided voters against them. It focuses the attention on a means instead of an end, allowing dishonest people to run wild with their claims of anarchy.  It has failed miserably.

Road trips for me fall into two categories:  solo and with family.  Solo allows me to give free rein to my organizational instincts. I plan things, execute the plans, remember details, the whole thing. Whether strength or weakness depends on context; I am organized. With family it's a losing battle. I noted early on that the time it takes to exit a building with my family is proportional to the number of people. Folk tend to decide unilaterally what they're going to do. We haven't lost any kids yet but it has been a concern.

I serve as Faculty Ombudsperson at my university. The last couple of Fall semesters I had four cases each. This term I had ten cases. That's an increase; for context this past Spring I had five cases.   Much of my business has to do with interpersonal conflicts, so it is not surprising that the stress of the pandemic would exacerbate such conflicts. It's possible that during the previous two semesters the use of video software for teaching and other forms of interaction may have dampened the conflicts and/or the likelihood of folk approaching me. I am in the third year of a three-year term; it is also possible that folk are becoming more aware of my existence in this role.

A number of states, Kentucky in particular, have been devastated the past few days with tornados and other kinds of wind storms. As someone who has been spared that kind of devastation it's always been hard to understand the damage that moving air can cause. I think it was about 1976 or so that James Hansen from NASA started testifying regularly before Congress about the change in our climate caused by air pollution, specifically the byproducts of burning fossil fuels. The fossil fuel industry has been so entwined with our car culture in the US that many people, specifically politicians, were able to ignore the science and just maintain the status quo. Four decades later and we are reaping what we have sown, although that phrase isn't accurate. The world's population has reaped what the polluting nations have sown. The world I leave behind will be very different than the world I was born into.  One of the fundamental issues of climate change is that we are charging the atmo...

I upgrade software regularly. It has become easier to do so with each passing year. Early on I had to plan for it, reach out to repositories, etc. Nowadays the software will usually prompt me. Many folk don't like software updates, because the cost in convenience can be high. Even subtle changes in user interface can break many unarticulated means of working. The benefits are often hard to perceive:  new features that you didn't know that you wanted. The main reason that I regularly update is the benefit people don't like to think about:  increased security.  Everyday a large number of people spend their day trying to break into other people's computing technology. I saw this up and close when I hosted my own web server; I'd say the main reason I stopped at the end was the required vigilance as literally thousands of entities tried to break in each day. From my casual perusal of security blogs it seems as if the majority of break-ins occur because folk have not upda...

I assess others regularly. That is part of my job as a teacher.  It is an unambiguous form of communication (if done right) the summary of which (the term grade) students share on their transcript in search of further education and employment. That doesn't mean that I enjoy being assessed myself. I am fortunate that most of my supervisors in my life have been pleased with my work. Even when constructive it is hard for me to take criticism, written down in its finality. The hybrid is self-assessment. At my university I am asked to write an annual self-evaluation along with professional goals for the coming year.  Much of what I write about myself is good; I'm still going strong after decades at my job.  When things go poorly I feel more in control if I'm the one who is pointing them out.

This morning I finished grading the third and last of my final exams for the semester. This particular class was small and did well overall, so it was easy to take specific pleasure in their achievements. On some level submitting term grades brings closure to a class. An immediate exception is when a student challenges a grade; occasionally I enter a typographical error into the grade-book and have to correct it. I work hard to avoid it out of pride in my work so it doesn't happen too often. (Other challenges are unfounded and wither quickly; I offer many assessments during the term and do not suffer students to ask for changes to the grading schema after the fact.) Some classes naturally lead to other math classes. This doesn't happen much with the classes that mainly serve as general studies graduation requirements but past that I'll often have students take a second class with me. Sometimes that's a scheduling requirement (only one section, no way to avoid me) and so...

Long before he ran for president, Donald Trump was part of my media feed. He pays publicists to make this happen. I guess that's a business investment if it leads more people to give him money. I never really understood the urge to give your money to people that are wealthier than you are. One thing that was clear when we were younger is that he had ripped off a lot of folk in Atlantic City. He regularly refused to pay contractors for their casino work. With the casino bankruptcies he seems to have left his investors with all of the debts. My all public accounts (and there were many at the time) this was because he had a lot of lawyers who specialized in running out the clock. Anyone trying to sue Trump lost their shirt in legal fees without ever getting to a payoff. Now we are coming up on a year since Trump, having lost the presidential election, assembled a mob and directed it to attack Congress to stop the certification of Biden as his successor. So far, no consequences for any...

A student met with me today to go over his final exam. He had done well, one of the highest scores in the class, but wanted to see his mistakes and discuss them. At no point in the conversation did he try to get me to change his grade; rather he wished to know how his answer could have been correct if he had done it differently.  (A subtle thing---answers can be correct even if they don't follow the particular path in my solutions.)  It was a good conversation because he wanted to understand more, I guided him, and he did understand more. Sometimes I dwell on students when they are not at their best; I need to lift up those anecdotes when they are at their best.