Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

Today is the last day of 2022. Since I've spent most of my life on the academic calendar this means less to me than it may to other folk.  As an introvert I'm not really into partying as a rule, and much of the culture focuses on making this date into a party. As a lay person (and not a trained historian) I understand that historically there has long been an incentive to celebrate the turning point, a realization that the days have reached there shortest point in the Northern hemisphere and are starting to get longer again. With the institution of calendars that both took into account the cycle of going around the Sun and the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, there was always a mismatch, and these days at this particular time of year seemed to be off the books. I wonder how the Southern hemisphere views the holiday, historically. I'm not a farmer and the seasons of the crops have little direct influence on my life. We have a break in classes this time of year and I guess ...

One of the inspirations for my blogging is my friend Michael Covington's far-superior blog. His most recent entry as I write this is  https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2212/index.html#x221222 It articulated something that I've often thought of; that feeling I have that someone is rushing me to keep me from thinking something through clearly.  I am often rushed without malice because of the impatience of others but here I am thinking of when someone is trying to sell me something, and in particular, trying to convince me to support a political idea that goes against my values. It is fairly commonplace for me to read an opinion that contains ten whoppers in the lead paragraph. It is easy to spot when reading; Michael notes how often rhetoric is spoken rather than written in hope that folk won't think about what they are hearing. I was working in a hotel lobby last week with Fox Business News blaring on a nearby television set. It was stressful hearing a high d...

I brought some reading along for our holiday travels. I keep a different sleep/wake cycle from much of my family (apparently morning-person-genes are recessive) so I often have time to read.  I brought along a collection of noir novels from the fifties that I have read before and a small text on the mathematical properties of ordering in-and-of-itself, as applied across multiple topics in mathematics. I am rereading both because I get the same kind of pleasure from them as when I read them the first time. I don't have as much disposable time as I used to but I have watched in my youth a large number of films more than ten times. A well-made film has more to discover with each viewing. I have read Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, at least his volumes to date (please, DK, finish the series before you die, please) over ten times. It is a work so dense that each time I gain new understanding and yet acknowledge that I have barely begun to master it. Why? Because it i...

I often tell people that I love math, but math is big and I don't love all of it, certainly not in the same way. This past calendar year I taught two very different introductory courses in Abstract Algebra and Analysis. Both are foundational---they were categories on my oral comprehensive exams in graduate school---but as different as night and day in terms of the style in which the topics act. The first one focused on articulating structures that would be useful in different contexts; the latter identifying what the notion of closeness means in different contexts. Many topics in math have very different styles. I've taught a special topics course twice on Combinatorics which has such a very different way of approaching problems (articulate collections relevant to the context and count the size of the collections in different ways).  Multivariable Calculus for all of its techniques have some basic principles (run a curve through it, use the Chain Rule) that makes it easy to kee...

For at least a third of my life I have struggled with lack of sleep. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea in 2003. My wife thinks that my snoring (i.e asphyxiating and waking up) preceded that by many months.  I have been faithful with the main treatment, using a CPAP device to pump air into my lungs at night. And yet: even with the CPAP my sleep is troubled. I have back pain issues (a pinched nerve) that are exacerbated by lying down so there is a natural governor in terms of how long I sleep:  at some point the pain makes itself known. Early on I did not have coping strategies in place. For most of my life I had been able to rely upon my wits and memory to perform well without much preparation. That failed me more and more as my sleeplessness progressed. I suffered from severe depression then for my life as I had known it was coming to an end.  At some point I acknowledged the feelings and started identifying coping strategies to help me find joy in this new stage of life. ...

I wasn't very athletic in my youth, or any other part of my life actually. In any event I never collected baseball cards. This was long before there were other kinds of cards to collect, so not being into baseball cards meant I wasn't into trading cards. I had friends who were into it and that was cool. Our former president teased Wednesday that he was going to make a major announcement yesterday (Thursday). He had already announced his candidacy for the presidency, and it seemed not unreasonable to think that it might be related to that candidacy. To my knowledge he has no campaign manager or staff yet, which makes that announcement a bit weird. It turns out that the announcement was that he was selling pretty cheesy looking NFT's with his head photoshopped on tops of a child's idea of masculine figures (superhero, astronaut, etc.). They look bad and sell for $99 each. Since they are NFT's you don't actually get the image to hold in your hands, although he refe...

If the universe flipped left and right overnight, how would you know? Orientation is a matter of consistency; it is not as if one element of a mirror-image pairing of environments is ever canonical so much as everything within that element is consistent. What options do I take as canonical because they are in my environment and consistent?  How many of my moral precepts are contextual and which are absolute?

I have always enjoyed the rhythm of the academic year. Some parts of the work are repetitive, and so having the variations of monthly exams, the mania of the students and faculty trying to get work done before breaks, the meetings at the end of term where folk are trying to remember their names: I love it all. At the end of each semester though we go from highway speed to parking and it's rough on the transmission. The adrenal glands die. I and many others are tired but unable to sleep, still trying to process the rush of events. Bodies ache from academic work which is not the same as manual labor and yet we all just ache. In December, we along with many others celebrate the holiday by travels to be with family when I at least am at a nadir in terms of mental and physical energy. It is the calendar, it happens every year, I try to prepare ahead for it and then give myself a break when I make minor errors.

When I was in graduate school I noticed something about the undergraduates that I taught that caught me off-guard. The Mathematics building was across the street from the University Health Services building which had a walk-in clinic for students, etc. Before I arrived it had been know as DUH. (I'm not sure what the acronym was for, there are several possible choices.) When I asked the students what the building was, they all said DUH. When I asked them where the University Health Services building was, nobody knew. This was despite the sign being quite prominent in the front of the building. Students would see it every day on their way to class and not read it. I filed this behavior away as one of the many things I don't understand and didn't think about it much until lately. We are yet again having the wedge issue of civil rights for non-hetero couples being up for debate, turning one group of citizens against another group of citizens for political gain, as if one group ...

I have been fond of Noir as a genre for as long as I can remember.  I enjoyed watching The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep on television with my father when I was very young, so I guess it started with Humphrey Bogart and his appeal. I was always a reader so of course I turned to the novels that the movies were based on and read everything I could by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I branched out into other movies and authors. I think Double Indemnity has been one of my favorite movies for many decades now although I'm more fond of some of James Cain's other novels. People more articulate than I have tried to describe Noir as a genre, and as much as I've been immersed in it for decades it is actually hard for me to do so. Part of the appeal is the intricacy of the plotting; no good Noir is a straight line. Part of it lies in the moral transitions in both directions---giving in to temptation and seeking atonement---and what they reveal about character. Part of it is ...

I don't have many hobbies; I usually spend all my time not committed to family on work, because I love my job. One thing I have done since I first moved off-campus as a graduate student is cook for myself. I am a fussy eater with strong distastes. The other side of being fussy is that I have strong likes, and it is through cooking that I have found many flavors that I did not know that I liked. I began with an old Good Housekeeping cookbook given to me by my mother. I pretty soon realized that the salt, butter, cream, and sugar amounts were kind of off-the chart. It was a wonderful procedural guide but I found pretty quickly that I had to revise the recipes for myself, and began to keep a recipe file on 3 x 5 cards. Throughout graduate school I made a point of asking for specific cookbooks (that I had browsed in bookstores) for birthday and Christmas presents and pretty quickly built up a library. Some were general, some were more specialized on Chinese and vegetarian cuisines. I...

It is not clear to me that public discourse was less ugly in past years. I am white and affluent and those are powerful filters. I may be more aware of the vitriol that is present now because of technology, and hope that there is a constructive use to that knowledge as a free citizen in a democracy. I am more aware than ever of politicians (elected officials, candidates, pundits) advocating that we treat each other worse. One of the gifts of the spirit that I feel I have in the face of that advocacy is inertia. As my default position I'm not going to agree to treat other people worse. Others need to convince me why I should and they need to work hard. By disposition I am pushed away from agreement with advocates who are loud in either volume or intensity of language, for to reward that kind of behavior is to invite cacophony. I am pushed away from agreement with advocates who talk very fast, stringing together extreme and improbable claims in an attempt to keep me from examining an...

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...

Even though I have no personal connection the attack on Paul Pelosi this week has deeply upset me. There is the fact that an intruder in his home fractured his skull (and arm) with a hammer when he's in his 80's; that's a heavy road to come back on. The assailant (I don't want to name him; we should never give attention to the people who do horrible things beyond what is required to punish them to avoid copycats) was looking for Mr. Pelosi's spouse, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Years ago a small fringe of conservatives started demonizing Speaker Pelosi, sometimes to energize their base, sometimes to rake in campaign contributions. All people of good-will denounced it, pointing out that in our angry society it is a short path from reading about violence to inflicting it for disturbed folk. The Republican leadership never did, though, and it spread. Kevin McCarthy recently spoke about replacing Speaker Pelosi with the coming election with the weird phrasing ...

I decided when I was younger that hope was my preferred strategy. I noticed in others and myself that despair seemed to guarantee failure. Hope didn't come with a promise of success, but despair positively guaranteed that I would not achieve what I wanted to achieve. It's been decades since then; I am observant about such things and nothing that I have seen or experienced has made me reconsider that strategy.

I am in my office during Break, undisturbed as I work and able to crank up my music without fear of disturbing others. I have a recording that I don't listen to very often because it is powerful and during much of my waking hours I want to be able to focus on others. The recording is of professionals performing a meditation on Saint John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul  by Ola Gjeilo. I was blessed in being able to sing this, in eight-part harmony, some years ago as an amateur during the Easter Season. It touches, in me and in others I have spoken to who have heard it, deep reserves of unworthiness, despair, hope, and grace.  It marked me for having been a part of the performance. I can not remember much of the tune, or the lyrics, or the actual experience of singing the piece. That is not how it marked me. I remember how it made me feel. I believe that is the mark of transcendent experiences, at least in my experience. The details fade but the intensity of feeling stays...

When I was in graduate school I read Lead Time by Garry Wills and it made a big impact on me. He spoke of the advantage that he had as a (at the time) magazine journalist to spend time on an article and delve deeply into context and impact in a way that does not occur with the daily (and now instantaneously) news reporting cycle. It resonated with essays that Calvin Trillin had written for the New Yorker (collected in Killings) on what happened after a killing and the impact on the community. This hit me hard over the weekend when I finally caught up with Caitlin Dickerson's piece for the Atlantic, We Need to Take Away Children, on the Trump administration's policy of separating, often permanently, children from would-be immigrants. I felt as if most of the big parts of the story had been public record but over a period of time; having them detailed factually in a chronology was infinitely painful to me as a parent. It is because of my winning the birth lottery that I was born ...

I turned 61 recently. As I am tentatively (health willing) planning to retire when I turn 70 I feel as if I am now officially in my last decade professionally. The only reason I bring this up is that I find myself referring more openly in conversation to "when I retire" and "before I retire". This came up several times yesterday in different contexts so whether or not I am aware of it consciously it is on my mind. Primarily with limited time (and it will fly by) I need to be selective about which opportunities I pursue in my career. The more senior I become the more challenges I am offered by colleagues and I can't take them all on. I have a lot of organizational strengths and some leadership ability and that seems to be something that I really don't want to waste. Fortunately my professional association has provided me with more; I had been envisioning a time when I would no longer be chairing a committee for them and then I was asked to chair a newly-forme...

Hurricane Ian has caused a good deal of devastation in Florida, a bit less in South Carolina, and a bit less in North Carolina. Our Family Weekend at Elon was greatly curtailed. Our home never lost power or had damage but there are trees down and a large number of folk without power in my ever-widening communities of neighborhood, city, county, state, etc. Weather events are distracting on top of everything else that they are. I try to get my head straight about Plan B's, ways to ensure that my loved ones are safe, how to communicate that I'm safe, etc. That really doesn't take long although it is adjusted as I learn more. It feels as if a large part of my mind keeps running through those details of planning with no new accomplishment and it is hard to think of other things.  I am blessed in that these moments are few. For many people weather events are more commonplace, and for even more folk non-weather events are common that have the same effect:  food insufficiency, fea...

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...