Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

The SCOTUS decision today banning race-based admissions at Harvard and UNC will enforce class boundaries for years to come as affirmative action at other institutions cease. My university (Elon) does not admit individual students, it admits a class. It would diminish the learning experience if they all majored in math, were from Delaware, were Catholic, ... It is in the best interests of educating all students to admit a diverse class. Race-based preferences are part of that. What SCOTUS did not address were legacy admissions, which serve as affirmative action for the status quo, i.e. mostly white applicants. The hypocrisy is staggering.

A large part of our family visit to the Northeast this past week has been spent with loved ones who need care. This has been hard on them; they have been role models of caring for others and the shift from offering to needing assistance is hard on the ego. I have begun that transition and I already see in myself that struggle. Two things are limiting me currently. Firstly, my sleep disorder renders me very groggy at the end of the day. Unless I work hard (ingest caffeinated beverages, splash my face with cold water, etc.) I am not much help then. Secondly my prosthetic knee has been a godsend but it is not the knee I was born with; stairs will be a difficulty for me the rest of my life. It was shocking to me how little help I was moving my daughter into her second floor apartment. During the day I try offer my help freely and I'm still not too bad for carrying things on level terrain, such as grocery shopping and unloading, etc. But if God grants me a long life more and more will n...

By virtue of living 400-500 miles away from family my wife and I (and later our children) have been driving back and forth on Interstate 95 for decades. We have a process when it comes to packing the car, knowing which rest stops work well, where to expect bumper-to-bumper traffic. Separately I have been driving to regional conferences in the Southeast during my career, often a half day of driving. I am pretty comfortable on the highway with podcasts or, if I fear falling asleep, music that I enjoy singing along with. Travel is tiring but most good things are. I enjoy the sense of movement, seeing new types of scenery, etc. Sometimes things go wrong but we've been blessed that they've never gone too wrong.

We will be taking a road trip next week so we celebrated Father's Day a week early yesterday. My father has been gone since 2007. I miss him daily and try to emulate the many good qualities he showed me. One in particular has been on my mind as long as I've been old enough to perceive it. Because we led very different lives, because I had opportunities he lacked, we had very different life experiences. He did not understand much of academia or what I did for a living, but he was happy that what I did made me happy. I am a curious person and so when I don't understand something there is always a tension that I should with effort understand it better. My children's lives now are in many ways to me as mine was to my father; I don't understand many of their day-to-day events and opportunities, pressures and causes as well as I would like.  The one thing that I consciously strive for with them is to take joy in their joy and be open to the understanding of their joy if a...

I have always been a fan of memoir, although I am a bit fussy as to what I enjoy. My current favorites are Michael Palin's three volumes and those of Alec Guinness. Humility, actual true humility---accepting with open eyes one's strengths and weaknesses---is a-if-not-the major factor of what I look for. Truly great and interesting people have depth to them, have learned from their mistakes, have accepted and fought against all the best of things. Memoirs by politicians are the opposite---the need to be right in retrospect at all times feels so desperate and petty to me. I find articulation to be a form of meditation and therapy, clarifying for me who I am in terms of what I care about. With trusted friends good non-casual conversations bring that out in me, but as an introvert I often turn to journaling. Well-written memoirs serve as a template for me. I have been journaling since I went away to university. I finished high school a year early and felt only secure about my acade...

I try to be friendly and so my reflex around most holidays is to wish casual acquaintances a happy holiday. (I'm a bit more selective with religious holidays as appropriate.)  Some holidays don't work with happy; Memorial Day is one of them. We celebrate the sacrifice of members of our military who gave their life in uniform on Memorial Day, which certainly isn't something to be happy about. We do seek to acknowledge and encourage virtue. As much as I find war abhorrent I try to limit my criticism to those making decisions and not those who carry them out in an honorable fashion. But I am dearly reminded at times like this how isolated I am from the costs of combat. I do not know anyone currently enlisted in the military, only ROTC students and members of previous generations.  9/11 was the exception as was 12/7/1941 where many folk enrolled after our country was attacked. The rule with the all-volunteer military seems to be having soldiers fight for us who are worse off th...

https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2305/index.html#x230520  

I am currently reading All the King's Men  by Robert Penn Warren. I've seen praise for this work for most of my adult life and finally got around to getting it out of the library. The writing is incredibly textured and so it is slow going. I have seen the 1949 movie version with Broderick Crawford several times (and enjoyed it) but in 1949 movie adaptations were not known for their fidelity to their source material so I'm keeping my mind open re the plot. Another reason that it is slow going is that I am stopped short every time I see what is euphemistically referred to as the N-word. It is painful to see in print. The dialogue is set in the deep South in the early 20th century so it is truthful but that makes it more painful, not less. I grew up in a Philadelphia suburb that struggled with integration. When the first family of color moved into my neighborhood someone greeted them by spray-painting "Niggers go home" on a stone wall facing their house. I was humili...

One of my mentors is going through some hard times; he has become a caregiver for the immediate future and other family members of his are suffering in other ways. Aside from the immediate stress I think there is a deeper stress; he has spent most of his life supporting other folk and now with age and dwindling stamina and strength he needs support to be a good caregiver from others in ways he is not used to. In my own life it has been incredibly difficult for me to ask for help; I am much more comfortable by inclination and good fortune with helping others. And yet: I have had surgeries that required the care and support of others for weeks.  It has been very difficult for me. Pride is a two-sided coin. It is a strength in terms of holding myself to a high standard that has helped me to succeed in many ways but it is a weakness when as we all must do at some points I need to ask for assistance. My mentor was there for me in two very traumatic life-changing events and I am trying t...

In 2016, before the election, a recording of Donald Trump bragging about being able to grab women by their crotch ("pussy") because he was a celebrity was leaked. I was naive enough to think that it would sink his bid and clearly I was wrong. It came up in the first debate between him and Clinton, where he discounted it as "just locker room talk". That has stuck in my craw over the years. What kind of man brags about sexually assaulting women? In my experience people brag about things that they think will make them look better. Does Trump revere men who assault women? That tape has now been a key part of E. Jean Carroll's civil lawsuit against Trump. The fact that it is a civil and not criminal suit is sad, but Carroll did not report her rape at the time (1996) because she didn't think she would be believed and already at that time Trump had an army of lawyers with a reputation for viciousness. In any event the NY state legislature passed a one-time waiver f...

More than a day actually. My daughter moved into her first apartment this weekend along with roommates from her student days. My wife and I are back to being empty-nesters. In my own life the move into my first-year university dorm was the real break with my family; every other stay with my family was a temporary surrendering of autonomy. I face her departure that way, that moving her into her first university dorm was the real change in our roles. Like many of her peers she stayed with us after graduation while she built up her bank account as is prudent. I love my children but I am blessed with also liking them. That is not a given but they are interesting people who are good company, caring about important things and yet playful at the same time. So far they are still happy to chat with us regularly and I have hope that our bonds will continue to be strong. I'll do my part.

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

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

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

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

We just had another school shooting in Nashville. Someone with anger in their heart legally purchased weapons with what I think of as a military capacity for killing many people in a short amount of time. The shooter did not make their own assault rifle, etc. but rather purchased it. My naive layperson understanding is that many legislatures have passed laws excluding any legal responsibility by a gun seller, distributor, or manufacturer for the actions taken by a gun purchaser.  When selling weapons with military capabilities beyond any reasonable definition of self-defense this clearly puts society at risk. A starting point in dealing with this completely evitable ongoing tragedy in our country and none other would be to publicize such laws and demand their repeal or some explanation as to how they serve the public good. It really, really hurts us all on so many levels that we have traveled this path since the repeal of the Assault Weapons Ban, imperfect as it was. The before and...

I was thinking the other day of a scene from the film Battle of Algiers, about the revolution to drive the French out of Algeria; after a cafe has been bombed a group of French civilians find a young Arab boy, a street vendor standing nearby, and start punching and kicking him. It is the ambiguity of the film that children participated in the revolt against the French, but we have not seen this child do anything but be there. The group of ostensibly civilized Europeans see an Arab boy and try to kick him to death. (A French policeman pulls his unconscious body away from the mob.) What drives a mob to try to kill a small boy for no other reason than being Arab in the vicinity of a terrorist act?  It is clear from the racial slurs that they yell during the assault that they would not have tried to kill a French boy. The older I get the more I see fear as the source of the evil in my small part of the world and apparently the world at large. Fear of the other in particular seems to ju...

I'm attending two conferences this month. The one I went to last week was a regional association that I've been part of for 35 years. I don't know everyone but it definitely feels like an extended family to me and I greatly look forward to the meetings. The first one after COVID was truly joyous, not just for me but for many other senior members and so the joy was shared and magnified. I am currently attending a conference on using technology in teaching mathematics. I attend every four or five years to keep up with the latest, but it doesn't move so quickly that I need to attend every year. Usually other department members attend and we grab a meal together but it is far less tribal. This time no one else from my department is here and I may go the entire conference without seeing someone I know well enough to say hi. It's a good conference and it serves its purpose but the feel is very different. It's good for me to articulate what I value from last week's...

I could just post links to my friend Michael Covington's blog daily but I restrain myself. This post was particularly good: https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2303/index.html#x230311

The word patience carries different kinds of emotional baggage depending on the context.  A few months ago I heard a homily from a Catholic priest asking for patience with the Catholic church in its struggle with LGBTQIA+ issues. I didn't take it well---it resonated with my understanding of the history of the civil rights movement, wherein people who were not used to treating people of color as fully human would constantly ask more patience of the folk being discriminated against. Change doesn't happen overnight but perhaps faster than decades and centuries would be more appropriate. Since then I've tried to analyze my feelings about the experience, because they were stronger and more lasting than I expected them to be. I'm still working on it but a few things that I feel represent who I am: 1) I am very privileged in my life and need to show patience to others more than they need to show it to me about 99.99% of the time.  2) Patience is sacrifice; when the powerful as...

For better or worse I was raised to feel shame at the drop of a hat; if I ever fell short of my parents' standards I was so encouraged, and I continue to do so as an adult. The things that cause me shame are different as my life has changed. My standards, my self-expectations, are mediated by my growths and declines in various areas. I'm not sure if I would want to be different. If I were different, I wouldn't be me on a fundamental level. One of the constants in my life is that I am obsessively punctual. I do not like to have my time wasted, so if I commit to being somewhere for someone then I project that they will feel the same. Consequently I am perceived by others by and large as being responsible (which has a different emotional baggage than shame). I bring this up because I am teaching a first-year course that is required as part of our core curriculum where a number of students are not showing up.  I missed a couple of classes in university for illness and we do liv...

Every now and then I see a title for a talk or a publication about reconciling faith and science. I never really understood the need. I do live a sheltered life, immersing myself in STEM culture. STEM culture never rules something out without a demonstrable reason. The idea of science ruling out faith or spirituality is simply bad science, often proffered by folk who don't do science. The reconciliation is often offered from the humanities as if this were a gift to us cold science types who don't know any better. Different STEM folk can speak for themselves; for me science has always been about trying to understand God's creation without prejudice but with rigor. 

One of the tasks that I have been pursuing for a number of months relates to a committee that I chair. My primary professional association, the Mathematical Association of America, has set up a committee to address student concerns that are not directly related to conferences. As students are the next generation of mathematicians we have a strong incentive to make them first-class citizens within our community. My committee identified informally some students to serve as a focus group and interviewed them in the Fall. They had a number of different concerns but one common thread was a feeling of disconnection from the MAA. This felt a bit ironic as the MAA has committed in the past year a number of resources to establishing a community framework for its members, MAA Connect. Members identify communities that they wish to participate in or are on committees for, and there is a framework for posting comments, digests of posts, libraries for sharing documents, etc. There is room for impro...

One of the joys of lasting for a while in my career is that I often get asked (formally or informally) to suggest names of folk for potentially filling positions. Nobody ever goes entirely on my say-so but I like to think that I contribute names of qualified folk to the process that might otherwise not be said. I think of this as I sit this morning putting together notes for a meeting of a Nominating Committee that I sit on for later this week. We will provide names for a slate presented to a professional organization for an election. It is the nature of this organization (for good or for bad, it cuts both ways) that there are never any nominations from the floor; they defer to our judgment and our prior confirmation that the nominees are willing to be nominated. The bylaws list the positions, responsibilities, and terms of the these officers. Each year we take the positions that are renewable, confirm whether the current officeholders wish to continue, and as appropriate shorten the l...

One of the things I have prided myself on is not quitting things. Part of it is ego (this shall not best me) and part of it is the knowledge from experience that there is more pay-off from a sustained commitment than from dipping my toes into something. One of the things that I have had to acknowledge with age is that I have less stamina now. I would not trade the small wisdom I have acquired with age to get it back but I have less physical stamina, less mental stamina, and most importantly less emotional stamina with each passing year. Part of that small wisdom is to face these changes head on and make the best decisions I can about how to proceed. For a number of years I have been a member of a support group that is confidential, and I will be vague about its details. I mostly received the support I needed at the beginning, and have stayed to try to return that support to newer folk. My participation had to do with wanting to support loved ones facing challenges that are real to them...

This term I will have a number of things (classes, office hours, meetings) back-to-back on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and very little scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I am not used to this kind of rhythm although I have had it before and will adjust to it. I am not used to having blocks of time and have adapted most of my work routine to pieces that can be done whenever it fits into my schedule. Occasionally I'll work on something more substantial and explicitly put other things on hold but that is more the exception.

I have what is apparently a very common name. In grade school I would occasionally be given grades on my report card and disciplinary warnings for someone else which is how I first learned that I was not unique. Throughout my adult life similar things happened with mail, bank statements, etc. I had a sheriff's deputy stop by my home once looking for another one of me and I've had several bill collectors annoy me until I threatened legal action for their lack of due diligence as to who I wasn't. These past few months I've made the headlines because of the January 6 Committee, whose report I am slowly reading. A relatively low-level Department of Justice official with my name actively embraced Trump's attempted coup; at one point a Trump announcement referred to him/me as the new Attorney General.   Quoting from the New York Times (January 24, 2021), confirmed by evidence gathered by the January 6 Committee: " It was New Year’s Eve, but the Justice Department’s t...

  https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2301/index.html#x230122

As a professor I view my main job responsibility as teaching to the best of my ability; I always have. As a teacher I am asked to be a guide, a coach, an assessor, and many other things. I am not asked to be an investigator nor am I qualified to be one. Students regularly ask for make-up exams. Sometimes they are open about wanting more time to prepare for an exam, not thinking about their colleagues in class who would also benefit from the extra time but instead took the exam as scheduled. Sometimes they are out sick; especially in Winter Term illnesses abound. Trying to offer a level playing field to students about their grades is one of those things I'm pretty serious about. I don't set a high standard about verifying an illness but I do like to see some form of documentation. Every now and then a student does not provide any documentation of seeking medical assistance and becomes more insistent as the semester ends that I give them a make-up exam. This is the brinkmanship m...

I have trouble teaching and not being the one leading the discussion. I'm not proud of this defect; I have many colleagues who are good at supervising group work. I am not. This Winter Term I am regularly sitting as a resource while students work together on projects. It drives me up the wall. I'm not sure what this says about me, the need to be in charge. I am often in situations where I enjoy listening to someone as competent as (if not more) than I. 

I have an older family member suffering from dementia. She has in the past experienced hallucinations and did so again this last week. It is very disconcerting conversing with someone who refers to nonfactual events. On the other hand before my sleep apnea was diagnosed back in 2003 I had gone for a long time without enough REM sleep. I experienced what I can best describe as waking dreams, wherein I would know that I was talking to someone and at the same time I was somewhere else doing something else. So I have some first-hand experience with this. Of course we are experiencing this in our public discourse in this era; folk refer with certainty to political events that have not actually happened. Again, it is disconcerting to converse with someone whose foundation is on shaky ground. It is simplistic but I still use the six W's as my anchor:  who, where, when are the basics of facts. What, how, and why often require a bit more interpretation but are still pretty good ties to real...

It's been 33 years and counting and I still get a bit nervous before a new term begins as it did on Tuesday. Much less now of course. I have my checklists, mental and written, to make sure that if anything goes wrong it is not because of lack of preparation on my part. I can encourage, nurture, and cajole, but I can't control my students efforts or achievements, so I have to just accept what comes my way. Of my two Fall classes one surpassed my hopes, the other let me down. (Absenteeism without communication, leading to abysmal final exam scores.) Pretty much all of my professional work is the same way. I prepare and I do prepare hard these days, not relying on my memory and improvisations as I had as a young man. As I am not a hermit I work with others and along with my encouragement and cajoling I can not control the behavior and performance of others.

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.