TMWA

Lighted windows

2011-08-21T00:41:00.003-04:00

When I started grad school, some other new grad students and I walked through campus one night before the undergraduates arrived. The dorms were empty, but clearly being prepped for students to arrive. Some windows were lit. Bunk beds and empty desks peeked out over the sills.

Every year, I see the students getting ready to move in, and dorms, apartments, and rental houses getting ready to receive them. Living in academia does have a strange cyclical feeling to it. Falls feel like new beginnings, and springs feel like an ending. The end of December is a Pause.

I see students and families scurrying around near the start of the year, buying pens and sheets, paper and wastebaskets, calculators and cans to stock a new apartment with. I see students moving into dorms every fall, and I'll see them move out in the spring. I'll soon see those lighted windows filled with activity, and I wonder what the stories are inside them when I pass by. I wonder too, who was walking past my lighted windows when I was in school, thinking about my stories?

At a new beginning like now, it feels like a good life for all involved.

Flatland and Social Commentary

2011-05-09T22:22:00.004-04:00

I've recently finished The Annotated Flatland. Flatland was written in 1884 by Edwin Abbott, and tells the story of "A. Square", an inhabitant of a two-dimensional world called Flatland, who is visited by a three-dimensional sphere. I'd heard of the book before, but hadn't read it. It's fairly famous as a mathematical work which describes ideas about how two-dimensional creatures would perceive three-dimensional objects, and by analogy, how we might perceive the fourth dimension. This semester, one of our better students watched a recent movie made from the book and was fairly excited by it. It led to a conversation with another faculty member who said she'd attempted to read the book, but had found it so sexist she couldn't stomach it. It turns out that the book's treatment of women is a point of contention for a number of people.

The book describes a two-dimensional universe with a strict class structure. All males are polygons of various sorts, ranging from the lowest ranked isosceles triangles with one very small angle, followed by triangles, then squares, then so on up higher and higher order regular polygons. (Irregular polygons are considered immoral, and are shunned, imprisoned, or executed.) At the top of the social order are high degree polygons called "circles", who are the elite priest class of the society. Women are only line segments, and are considered incapable of thought and essentially worthless.

So the story does describe a fundamentally sexist (and horribly class structured) world. (It's worth noting that the strict class distinctions have a strong affect on the male inhabitants, too. The isosceles triangles with very small angles are considered mentally deficient and are caged in schools for the young to practice "feeling" angles on. Isosceles triangles with larger angles are only allowed low-ranked jobs, and equilateral polygons are ranked on the social hierarchy by the number sides they have, with the most honored jobs reserved for those with a large number of sides and large angles.)

So was Abbott a wretched sexist and classist? As it turns out, no; Abbott was in fact fairly progressive for his time, and in fact argued for the education of women at a time when many believed (as the Flatlanders did) that women were incapable of education or of rational thought. What he wrote was in fact a critique of common attitudes toward women, the disabled, and the class structure. At the time, it would have been a thinly veiled satire of Victorian social norms, although apparently there is some evidence that even at the time, some people did not get that he was making fun of, rather than encouraging, those attitudes. (Which means that Flatland may in fact be a 19th century example of Poe's Law.) Of course, by the 20th and 21st century we are far removed from Victorian social mores, and it makes it hard to recognize this as a satire when the social context has been removed. Instead, it ends up looking horrifically retrograde. Once read with the idea of a satire in mind, however, it becomes remarkably clear. In fact, there are occasional clues in the text that the line segments are more intelligent than A. Square (or the rest of Flatland) credits them with being.

Interestingly, the movie altered the story to remove the sexist elements. The protagonist's grandson (a hexagon) is recast as a hexagonal granddaughter, Hex; women are no longer represented as line segments or considered unworthy of education. However, the class structure of the original is preserved. Perhaps we are more able to recognize the critique of class than of gender. The movie is also given a happier ending; through the intervention of the three dimensional visitor, the Flatlanders come to understand the reality of the third dimension (and the fourth is hinted at), and it is implied that the class structure dominated by the circles is being overthrown at the end.

So what about this movie alternative? The social critique has been altered. The critiques of class and orthodoxy remain. The idea of truth--as revealed by reason and observation--taking priority over authority, is a familiar (and needed) social criticism for our culture, but isn't far from Abbott's original text. The removal of the gender dimension (ahem) might be wise, since a careful recasting of the story to satirize our own prejudices might be more difficult, and require more time than the movie allowed. Our contemporary approaches to sexism have become more refined and less crudely stated, and exposing these may require different tools than Abbott used. So perhaps the movie is a good "translation" into modern language of some of what Abbott intended, without being literal.

Plus, the graphics are pretty cool.

New Vegetarian Restaurant

2010-10-24T12:30:00.002-04:00

We have a new restaurant in town, a vegetarian place which (apparently) moved down from Erie. I went to the grand opening with a few folks from the department this past week.

I was excited about, but the actual experience left me underwhelmed. The food was good, but it was basically all just standard sandwiches of some sort with the meat replaced with fake meat. So you can get a variety of veggie burgers, or a tofurkey club with tempeh bacon, and so forth. I can see why this would appeal to a vegetarian, but as a non-vegetarian, if I want a burger or a turkey club, I'll just go get a burger or a turkey club.

It's a college town, so there might be enough vegetarians to keep it running, but I don't think this is getting added to my rotation. I'm generally interested in more creative vegetarian options.

The Antiphany

2010-10-15T21:20:00.002-04:00

I'd like to coin the term "antiphany" or anti-epiphany. It represents a sudden insight or understanding which is not in any way transcendent, but in fact horrible and gut wrenching. A moment in which you put the pieces together, and feel not enlightened, but as though you understand how much you've missed, and that things are much worse than you ever thought. Not just when you feel your stomach drop, but when you know it just entered the express elevator to hell.

I've had two this week.

The lesser was a simple matter of realizing how little success my precalculus students ever seemed to have in understanding transformations of graphs. I thought about the fact that none but the best ever understood this topic very well, and that perhaps a tiny percentage of those going on to calculus would understand or remember virtually any of this. And I thought about episodes in my calculus classes when I would casually, as an aside, mention how some particular result could be viewed in terms of transformations of graphs. Calculus is filled with lovely insights which blend the tools of geometry and the tools of algebra. In many ways, calculus is the blending of geometry and algebra. Analytic geometry makes calculus possible. So I try to share these insights with my students whenever possible. I try to point out the wonderful connections which seemed so magical and delightful to me when I first studied calculus (and which I still find magical and delightful, truth be told). And I thought about how little my precalculus students understood about transformations, just one semester before they might enter my calculus course.

And then... Antiphany. My calculus students don't have the foggiest idea what I'm talking about when I share those insights, do they? They're missing a basic facility with graphs and functions to be able to hear anything other than an impenetrable wall of words, and without that basic facility, there is no way they can hear it. Unless they are able to grasp the basic facts of analytic geometry intuitively, they can't hear an insight about those facts.

The second antiphany was an odder moment, and much worse. Without going into detail, it was the sudden understanding, in a brief revelation, that one project I've been working on for a few years was doomed from the beginning. The effort had generated stress and frustration for me (and for others), and I hadn't been able to succeed. I'd had to deal with the effects of the failure, and keep struggling to try to make it succeed, and then in a single moment, I saw why success was impossible. I had in fact been sabotaged before I ever started, without knowing it. And I found out how I'd been sabotaged, all at once. I could see the past few years flushed down the toilet, wasted effort worrying about trying to push the damned rock up the hill when it kept being shoved back down from the other side.

Antiphany. It's a good word, even if I did make it up.

(By the way, a brief Google search turns up some previous coinages of antiphany, based on the same idea of an anti-epiphany. But I intend a somewhat different meaning.)

Ponderings on Geometry

2010-09-14T20:49:00.002-04:00

At a conference this summer I saw an interesting invited talk about teaching geometry. The speaker discussed some of the historical challenges to Euclidean geometry, and discussed how these were eventually overcome. The problem for schools being that while mathematicians like Hilbert managed to fill in all the gaps left by Euclid, the resulting geometry was very complex. It took a great deal of work to get from the axioms up to the interesting Euclidean results. In fact it took too long for a single year high school course to even get to the beginning of Euclidean geometry. As a result, the speaker claimed, most high schools eliminated axiomatic and proof-based geometry from the curriculum, replacing it with practical, computational geometry only. (He went on to detail a new approach, which allows a more rigorous approach to Euclid's geometry in a high school without starting from scratch, and using a book which is designed to be used in an inquiry based class. It looks fascinating, and I'm hoping to teach a class based on this book soon, but that's a digression.)

What caught me off guard was his statement that rigorous axiomatic approaches to geometry using proofs had been all but eliminated from most public high schools due to difficulty dealing with the challenges to Euclid. I had to wonder, was this actually true? I certainly had a proof based and axiomatic geometry in high school, and that was... ok, a little over twenty years ago. (Geez I feel old now.) And while my high school was mostly fine, it wasn't really an elite school. (When I taught an analysis class, I actually used several problems phrased in the form: "My high school calculus teacher said ___. Prove rigorously that he was wrong.") So had schools actually eliminated proofs from geometry since I had taken it? Or had my school been an odd stand out for not eliminating it?

Tonight I was about to start a geometry unit with a class. I asked the students for a show of hands of how many people remembered doing ruler and compass constructions. Less than a third--and maybe less than a quarter--raised their hands. Now I know from experience that some of the students may very well have seen constructions and just have forgotten everything five minutes later. But still, it seems that a number actually didn't do constructions. And I'm inclined to think that if they didn't do any constructions, they probably didn't do any proofs, although I could be wrong on this. (And of course some may have done constructions but not proofs.) So maybe the summer speaker was right, and axiomatic geometry is mostly gone.

But I question his reasoning about why the proofs are gone. He believed it to be because it proved too difficult to fill the gaps found in Euclid. I can't imagine boards of education, state legislatures and such largely care--or even know--about that. My first suspicion was that someone, somewhere decided it was "too hard", or that students just couldn't do it, and replaced it with other things.

But why too hard? Abstract reasoning and logic is hard, but given time and effort, most people can make progress. Ah, but there's the problem: Time. To do a good job with a class about proofs, it takes time spent working on problems, trying ideas, failing, and trying again. Learning to reason is a long and difficult process. And curriculum tends to fill up with all sorts of nonsense as everyone and their dog proposes new lists of things that "everybody" ought to know. Most of those things are lists of facts and formulas. I can almost hear the litany start for a geometry class: "Students must be able to give the formula for the area of a circle, a semicircle, a rectangle, a square, a triangle, a trapezoid, a parallelogram, a rhombus; Students must be able to find the perimeter of a circle, a rectangle, a square, a triangle, a trapezoid, a parallelogram, a rhombus..." (And it's worth noting that the only really interesting things in the list I just gave are probably the area of the circle and the rectangle, and perimeter of a circle. The rest should be easily derivable from some good geometric thinking. But the students will instead be given a list of formulas to memorize.)

We add and add to curriculum, and nothing is ever taken out. We add numerical approximations and work with computers. We add calculators, then graphing calculators, then geometry software. We add three dimensional shapes, and trigonometric functions, and whatever else anyone can think of because ... well, because someone else happened to remember it and thought it would show how rigorous we were being if the list of things for students to know was really long. (It should be noted that I am not opposed to any of these topics in high school math classes. But we must recognize that we cannot do every possible topic all at once.)

But a long list of topics is not rigor. That's just memorizing a bunch of stuff. Take any of those topics and spend some time with the students doing a long and careful analysis of some challenging problems, and you'd have a recipe for a great math class. The central questions will always be the following: What do you think is true? How do you know that? Why? Is this like anything we have done before? Can we generalize this result?

All of this of course misses the biggest elephant in the room as to why high school math has dropped most reasoning and replaced it with lists of tasks and formulas: It's very easy to write a statewide multiple-choice test which to see if students can choose the formula for the area of a circle. It's very difficult (or perhaps impossible) to write a state-wide multiple choice test which determines how skilled students are at reasoning and solving complex problems. But I'd much prefer a student who can work out how to find the area of a trapezoid based on what she already knows than one who has only memorized the formula. I regularly have students who have memorized a formula corresponding to a figure, but can't figure out if it's the formula for the area or the perimeter. (When I ask how to find the area of a circle, I can guarantee about half the class will respond "2 pi r.")

And I'd really love to have students who learned enough reasoning to write proofs in their geometry class, but apparently that's rare now. No wonder we have trouble teaching proofs later in college.

Morning scene

2010-08-30T18:52:00.000-04:00

The garbage truck is outside rumbling and beeping, and I squint ferociously enough to make out the time on my alarm clock.

I realize I have one hour of summer vacation left. The sheets are still comfortably cool, and soft from yesterday's laundry, so I doze a bit. The window is open to make the most of a cool night, and light is sneaking past the mostly closed blind.

Roll over. *squint* I have half an hour of summer vacation left. I could reset the alarm a bit later, but I have things to do. Stuff. Stuff starts today. What did I get finished last night and what's still waiting for me? I should have enough time to get the last syllabus copied this morning and check over everything. What the heck is the deal with the new online course system, anyway? I have no idea what the students are going to actually see on that thing....

I have fifteen minutes of summer vacation left.

Sleep is a long gone specter, but I can at least enjoy the idea that I don't have to get up yet. Not really. Not yet. Summer isn't over until I actually get up. What happened to the summer, anyway? They just slip past faster and faster, and I've finished not a tenth of what I'd hoped to.

I have ten minutes of---$*@# it, I'm getting up.

The Last Airbender (Movie review)

2010-07-02T23:46:00.004-04:00

I went to see The Last Airbender last week. As a long fan of the Avatar series, I thought I'd write down my thoughts on the movie and how it stacks up to the original. Overall I thought the movie was OK, although it felt awfully hurried to try to fit into one movie what originally took place over a season of a television show. As I feared, character development suffered a bit from this; I thought both the characters of Aang and Zuko were pretty well fleshed-out, but most of the remaining characters were pretty flat, which is unfortunate. In some ways, the movie does a better job of pulling in some major themes (such as the Avatar's relation to the spirit world) than the early series did. On the other hand, it should be able to draw in some of these later-developed themes better, since it has the completed series to draw off of. But ultimately I'm not sure I can see the movie as hugely successful. It felt rushed, most of the characters felt under-developed, and somehow even the bending scenes failed to be compelling. So that said, let me say a bit about what I liked and what I found lacking. And I guess from this point out, there be spoilers--both for the movie, and for the rest of the series.

I liked the fact that the relationship of the Avatar to the spirit world was spelled out early on and woven deeply into the plot. As I recall, this was something which was introduced a bit later in the series. The dragon as a sort of spirit-guide works. (I'm assuming it's still Roku's dragon, although this is never mentioned in the movie.)

The movie tells us that water bending is strongly tied to emotions, which I think helps us understand Aang's overwhelming grief at the loss of all of his friends, guardians, and mentors, and his guilt over abandoning them. It's a nice device to get the idea across quickly. (But I have to wonder: What are the other elements linked with?) The betrayal of Aang by the Earth villager, who tells him he spent a life in poverty because of the Avatar's absence, deftly underscores the idea that some resent the Avatar for disappearing. An episode in the first season of the series dealt with the theme of the Avatar abandoning the world to the Fire nations ravages, and I remember that episode impressed me--and caught me off guard. It was a hint that the series was going to be deep and interesting. It's difficult to pull off the same trick in a single movie, since we have to identify with Aang before we can see this more complex (and uncomfortable) shading of his character. The movie tries (I think) to develop sympathy with Aang by having him start helping Earth nation villages right away. This works, but on the other hand is a little weird, since from Aang's perspective, he basically ran away from his responsibilities as the Avatar yesterday. So why exactly does he suddenly decide to accept those responsibilities and start acting like the Avatar?

The same series episode which started the development of Aang also started the development of prince Zuko, who wants to regain honor in his father's eyes by capturing the Avatar. The movie does a fairly good job of outlining Zuko's history and motivations. I think they are a little too quick to dive into the character of Iroh, Zuko's uncle, 'though. I recall him being a rather enigmatic figure for some time into the series. His reactions to and willingness to turn on other Fire nation troops so rapidly in the movie I think lead to a lot of loss of subtlety for the character. The movie watcher would have no real reason to question the Fire Lord's assessment when he calls Iroh a traitor, but this is a mischaracterization of Iroh. Iroh is proudly and fundamentally of the Fire nation; he's just not insane or evil, and tends towards a more harmonious blending of the all the nations rather than a desire to have the Fire nation completely dominate. There are certainly strains of "with us or against us" totalitarianism in the Fire nation, but I don't think there is enough in the movie to undermine that idea with a viewer unfamiliar with the series.

Unfortunately, despite some careful work on Aang and Zuko, and some attention to Iroh, most of the rest of the characters in the movie are pretty flat. The romance between Yue and Sokka is pretty much handled by saying, "Um, and they're in love, OK?" When Yue sacrifices herself to save a spirit, it's hard to pull much emotion out of the scene since we pretty much met Yue fifteen minutes ago, and much of that fifteen minutes was spent watching Aang try to learn to water bend. Katara isn't developed much either. After the movie harps on the idea that Aang abandoned his responsibilities because he was told he could never have a family, the scene at the end where Katara bows down before Aang as the Avatar--just like everyone else--could have resonated strongly, reminding us of what Aang was giving up, had the movie (like the series) suggested that Aang might have feelings for Katara.

The only other characters of any significance in the movie are Zhao (portrayed as a simple villain) and the Fire Lord (portrayed as, well... not much of anything, I think). Most of the other characters don't even get names. (I will say that I think the decision to have the monks in Aang's memories never speak is interesting; it keeps that past distant from us, and leaves us with just impressions about Aang's feelings about them, which are pretty clear. It helps emphasize the idea that these are memories of long gone people. Not that I think there would be a problem if they are to speak in a later movie either; it just worked well here.)

Partly the movie suffered from trying to cram a season worth of episodes into one movie. The first half of the movie left me trying to catch my breath; it seemed like a constant series of rapid scene changes. Now go here! Now there! Now Aang's captured! Now he's escaped! Now he's visiting a temple! Now he's in the spirit world! Now he's leading a rebellion! Now he's captured again!... To have been a successful translation to the big screen, I think the movie would have to have been twice as long (at least). Unfortunately, no one would have gone to see it.

Then there are distracting and weird changes made for no real reason I can see. Why in the world would you change the pronunciation of some the characters' names from the series? And fire benders seem to need an external source of fire to bend now, which I suppose makes them more like the other benders, except it also seems to put them at a huge disadvantage: While it's hard to go anywhere that has no earth, air, or water, it's not that unusual to be places without fire. (Of course, this also leaves me wanting to scream in the battle scenes with the water benders: "Just focus on putting out their fire source in the first place!") I suppose it gives an easy hook to emphasize the idea that Iroh is a truly gifted fire bender, or a way to explain what the comet will accomplish, but it mostly just seems unnecessary.

And one last minor complaint: I'm not impressed with the bending scenes. The animated series did a better job on two counts. First, the bending in animation seemed more controlled. The bending in "live action" (in reality computer animation) ended up looking more like a vague suggestion to the element, probably in an attempt to make it look more "real". Secondly, the bending motions in the movie rarely seemed to actually do anything. Most of the time the characters seemed like they flailed around for a few minutes, then finally something would happen. Sometimes. In the series, the element seemed to respond immediately to the work of a bender, and it seemed linked and connected with their motions. The movie bending looked more like a bunch of magic passes, followed by a brief magic trick. Perhaps this is partly a problem in coordinating the computer animation with the choreography, but there never seemed to be much connection between a bender's motions and the response of the element.

I'm not sure what the overall reaction to the movie will be, but I'm not feeling it's been a very successful retelling of the tale, and I'm not sure it will have the same appeal. (Of course, I'm sure more people will see the movie than the animated series; it's being sold as a summer blockbuster and there are plenty of people who just won't watch animation anyway.)

When do they turn off Disneyland?

2010-01-26T21:31:00.004-05:00

As it turns out, an hour and a half after closing.

I went to the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco about two weeks ago. Since I was flying all the way to California anyway, I arranged to spend a few days at Disneyland first (of course). I stayed close to the park so I could walk in and out. (I discovered two years ago when the meetings were in San Diego and I visited Disneyland that this is a great way to visit. The whole resort is pretty walkable, even if I do end up with blisters on my blisters after a few days there.)

As it turns out, I stayed even closer to the park than I thought. I could see Space Mountain from my hotel room:

After the first night in the park, I left at closing and noticed when I got back to my room that I could still see Space Mountain. But at a later point, I looked out and it was gone. I eventually pinpointed the time on a later night: At an hour and a half after closing time, the mountain suddenly winks out of sight.

So I figure that must be when they turn off Disneyland.

The semester so far

2010-01-25T22:24:00.002-05:00

Today began the second week of a new semester.

I have two particularly small sections of one class, in part, I think, because I'm the only person teaching the second semester of the course who was not teaching the first semester in the fall. I love having small classes, so I'm not complaining. One of my students who didn't show up on the first day claimed she had switched to Professor D's section, but was still showing up in my roster. I double checked with Prof D, since today was the last day of add/drop. It turns out that Prof D had signed an override to allow her to enter his already overfull section. He now has 33 students. I went from 16 to 15. I'm laughing. I'm not sure Professor D was when he found out what had happened.

On the other hand, my Gen Ed class (aka, "So you think you can math?") is not small at all, and has stayed firmly at the enrollment limit of 40. Students have some incentive to pass the class this semester, since in the fall both the difficulty of the course and the prerequisites will increase. I'm being very straightforward (and maybe just a little easier than usual) to give them the best shot of getting through before the new course requirements kick in. We have just finished the second class (for a total of 2.5 hours of classroom time) doing nothing but unit conversions. Some students are completely lost.

I had a student show up in my office today wanting to do an independent study this semester. We discussed some possibilities, but I said we should talk to the chair to find out if it was possible such a study could be approved this late. The chair responded by putting her head in her hands and making a sound like a expiring mongoose. Since the student still needs to be in the chair's good graces, he wisely rescinded his request for an independent study.

But my joy this semester will be teaching the "Intro to Proofs" class for majors. I'm teaching the course using a technique commonly known as a modified "Moore method", which I've been interested in for some time. I went to a workshop for new practitioners two summers ago, and last semester I applied for and received a mentor so I could start trying it. It's the ultimate in student centered instruction, where most (or sometimes all) class time is spent with students presenting proofs to the class and the class dissecting the proofs as needed. I was prepared for all sorts of disasters to occur, but to my astonishment, my first two classes have gone extraordinarily well. My current major concern is to make sure all of the students stay involved in the class, rather than just a subset. But so far the discussions and presentations in class have been wonderful, and in fact beyond what I had hoped for. I still expect plenty of challenges ahead, but at least I feel like I've been well prepared for them, so I'm cautiously hopeful that we may have a really good semester.

Oh, and the unseasonably warm weather we have been enjoying is drawing to a close. Looks like we'll be down below freezing for a while now. Drat.

Retrospective

2009-11-30T22:20:00.002-05:00

Well that's it. This marks the end of National Blog Posting Month (which I mentioned earlier), or at least my participation. So what have the results been?

It turns out that over the course of November I wrote about 10,000 words for my blog. That's fully 1/5th of the goal for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), so who knows, maybe someday I'll try that too. I can finally write my novel about the smart, hip, jet-setting, handsome mathematician who has men fawning all over him. (Hey, this is my Mary Sue, right?)
I started this blog August 2005, which is about 4 years and 4 months ago, or 52 months. At the start of November, I had 162 public posts. That means I was averaging around 3 posts a month, until this month when I produced ten times as many. Or, over the course of this month, I've increased by almost 1/5th my total postings.
Sometimes I faced some writer's block of course, but usually once I picked a topic, I found I had things to say.
I've written about an enormous variety of things. I've talked about students and teaching (including the good, the bad, and the ugly), holidays, dreams, visiting a conference, and random musings of my own mind. Some days I wish I had a more interesting life, but often I like it fine.
Not everything I've written has been a gem. But I've definitely written things I've liked, and some of them seem to have inspired other people to chime in. It does definitely convince me that I should write more often. Having an explicit (and public) goal definitely spurs some creative work. I'm not sure if I'll participate again in the project or not in any sort of semi-official way. (As I noted, I wasn't doing anything official this time; I just thought I'd try it.) For the moment, 'though, I may take a pause before I write again.

Well, a good night to all, and a happy upcoming December. Be seeing you!

Hibernation

2009-11-29T23:32:00.003-05:00

I don't care for the cold. (I don't know what I think I'm doing up here. Who am I, Nanook?) But I do like burying myself under a heavy pile of blankets to go to sleep at night when it's cold. Flannel sheets, a big artificial down comforter, maybe a quilt, 'til I'm nice and toasty, and trying not to let any part of me poke outside my nest. It's wonderful. The only problem is that it's still cold in the morning when I wake up and have to get out of bed. I think bears are onto something. If I could just sleep through the winter and wake up again when it's spring, I'd be all set.

Or I just need to live someplace warmer.

What students hear

2009-11-28T21:31:00.002-05:00

I sometimes think about what students hear when we (their teachers) talk. I don't think undergraduate students (even good ones) manage to grasp the essentials of mathematics. I don't think they see what we are doing as logical reasoning based around some fundamental principles. They hear the specific words and explanations for a particular problem, but don't grasp that what we say comes from some coherent system. This is not necessarily because we don't say that this is so. It just seems that this concept doesn't completely register in the time we have them. It might later, or it might not.

When, for example, we want to find all solutions to x² = x, I might suggest dividing both sides by x, getting x = 1, which is one solution. I then note that we can only divide by x if we assume x is not zero, and in fact x = 0 is the other solution. We then have all solutions to the equation. To me, at this point in my life, I see division of both sides of an equation as a legal operation with very specific restrictions (namely, that we cannot divide by zero). I also recognize that since we can view both sides originally as multiplied by x, that x = 0 is certainly a solution. But I remember when things were not quite so coherent, and then the step back to note that we cannot divide by zero seemed like a trick just to justify a zero solution. It seemed that a lot of algebra (and some other mathematics) was made up of a bunch of special rules and exceptions, and it seemed like teachers had a never ending supply of these to pull out to justify whatever they said the answer was. It seemed a bit like playing pretend with a small child, where there is an exception to everything, to be made up on the spot: "Oh yeah? Well I had my invisible anti-force field magic belt on, so I could escape from your force field!"

How do people learn to see mathematics (or any field) as a unified whole? Perhaps part of it comes from time and experience. It may just take a certain amount of time working with the concepts before they become solidified and can be deftly manipulated. It may be similar to the feeling I can still remember in college, when I became sufficiently comfortable with algebraic manipulations that I could use them to do faster mental arithmetic, by disassembling and reassembling the numbers in convenient ways, making the numbers dance as needed. It's not that no one had ever suggested the idea before; it's popular to present these ideas to students, but until those concepts are internalized, it doesn't make mental arithmetic any easier. It just seems like a trick--and a somewhat painfully difficult one, at times.

Or maybe we need to give students more opportunity to see mathematics as a unified whole from the beginning. That would be one reason I've for years pushed for depth over breadth. Whenever a curriculum issue comes up, my first thought is usually, "What can we cut out?" Skimming quickly over dozens of topics and techniques encourages that sense of mathematics as a big collection of tricks, rather than something that has meaning and can be reasoned about. We need time to think about ideas, process them, wrestle with them, and make them our own. If students can understand a few concepts deeply, they'll have a better chance of figuring out something new on their own.

For the same reasons, I also feel drawn to inquiry based learning or Moore method teaching, where students are asked to figure things out with minimal guidance. We start with a few ideas--say, some definitions and a few axioms--and students are asked to build on that framework. Each new step has to be justified, and students need to figure out what works and what doesn't, without being told specifically what to do or what's right and wrong. They should rather be led by careful questioning to notice for themselves what works and what doesn't. If instead of just saying, "No, that's wrong," the teacher can simply present another problem and let the students figure out that their previous approach is flawed, they may internalize the structures much better. After all, structures you yourself have built are already essentially internalized. And it's hard to view a subject as filled with arbitrary tricks when you yourself have built up those "tricks" because they were needed.

In any case, what I would most like is for the students to come away with a sense of my subject (and others) as a unified whole, as something they can investigate and reason about, rather than just a collection of tricks and techniques. The techniques are useful, and the tricks are powerful, but without a strong foundation, it all falls apart.

Random thoughts

2009-11-27T23:10:00.003-05:00

Random thoughts for today:

I ended up with leftovers of everything but turkey yesterday, since I supplemented the contents of a frozen dinner for my Thanksgiving feast. So I may have been the only person in the world to go out and buy frozen turkey dinners today, so I can use up the rest of the stuff.
From the "Things I wish my Students Knew" file: You cannot tell which of x or -x is negative without knowing something about x. (Of course, if x = 0, neither is. But I'm not looking to completely blow their minds.)
Two more weeks of classes to go. The end is in sight. But the spring semester is too near. There is a monster at the end of the semester!
The weather is finally turning cold. My fingers are getting cold while I'm at home. I've noticed I have more of a problem with my "mousing" hand while I'm at the computer, I think because it's the one I can never put in a pocket for a while.
There are occasional television shows that I keep up with a little because I think I'm hopeful the show will get better. The premise is interesting, and there's cool stuff going on, but the writing is pretty mediocre. Often the writing never improves. I find myself wishing some particular episode had a better writer, because I often walk away disappointed.

Another Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T22:33:00.002-05:00

I'm doing it again. I was originally going down to see my partner, but everyone down there is still sick with flu, so I had to give up and just fake Thanksgiving here. Pretty much just like last year, when we were having snow. Frozen turkey dinner again this year, although I actually purchased both a can of yams and cranberry sauce for the occasion. I also decided last night while shopping in the Medium City (I can't seriously call it the Big City, but it's decent and only half an hour away) that I would go ahead and make a pumpkin mousse pie, which was fairly traditional when I was growing up. I decided to wait until I got home and looked up the recipe, so I could go to the local grocery store to get needed ingredients. I also thought I might already have most of the necessities for my green bean casserole at home.

Back at home I made my list, and discovered I did indeed have the green beans, french fried onions, and cream of mushroom soup, so one less set of stuff I needed. But I found last night that the local grocery was out of pumpkin pie spice (perhaps temporarily), and out of canned pumpkin (perhaps not so temporarily). Did you know there was apparently a pumpkin shortage this year? I hadn't heard anything about it, but I figured I'd make one more attempt this morning to see what I could find.

I stopped at the local grocery on the way out and found at least the spice was restocked, but no canned pumpkin. The store did have pre-made pies and pumpkin bread kits, but I didn't want those. So back to visit Wegmans in the Medium City again. Wegmans was out of most of their pumpkin, but did have plenty of cans of organic pumpkin from a brand I hadn't heard of, so I found what I needed and headed home.

I started setting up the casserole in the afternoon. Let's see, green beans, casserole dish, cream of mushroom soup... hmm, the soup is how old now? Oops, it seems to have a 2003 expiration date. Maybe it's OK? Hmm, no it looks kind of funny. Well, off to the local store one last time for soup. Thankfully they were still open for another hour. For not having done much in the way of cooking, my Thanksgiving turned out almost as hectic as a traditional meal would, complete with multiple grocery trips for missing and forgotten ingredients.

In any case, the meal turned out fine, and I've spent the rest of the day watching my recently arrived Netflix DVDs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed. So it was a fairly supernatural Thanksgiving, but that's what I like, so it was good in its own way. I just wish I could have gotten down to Kentucky, too.

Baby in a basket

2009-11-25T23:37:00.002-05:00

As I passed a shopping cart in aisle at K-mart, I noticed a small foot waving around inside the cart. Laying flat on the bottom of the cart (which was lined with a blanket) was a baby in a sleeper, wiggling about on its back, making that goofy, vaguely smiling face that only babies can. Or at least, when I'm making the face and I think anyone has noticed I stop quickly and look embarrassed. I know people usually say it's just gas, but that's not usually where my gas comes out. Although I guess it can make me smile and giggle afterward, especially if it happens at a really funny time. But how often does one get to meet the pope, anyway? Maybe I should have tried pulling his finger. (The baby's, not the pope's.) But that might have upset the parents. You don't want strangers playing with your baby at the K-mart before you've even gotten it to the checkout yet; they probably went to a lot of trouble to pick one off the shelf that looked fresh.

It's probably a really strange view of the world to the baby in the bottom of the cart. Big orange grids on all sides, and looking straight forward all you can see are ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights. I'd probably be laughing at my gas, too.

Winding down

2009-11-24T23:36:00.002-05:00

We've stopped briefly for Thanksgiving break. To no great surprise of mine, a number of students were missing in both my Monday and Tuesday classes, since we are off on Wednesday through Friday of this week. We'll be back for two weeks, and then finals, then graduation, then we're hitting the Christmas break, and soon enough I'm traveling again.

I usually like the brief periods of "down time" around a break or between sessions, when most of the students are gone. In the past, I remember spending a lot of time around my office around finals or the last day before a break, getting things done. It's a good time to get last grading done, file, organize my grades, respond to e-mails, and the like. And since nothing in particular is due immediately, the air can be almost festive. It's also a good day to take off for a nice lunch with colleagues. But today for some reason, I just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. I guess I'm just run down this semester for some reason. So I ran up to town for some brief shopping and dinner after my class (it turns out I teach one on Tuesdays), and I'm looking forward to sleeping in for a few days.

I'm glad for the break. I'm also ready for the semester to be over.

Flu shot

2009-11-23T20:59:00.002-05:00

The school just got H1N1 vaccine to offer to faculty, so I called this morning to make an appointment, then walked over to the bursar's office to pay for it. (The last thing I need is to get sick when in about a month I'll be flying all over the place on various trips. Plus, I get my flu shots on general principles anyway.)

When I got back to my office and got back to work, my arm felt a little achy, which is more or less what I always get with a flu shot. Then I remembered I hadn't actually gotten the flu shot, I had only paid for it. I'm taking it tomorrow morning. Talk about psychosomatic. Either that, or I'm developing an allergic reaction to spending money. But since I just booked a bunch of flights and hotels for my upcoming travels without batting an eye, I don't think that's it.

Dreams

2009-11-22T23:24:00.002-05:00

Last night I dreamed I forgot I had a class Tuesday. It was apparently the elementary education majors class, and they were all sitting in the room with the big tables for the whole period waiting for me. (Yeah, like that would happen.) I finally remembered (for some reason) and was dashing around trying to get ready, when I remembered I had another class after the first one. Since the room was still full of my last class of students, the next class had gone to another classroom downstairs. I had a notion of trying to rush back and forth between the two classes, setting each one to various tasks as I went between them. (Never mind that this would imply I must have been scheduled for two classes at once.) I never got myself organized enough to actually start with either class, 'though, and I was pretty sure time must have run out on the first class by the end.

I don't usually have dreams like that mid-semester, although I certainly know the feeling of rushing around and getting nothing done. I do sometimes have similar dreams at the start of the semester. Usually those don't involve forgetting a class altogether. Pre-semester dreams tend to involve being fifteen minutes late for class and running around trying to photocopy my syllabus and get ready. I understand well the fear of not being ready for the semester. Apparently now I'm also afraid I'll forget classes altogether during the semester.

Of course, by the time I woke up, I had no idea whether I had classes on Tuesdays or, if so, how many. Thankfully I have 'til Tuesday to figure that out again.

Traveling Academics

2009-11-21T20:53:00.002-05:00

Today my Alma mater hosted a conference for undergraduate research in mathematics and computer science. Since that school is a scant two and a half hour drive from our school, my colleague (and partner in crime in the department) spread word and attempted to find interested students to present at the conference. In the end, no students from our department managed to get a paper submitted in time, but three students were interested in going to the conference anyway. I was interested too, but with five of us going, that's a bit more than can be comfortably squeezed into one car for 2.5 hours, even if my car is fairly roomy. So my colleague and I debated whether or not to reserve a van through the university. We both pretty much agreed that the odds favored at least one of the students dropping out before the trip, but she decided (wisely, I think) to reserve a van anyway.

On Thursday, one of the students dropped out of the trip. So we canceled the van and planned to go in my car.

We planned on leaving about 6 am to allow enough time to arrive. One of the two students showed up at 6 am, and we finally gave up trying to find the other around 6:30 and hit the road. When we were about 15 miles outside of town my colleague got a call on her cell phone confirming that the student had indeed overslept, and in fact had just woken up. So in the end the trip with three students became a trip with one. So the van was definitely not needed, just as we suspected. It remains to be seen if it was canceled early enough that we will not be charged for it.

My colleague performed admirably when tasked with keeping me awake on the drive into Ohio, so we arrived without my getting my morning jolt of adrenalin by driving off the road or something. We even had enough time to get settled before the first talk started.

The talks were lovely and interesting. A few were in fields that went completely over my head. I have found in those cases that it is much easier to remain awake and alert looking if one stops trying to follow a talk that sounds like gobbledygook and instead just thinks about other things. Like, for instance, what I was going to write about tonight. This paragraph, for example.

But other talks were understandable and interesting. Even many of the CS talks I found fairly accessible, which was nice. The student who actually came was a CS student (but is also fairly mathy), and he seemed very charged up about a number of the topics, so I'm very glad he got a chance to come. He's actually about to graduate and plans to head off to grad school, so who knows what some of these ideas could inspire him to look into.

An invited speaker talked about art created via operations research, including such interesting projects as Obaminoes (which involved using 44 complete sets of dominoes to make a pretty darn good pictures of our 44th president). It was a neat talk, and the various art projects he'd worked on through operations research were pretty cool.

The student talks covered a wide variety of topics, including dissecting regular polygons into squares, simulating a robot, and solving sudoku and ken ken puzzles using some some algebraic geometry tools. All of the students did a great job. We need to get some students coming out and presenting at this thing.

Besides, our students might not have so far to travel next time. The hosts of the conference indicated they needed a host institution for next year, and my colleague and I talked to them about the possibility. It's a reasonably small conference and sounds like it might be manageable, so we are going to be looking into what resources we have and what support we might get if we wanted to try and host next year. It sounds like a lot of fun in addition to being enough work to make us truly frantic.

We briefly checked out the campus after the talks, grabbed some dinner, and headed home. On the drive, the three of us ended up in a light and fluffy discussion about education, history, social trends, biological engineering, the nature of knowledge, computability, the limits of human thought, and what constituted "writing down" or storing information. You know: the easy stuff. It was almost like being back in college again.

All in all a good day, although it was fairly tiring. And there goes Saturday. Tomorrow of course is Sunday, which means I have to get on the ball on getting ready for the next week, which thankfully only includes two days before Thanksgiving break.

Registration

2009-11-20T21:31:00.002-05:00

It's registration time at the university again, so (some) of my advisees are coming to see me to get scheduled. Actually they pretty much have to come see me to get scheduled, since I'm the only one with their PIN that allows them to register. The school does that to force the students to actually get advising before they register for classes to help cut down on the students doing foolish things. This doesn't keep the students from doing foolish things, of course, but it might help.

Mostly I advise computer science majors, which I understand because we are a mixed department and most of our majors are CS. Most of the "math" majors are actually secondary education majors, and are advised in the education department. Although I still don't understand why I keep hearing about the few math majors we do have being advised by CS professors. But at least I get an opportunity to see the trajectory of the typical CS major. Or at least, the typical declared CS majors. They really don't have that many more majors than we do, they just get lots of people who think they want to be CS majors. I think some of the students think, "Hey, I love computer games; I'll major in computer science!" For many of those, things don't go so well. I often find myself advising a major who is repeating the introductory programming course and the introductory math class multiple times. Eventually, they usually give up and switch majors. Or fail out.

Some students are not so good at getting around to getting registration done. I had one who stopped by my office suddenly on Monday right before I was about to go to class and want to get his PIN so he could register. (Registration started some time earlier.) I spoke to the student briefly about the fact that he was failing his intro programming class and had withdrawn from his math class (see? I wasn't kidding). He indicated he wanted to change majors. So I took a minute to talk to another professor about a suitable major closer to what he wanted. Then he told me he actually wants to transfer to some other school, so he just wants to take some classes for spring and transfer credits. I asked where he was transferring. He didn't know. I told him I had to go to class, but I could talk to him tomorrow morning. He was worried all the classes would fill up and needed his PIN right away. I wasn't giving in on that, but offered to meet him after my classes finished that night at 8. He decided he could wait 'til tomorrow morning after all. But he didn't actually show up. I didn't see him again until Thursday. Then I could finally sit down and talk to him about what he was going to do, and make some semi-recommendations, which I know he isn't going to take. I suspect he's not going to end up transferring, changing majors, or doing anything else before next spring's registration, when I fully expect him to come rushing into my office towards the end of registration again, telling me he needs his PIN right away.

On the bright side, I do actually have a computer science major graduating this semester. That one, by the way, came to see me early in the registration period, always had a plan, passed his classes, and took what little advice I had the opportunity to give him. I wonder if there's any correlation.

Student projects again

2009-11-19T22:49:00.005-05:00

My numerical class finished up the second (and final) week of student projects tonight, and I am still very pleased. So are the students. They told me they enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. I learned about a number of things that I hadn't before, including some tantalizing glimpses into topics such as the use of quaternions in computer graphics and how GPS works.

I had good students, and I think I structured the assignment well. Early in the semester, I asked everyone to pick (separately or in groups) a tentative topic one week as part of their homework. The next week, I asked everyone to find three sources about their topic. Next came a brief outline, and I started meeting with the students in their groups. We met about once a week, and I think it made a real difference. I got to find out what was going on and direct each group of students a little more each week, refining and refocusing their work. Most of the projects needed to be significantly reduced, but sometimes they needed redirected, too.

Over the past two weeks I also watched each group show me a practice run of their presentation and made some final suggestions for improvement. You know what the number one suggestion I had to give almost every group (including my very best students)? "Make sure you start by telling people what problem you are trying to solve." It was an odd sense of deja vu when I watched each new group during the practice presentations dive in and start explaining how to carry out, say, the Wronski-Schwarzchild Decomposition Algorithm,* without ever mentioning what the algorithm was supposed to accomplish. But this is why asking to see the presentations first is such a wise idea (for anyone who plans to do this); I got to let the students know that they ought to discuss such things. And to my delight, I found that the students by and large took my suggestions when they actually presented to the class.

It's been a good few weeks for this class, and we'll be off next week for Thanksgiving break, so it will be a while before I see them again. It was a good place to take a pause.

---
*Yes, I just thoroughly made this algorithm up. And it was fun. Although I had a friend who came up with the idea that, should he ever develop some new mathematical operation which he got to name, he was going to call it the "Poopyface matrix," which I also like a lot. I think that also shows that he's funnier than I am.

Nighttime reading

2009-11-18T23:21:00.002-05:00

There are certain books--only a few--that soothe me as a I read them. They're old familiar friends, and as the words and scenes start to flow around me, it's like slipping into a warm bath. I know the lines and cadences, I know the plot twists and the characters, and I'm not likely to find anything new, but I'm not really looking for it. It's a calming experience, almost like a trance. These books I read to enjoy but also to relax, unwind, and shed the cares of the world.

I finished one of these again just a bit ago. I own a copy now, but I found it first in our town library when I was growing up. I used to visit the library pretty much every weekend, walking out with a precarious pile of books every Saturday. I don't do as much reading anymore I guess, but I still enjoy it. In fact, I still enjoy some of the same books after all these years, those old familiar works that I track down to read again, which sweep me back to my childhood escape. I re-read books back then too, picking out the same books again and again from the library sometimes. Some old favorites haven't weathered time well; I recall them fondly, but don't much care to revisit them. But others form the core of my nighttime reading, the books I pull out when I need to relax, before I try to sleep.

Never mind

2009-11-17T22:00:00.002-05:00

I mentioned recently that I was slightly panicked because I didn't see how I could finish everything in pre-calculus during the limited number of classes remaining. This week, I had to figure that out. I needed to put together the last assignment sheet that gets the class to the end of the semester.

So I sat down and did a major hatchet job over the weekend. Topics got pared down to almost bone. In the last chapter I cut all exposition and essentially covered two sections by just saying, "here's two equations, now use them." But I finally came up with a schedule that could (minimally) cover everything I needed to by the last day of classes, although I wasn't proud of what I was going to do.

To finish the schedule, I looked up our final exam time so I could put that on too. Then I... oh, look at that: We actually have two weeks after we get back from Thanksgiving break, not one. I can finish the chapter up in a reasonable way after all.

Never mind.

We are Borg now

2009-11-16T23:38:00.002-05:00

I joined the ranks of the cell-phone enabled over the weekend. Sort of.

I purchased a cheap phone on a prepaid plan with no contract. For under $50, I got the phone plus three months of service and about 4 hours of airtime. I'm not sure I'll even use the four hours, but it's there for all the traveling that I'm doing over the next few months. Next weekend I'm off to help a colleague shepherd students to a conference in Ohio. After that, it's off to Kentucky to see my partner. A few weeks later and I'm off to Dallas to see my folks. Then in early January I'm off to California for the Joint Meetings of the AMS and MAA, plus some general happy sightseeing. There may be extra trips in there somewhere, but I hope not.

So I'll be glad to have the phone as an option when I'm traveling, and I'm sure there will be other occasionally uses for it. I'll probably keep it active. If I really like it, I may think about upgrading to something fancier. But for the moment basic functionality seems like plenty. After all, I got along this long without having one at all, and generally only had any possible use for one a few times a year. It's always seemed mostly unneeded to me, like just one more thing to have to keep track of and pay for. But I figured there was some point to having it while traveling, so it seemed like a time to give it a try.

Resistance is futile.

Overpackaging

2009-11-15T23:48:00.002-05:00

I was happy to find a great sale over the weekend and picked up some more slacks and long-sleeved shirts. (Which is good, because I always have the fear that my students will eventually notice I keep re-wearing the same things over and over. I know it's unlikely, but it still bothers me.) It struck me while I was trying to get everything into the laundry that shirts have way too much stuff attached when sold.

For the standard (folded) shirt, I had to remove: a size sticker on the back of the collar and another on the front, pieces of cardboard and plastic to hold the collar up just so, three clips and a pin from the back of the shirt so I could get to and remove the big flat piece of cardboard and some tissue paper (for some reason), another pin at the neck, and then two tags attached on the front somewhere (one from manufacturer and one from the store). Some shirts had a few extra clips/pins to stick one cuff out on the front of the shirt.

I'm glad I don't feel the need to store shirts this way in my closet, because I don't think I have the origami skills to put it all back the way I found it, either.

Sleep

2009-11-15T02:17:00.002-05:00

Sleep is good. I never seem to get enough, but I like it. My computer has this menu option called "Sleep", and when I select that, the machine goes to sleep right away. I often find myself wishing I had that little menu option. "OK, go to sleep now." I tend to be a little bit of an insomniac. As much as I like sleep, sometimes I just have a hard time making myself actually do it. My mind needs a lot of time to wind down.

And sometimes I find myself having a hard time going to sleep because I'm too tired. I know that sounds crazy. I end up lying in bed, yawning, eyes watering, and essentially being to obsessed with being tired for a while to actually fall asleep.

On the good nights, when I can relax, I tend to think about pleasant things. Like imagining soaring over the world at night, flying on the winds, with lots of twinkly stars and people below sleeping. Or when I was little I used to imagine that my bed was a boat that would gently float down a river as I fell asleep. Then on some nights I would imagine I was paying extra for the "deluxe" sleep river that went through beautiful gardens. (I have no idea what I was paying extra with.) Yeah, I was a weird little kid, but it was a good fantasy.

Sleep is good. I think I'll go get some.

This is so hard, you should get college credit for it! Wait...

2009-11-13T20:33:00.003-05:00

Our university has a math sequence for elementary education majors. The courses mostly take a very deep and comprehensive look at the underlying mathematics involved in about K-6 education. Since we have a number of mathematics education professors in the department, the courses are extraordinarily well designed. It meets in a room with large hexagonal tables where students can sit together in groups of six, and we have two large cabinets filled with all kinds of wonderful manipulatives which are used in many class activities. (A manipulative is any sort of physical object which can be manipulated to learn math. We have various types of colored chips, geometric shapes, and other cool toys for demonstrating mathematical concepts.) Many of the activities are actually similar to and based on activities which could be used to introduce concepts to elementary students, although of course the college students are expected to go a little deeper and are asked to do some things that we don't ask elementary students to do. (For example, we have the students in the course perform various operations in bases other than ten to emphasize the basics of a place value system. No one teaches base four or base twelve to elementary students anymore.)

It's actually a really fun class, and full of all sorts of wonderful discoveries waiting to be made. I personally find myself fascinated by the fact that in many cases, the way we explain a concept to our students parallels the abstract definitions which can be used to define that concept in advanced mathematics. So whereas in class we may use groups of red and yellow counters to define the integers, a mathematician might start tossing around scary sounding phrases like "sets of ordered pairs" and "equivalence classes", but ultimately mean pretty much the same thing. I personally found the demonstrations hugely enlightening the first time I did the class. It provided me with very concrete way to think about and explain concepts such as why a negative times a negative is a positive and why dividing by a fraction is done by multiplying by the reciprocal. The idea of the class of course is to provide our future elementary educators with similar insights.

Unfortunately, the class is always a struggle to one degree or another. One particular point which the students never seem to get (no matter how often they are told) is that this is not a class in elementary school mathematics. We obviously expect them to have already learned how to do things like add and subtract integers and fractions, how to multiply and divide multi-digit numbers, and the like. After all, they were supposed to have mastered these topics in grade school. (Except of course we know many of them actually can't do these things reliably, so the course also helps back up these concepts. But I digress.)

As a result, the students sometimes ignore instructions on how to complete an activity. For example, they are supposed to learn how to represent integers with sets of colored counters and then use the counters to add and subtract integers. (This is actually a really cool activity; I'll have to write about it sometime.) But since they know what 7+(-4) is, and following the directions to make representations of the numbers using the colored chips seems complicated, they instead just write down "7+(-4) = 3" and explain to me that "the model was too hard, so we just did it." Since they feel the class is about (or should be about) learning to add, subtract, multiply, and divide just like they did in grade school, there is no need to learn anything else about these topics as long as they know what the right answer is. They sometimes fail to understand that the colored counter model they have been asked to use is, in essence, the content of this course: we want them to learn to use a physical model which represents basic operations on integers, and to use that model to derive various known properties of addition and subtraction with integers. This issue is usually an uphill fight all semester with the students.

But this semester I'm getting even another argument from some students in one class. With almost every activity we do and with almost every mathematical model we describe and learn to use, the students complain to me that "this is too hard for any little kid to understand!" Which is completely irrelevant, since I'm not asking any little kids to do this work, I'm asking my class full of college students to do this work. I've told them I don't address the issue of how to teach their future students, but rather just teach them mathematics. I leave it to other people to teach them how to teach math. This doesn't sway the students.

I tell my students, "I'm not asking your students to to this."

The students respond, "Yes you are!" against all evidence to the contrary.

My students somehow feel that any topic which they consider to hard for a third grader should be too hard to ask a college student to do either. I suppose they want a refresher of third grade math without any of the "hard stuff." Remarkably, I seem to have little success with convincing the students that they are not, in fact, third graders. Do they really think that in a college math class they should learn nothing more than what grade school students are expected to learn?

But do you want to know what the worst part is? Most of the activities actually aren't beyond the grasp of moderately intelligent third graders. I consider it the dirty little secret of the course. Granted, it would take more time, but grade school students could certainly be taught rules for representing integers with colored chips. With practice, they could learn techniques for adding and subtracting with the colored counters and even explain how it works. Eventually they would find patterns in what happened when you add and subtract integers. The same is true for almost every other topic we discuss, from the most basic (addition of whole numbers), to the most advanced (division with fractions, perhaps). You couldn't do all of K-6 in a semester obviously, and children may not make as many connections as a college student ought to be able to, but they could do almost every activity we do in the college course, and learn a lot.

I don't even bother to argue the point with my students 'though, because whether grade school students could do what we do or not is entirely beside the point. My class isn't filled with grade school students. It's supposedly filled with college students. College students who want to be elementary teachers. The same teachers that will lay the next generations mathematical foundations. Which will, in another ten to fifteen years or so, become our next generation of college students sitting in my college classes. And that thought usually fills me with the urge to go lie down for a while.

There's a pattern to this

2009-11-12T22:10:00.002-05:00

It's that point in the semester. Too much is going on. I end up running from early morning to late at night, with stuff to do piling up during the week. Stacks of papers to grade, assignments to write, lessons to prepare, quizzes to write, meetings to attend, students to talk to, e-mails to respond to, and supposedly at some point I'll do some research, too.

And when my week finally ends (which is around 8 or so on Thursday night this semester), I feel worn down and can't stand to look at anything anymore. I usually have a light Friday (usually just a meeting or two, respond to a few e-mails, maybe grade or take care of some minor task), then consider Saturday "off". (Of course off time has it's own commitments, like the need to go to the grocery so I have something to eat, do dishes so I have something to eat off of, and do laundry so I don't stink while I teach the next week. But I still have free time, and I enjoy it.)

But then Sunday creeps up, and off we go again. OK, what do I have to have finished for Monday? Then of course Tuesday will come, and... how long until Thursday night again? Thursday nights are really good. At least this semester.

Happy Thursday!

November

2009-11-11T23:03:00.002-05:00

November is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to try to write a novel (50,000 words) by the end of November. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not really interested in trying to write a novel now. (I actually worked on a novel at one point in my life, but the idea is not really appealing to me now.)

However, there is also a parallel event inspired by NaNoWriMo, the NaBloPoMo, which (of course) is National Blog Posting Month. Here the goal is just to post to your blog every day for a month. (Actually, they now extend NaBloPoMo to every month, but originally it was based on NaNoWriMo.) I thought this sounded like a reasonable idea, so I decided I'd try it this November. (I'm not doing anything official, I'm just posting every day for a month.) It sounded interesting and I figured it would be good for me. And it might make me put together some postings. I'm now just past the one-third mark, so I figured it would be a good time to explain.

So this answers the question on a few people's minds about "Why has he started posting all the time?" Although maybe the answer is really just that I decided to do it.

Real facsimiles

2009-11-10T23:08:00.002-05:00

I've been reading a couple of books put out by Disney (Disney Treasures and Disney Keepsakes) which give brief histories of Disney works, together with reproductions of various Disney memorabilia. Every page or two there is a removable piece which is a replica of something from long ago--a cartoon panel from a magazine, tickets from the opening of Disneyland, a menu from the studio cafeteria, paper toys distributed as promotional materials, and similar items. The books themselves are light, fun, and filled with pictures. I like perusing these before bed to wind down.

The memorabilia is odd in a way, and I enjoy them more than I thought I would. The replicas are often objects that (in original form) are collectors items, the sort of thing people would pay money for at an auction. I understand some of the allure, although I wouldn't be willing to pay what the originals cost by any stretch of the imagination. There is something about getting to hold and examine some little piece of history, even if it's an insignificant little trinket. I was holding one night a copy of a paper Pinocchio mask that was distributed as a promotion by Gillette (of all people) in 1940-1941. It's a weird feeling to hold that mask. Something that floated around almost unnoticed almost 70 years ago. Some child who is now significantly older than me probably played with one just like it. And here it is again, born anew.

Granted, these are fakes, reproductions rather than originals. But most of the originals were quick promotional gimmicks, not intended to be great works of art in any case. So really how much difference is there between the original and the copy? (Maybe the new copy is even made on better material.) So it's sort of cool to see and hold, and think about these being around so many years ago, seen and then quickly forgotten at the time.

I went through a similar phase with pennies once. Every time I found a penny (or really any coin), I'd check to see when it was minted. Then I'd try to think back to what was happening in my life that year. It's like a connection to that time. But sometimes I'd find a penny made before I was born. It's kind of weird and somewhat disturbing to be holding in your hand a penny, generally thought of as small and insignificant, which is older than you are.

Risk taking

2009-11-09T23:29:00.002-05:00

So I heard passed on a complaint from some employers: That the current workforce is too risk-averse, that they only want to do what is "safe". Or I guess in the usual "business-ese", that their employees don't "think outside the box." This is, I suppose, seen to be a failure of educators. (That would include me.)

I'm inclined to call bullshit.

There's no question that US public education has an unspoken agenda to produce docile, unquestioning workers who will sit in cubicles all day doing mind-numbing tasks and avoid asking difficult questions at all costs. That's actually part of the history of what the public education system was for. But it's worth asking why this was ever a goal, and the answer is because that's what employers wanted.

I'm also inclined to think that people have been encouraged to take fewer risks because risk taking because they have so little overall security. Most people today worry about being laid off at every downturn of the economy. There is no long-term job security any more. And in a particularly screwed up twist, no one gets health care at an affordable cost without a really good job. Plus we have an otherwise generally eroding social safety net. So no one feels safe, and I think a lot of that lack of security can be laid at the feet of corporations that decided short term profits could be had by regularly laying off employees and trying to squeeze more out of the ones left. And now they're complaining that their employees aren't willing to take risks? Why would anyone take risks in such a precarious situation?

Plus I doubt they really want risk-takers. Risk takers might try some crazy scheme that no one ever thought of before, and that scheme may fail. Actually the crazy schemes probably fail more often than not. (How many start-up technology companies did not go on to become Google, Microsoft, or Apple?) I suspect what they mean is that they want employees to take risks doing things that turn out successful. But that's not risk-taking! I don't know. Maybe an employee that does try some wild new idea that fails spectacularly really does get a "Congratulations! You failed!" celebration a la Meet the Robinsons. Maybe innovations (including failures) are actually encouraged by some (or all) employers. But that just doesn't ring true. I think it's the businesses that are risk-avoiders, and the employees are picking up on that and following along.

And employees are easy to blame. What employee would disagree with his or her employer's assessment of the situation? That sounds like awfully risky behavior.

Undecorating

2009-11-08T22:27:00.002-05:00

I just took down the last of my Halloween decorations. It occurred to me when I took out the trash I should probably uproot the tombstones outside my apartment before the neighbors think I'm any weirder than they already do. Especially since it's been over a week since Halloween, and I didn't manage to put them out in the first place until the afternoon of October 31. (Does that make the lag taking stuff down better or worse?) Of course, that's just show for the neighbors. Everything is still sitting around my apartment waiting to be packed up.

At least I remembered to take the giant glowing skulls out of my upstairs windows. Plus it's been over three days since I took off my horns.

Feeding my neuroses with technology

2009-11-07T23:21:00.003-05:00

First TiVo, then Netflix. There really is no better way to watch television series if you're a little OCD. Either pick a show and start recording, or (better yet), pick something out on DVD and get it. Then sit down and watch a bunch of episodes at once. Total immersion. It's the only way to watch. (Actually I subscribed to Netflix originally because my TiVo was missing a season of Smallville.) Thank goodness everything comes to DVD now. And if you're looking for more details about a series, there is no greater resource for all your pop-culture trivia than Wikipedia.

At the moment I'm "OCD"-ing Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed, which are oddly enough pretty similar when you think of it. (Basically both featuring somewhat reluctant chosen ones with special powers fighting supernatural baddies of the week. And both featuring kick-ass women as the leads, come to think of it.) It's somehow just easier once you start on one thing to keep watching that one thing. And keep watching. Even previous obsessions drop by the wayside.

Thank goodness there are past shows that I like but didn't already watch.

Where does time dissapear to?

2009-11-06T23:53:00.002-05:00

This week I had to get together another set of assignments for my pre-calculus class, and I'm really struggling to get to the end of the material. I keep trying to squeeze (and SQUEEZE) the schedule, cutting out more and more stuff, trying to make a mad dash to the end of the semester. And I'm realizing how little there is left. It's hard to find space for what's required.

It seems like everything drags, but somehow I'm more than halfway through the semester. This was a hell week anyway. I had a flu shot plus two meetings Monday, an academic club fair Tuesday afternoon then College Bowl all Tuesday night, meetings all week with students, plus all the usual stuff. I've started using my PDA again to keep track of stuff. I was glad to get to the end. But how will I get to the end of everything else?

I'm also now looking towards spring semester and trying to get planning done for new courses there. Plus a talk over break at the Joint Mathematics Meetings of the AMS and MAA which has to get done at some point.

Where does all the time get away to?

Projects

2009-11-05T23:18:00.002-05:00

I gave my numerical analysis students this week off to work on their projects (which they start presenting next week). I told them I would be available during class time for them to ask questions. The difference between doing this with upper level and lower level students is that the upper level students will actually do it. (I was actually a little surprised at how many people I saw.)

I'm actually really pleased with my numerical students right now. Most of them have been working hard on interesting projects. Most of my work in meeting with the students up to this point has actually been in getting students to scale down their proposals to a manageable size. One group of students was originally starting with an ambitious project of figuring out how to guide a robot through an obstacle course using GPS guidance. I initially got that scaled down to just working with the GPS, then got them to massively reduce the number of factors they include in their GPS model, and finally we have settled on doing linear least squares fitting, which is simpler than the non-linear least squares fitting that GPS requires. I'm relieved, and so are they. I knew at the beginning of the semester that this was simply too big, and I think it's finally something they can finish in a reasonable time. (Actually, they are almost finished now.)

Almost all of the projects are progressing nicely and look really interesting. I have student showing how calculators evaluate functions like sines and cosines, another student solving linear systems using iterative techniques, one studying efficient matrix multiplication for graphics applications, a pair of students working on Bezier curves and their use in graphics, a group of three presenting on a numerical simulation of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse, one doing arbitrary precision arithmetic, and one doing on the fly polynomial interpolation to compensate for lag in networked computer games. All of the presentations look good. I just need to make sure they don't run too long.

Sometimes I really like teaching.

How old are my students again?

2009-11-04T23:34:00.002-05:00

I have a group of students who seem to think it's very funny that one of them saw me having lunch with one of my colleagues a few times. This is not surprising, since she and I probably have lunch more days than not. (I'm reminded of an evaluation from a student years ago which said "I see him out eating all the time." I wondered if that one might have meant that I ate out way to often. Either that, or the student was stalking me.)

My students this semester like to ask how my date was and then giggle. I'm not sure if it's funny to think of their professor having a date at all, or that it's funny to suggest I'm going on a date when I'm not. I'm not sure why either would be that funny, actually. All I know is it baffles me and it feels very much like junior high (or earlier). But then students seem to get younger all the time. Why, every year it seems like the new first years are another year younger than me.

Come to think of it, by this point many of my students probably grew up with Harry Potter, which is in my recent memory. Ack, I just made myself feel old.

Nonetheless, my students' obsessions with my lunchtime habits are just plain weird.

The grass is always greener

2009-11-03T23:46:00.002-05:00

I subbed a class for someone who was out sick this morning. It was an algebra class and the second day the prof was out, so I was asked to try to actually teach something. Unfortunately, I never found out what he was doing in class, so I ended up having to ad lib something about graphs of transformations. (You know, a little algebra improv. "Now pretend you're a function translated to the left two units! OK, now you're getting stretched, s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d... AAAAANNNNND freeze! Reflect about the y-axis!" Well, something like that, anyway. Only less entertaining.)

After class I had several students asking me more about who I was and if I taught various courses. (And not in the "Ye gods, I must be sure of who you are so as to avoid scheduling you at all costs, you weirdo!" way, either. They seemed to like me.) This is always a little weird, because usually my own students aren't that crazy about me. They would probably like someone else who came in to sub for me and did some free-form math jazz better. I can just imagine my students all crowding around the other prof, asking if he ever taught the next course they needed to take.

This is why I don't take sick days.

College students can be less than adorable

2009-11-02T22:58:00.002-05:00

I was unimpressed on Halloween night by the number of college students I found trick-or-treating at my door. (Seriously, college students? It's questionable by the time the kids are 13 or 14.) I'm thinking I might construct a more age-appropriate treat for college students next year, like a really interesting pamphlet on a cool math problem, and tell them it's their intellectual treat for the night. If they want candy, they (unlike the six year-olds) can drive down to the grocery store and buy some.

But today my math class for elementary education students was working on an activity involving adding and subtracting integers. It uses a cute little paper copy of a clown who walks forward and backward on a number line "tightrope". It's a nice activity. When I was cleaning up after class I found a left-behind clown that some student had taken upon themselves to add genitalia to and portray performing an obscene act. (These students want to teach grade school?)

I am not overwhelmed with the cuteness of my students at the moment.

The waiters are younger than I remember

2009-11-01T21:38:00.002-05:00

I went to pick up Chinese food for dinner tonight. The family that runs the restaurant has a few children that are usually present, including a small girl. She was entranced to discover I would say "Hi" back when she said "Hi" to me, but I was a little nonplussed when she switched to "Ho Ho Ho". From that point she said many things, but I have no idea what. Possibly because she was speaking Chinese, or maybe because she was about three years old. I don't know which.

I sat down in a chair to wait for my food. The child toddled over, retrieved a melamine plate, and set it in front of me. "Thank you, but I don't need a..." The child was headed across the floor again, returning with a napkin. She kept one for herself to play with for a while. "Thank you, but no I don't..." Shortly thereafter she left and returned with plastic utensils. Then another place setting appears, and she even brings a fried noodle for herself (I don't know where that came from) which she starts trying to cut up with a plastic fork. By this point I'm starting to look around hopefully for someone to re-emerge from the kitchen and at least make some comment on all of this.

Lacking much success with her noodle, the child went over to her McDonald's play set in the corner. (I have to admit there is something that just strikes me as weird that there is a McDonald's play set in the corner of another restaurant.) She returns unfolding an actual dollar bill which she attempts to present to me. (I think some aspects of business may still be eluding her.) Unable to convince me to take it, she gleefully tears an edge from it and laughs. Before too much else happens, the mom comes out of the kitchen with my order, and I get to escape. I told the lady that the waiters here are so young, and pointed out the partly set table and her daughter. She laughed. I didn't mention the dollar.

The Counterweight Continent

2009-07-28T21:56:00.003-04:00

I recently ran across this really interesting posting about Texas trying to harvest nuts from Minnesota to help destroy Texas public schools. The post contains some some really fascinating background on the history of cartography. (I actually mean that. It's really neat stuff. Go read it.)

A chunk of the discussion centers on old maps which show some gigantic landmass at the south pole (frequently much larger than Antartica), and how those maps probably came to be. (That is, if you don't assume they were accurate and made by super-advanced Atlanteans 10,000 years ago. Or aliens, I suppose.) One note in particular caught my attention near the end of the article:

Almost as soon as Classical Greek scholars figured out that the Earth was a sphere, they decided that it must have a land mass in the south large enough to balance out the known lands in the north. In part, this was a scientific opinion based on their lack of knowledge about how gravity and celestial mechanics functioned. At least equally important in coming to that conclusion was the belief that the gods would not allow the world to be asymmetrical.

A continent which counterbalances the masses of the known continents... now there's an idea I've run across before, but I first encountered it with regard to a disc shaped world:

"Since you are a wizard of sorts, you are of course aware that we live on a world shaped, as it were, like a disc? And that there is said to exist toward the far rim, a continent which though small is equal in weight to all the mightly landmasses in this hemi-circle? [...]

Rincewind nodded. Who hadn't heard of the Counterweight Continent?
--from The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett

Bugger all. It seems when I learn something new and fascinating, Pratchett has gotten there first and already inserted a joke about it into one of his books.

So what did we do?

2009-06-20T19:18:00.004-04:00

What did we do on our recent Disneyland vacation? Well, we

Escaped the Temple of the Forbidden Eye
Helped defeat the Evil Emperor Zurg
Dined on the bayous of Louisiana
Watched top chefs make chowder
Went on daring adventures with Pinocchio
Rode a bobsled down the Matterhorn
Explored Sleeping Beauty's castle
Ate wonderful Mediterranean food
Went on the happiest cruise that ever sailed
Took the grand circle tour, including stops at the Grand Canyon and a primeval world
Learned to draw Tigger
Took a steamboat down the rivers of America
Played midway games hosted by toys
Sampled dishes from a food and wine festival
Visited 999 happy haunts
Had a scary adventure with Snow White
Spun out in Toon Town
Watched Aladdin triumph in a musical
Soared over California
Took a wild ride with Mr. Toad
Shared bakery goods with birds in the morning
Cruised through mysterious jungles
Munched Louisiana cuisine on a terrace while a steamboat went by
Toured the moon of Endor and battled the Death Star
Found Nemo
Toured the house of tomorrow
Ate wonderful Mexican food
Rode to the top of Mickey's Fun Wheel
Heard birds sing words and flowers croon in the Tiki Room
Sailed with pirates in the Caribbean
Raced through Monstropolis on a rescue
Learned that it's tough to be a bug
Took a plethora of pictures
Got shrunk, then blown up
Had many adventures with Winnie the Pooh
Took a monorail to Tomorrow
Experienced advanced Muppet technology
Had a lovely meal in Ralph Brennan's Jazz Kitchen (complete with live Jazz)
Rode a mine train through a southwestern mining mountain
Went to Wonderland
Experienced an exquisite four course meal with lovely paired wines
Visited the Blue Sky and saw the future
Stayed at a Pier in Paradise
Generally had a blast.

Now the only question is how to top it.

Following up on entering Disney

2009-06-18T02:16:00.003-04:00

I wrote in my previous post about the release I felt on first entering the Disney resort we stayed at last time. I wanted to follow up on that, because I've been reading Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Art of the Show by John Hench. In a section where he talks about the importance of play (for both children and adults) and the necessary ritual to enter a spirit of play, I found the following:

Imagineers create a feeling of ritual at the park's entrance. Many guests have saved up for a long time and traveled great distances to come to their chosen park. The lushly planted berm identifies and separates the park from the outside world; the entranceway to the park is the gateway to playtime. The tunnel entrance to Disneyland is a door through a warm-gray stone wall, an archway that gives guests the feeling that they are entering a special place on the other side. It still amazes me that such simple features of landscape and architecture work so well to transport guests from their everyday lives to the specially sanctioned playtime that the park alone offers. As guests traverse the tunnel, they leave behind the everyday routine of working, maintaining shelter, obeying rules; they enter a space where they can play voluntarily, and where, we know they will have the opportunity to feel more alive.

Yes; this is very much akin to what I experienced. I entered a different world, and in it's own way, it was carefully demarcated from the ordinary world. I note also that the tunnel entrance to the park is captioned with a plaque that reads:

Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.

What marked the transition when I entered the hotel? I think it was clearly the moment I saw Goofy in the lobby. The whole presentation was a unified (and beautiful) whole, but Goofy is what alerted me, "You're at Disney now, and that means you can quit worrying and have fun."

Why Disney

2009-06-15T23:30:00.003-04:00

I went on a trip to DisneyLand a few weeks ago with my other half. I spent a day or two before we left organizing and packing everything: reservations, confirmation numbers, itineraries, clothes and neccesities. What's needed and what's not? We drove from here to Pittsburgh (about two hours), parked in long-term, took a bus to the terminal, got through security, took two long plane trips with a several hour layover and arrived at LAX. Then we had to find ground transportation, which (eventually) got us to the hotel.

I booked a Disney resort hotel this time (Paradise Pier) because we got a great deal on it. (The whole trip was a great deal; there is a real upside to a bad economy if you can afford to take advantage of it.) We trudged into the lobby, which was bright and cheerful, with Goofy holding a surfboard in the midst of it, and a cheery gentleman at the front desk (at close to midnight).

And I just relaxed. All the stress I'd felt in getting everything set up and getting there was just... gone. Released. Everything was OK; I was in Disney's capable hands from this point onward. I was finally on vacation and (until I had to leave), I was free to be happy. And I smiled.

So there is something to be said for staying at a Disney resort.

Where are the Jelly Beans?

2009-04-13T21:43:00.002-04:00

So I went on my annual cut rate Easter candy run today, and found that most places have been rather ravaged. And I consider myself something of an expert on the status of post-Easter candy stocks. What happened this year? I was particularly disappointed to find that Target (usually a treasure-trove of all sorts of unique and interesting goodies), was heavily picked over already, and in fact had nothing but chocolate in some various guises. (Mind you, I liked the look of some of that chocolate, and I got plenty of course.) I commented to the woman who checked me out on the slim pickings, and she told me they actually got hit harder than usual the day before Easter.

I made my usual perusal from store to store this year, and found only two (of six) that had any jelly beans at all. What's up with that? Is there a great jelly bean shortage this year for some reason? Was the crop damaged in the flooding? (OK, so while I'm a city boy, I'm not really that much of a city boy. But when I was little I did think beans were manufactured. I used to wonder about how they got wrapped up in those tiny little skins.)

I was idly wondering if the problem might be related to tough economic times, but wouldn't that mean people buying less candy? Or maybe manufacturers made less expecting people would buy less? Or maybe everyone waited until the last minute hoping for a sale? Or maybe I'm pulling these theories straight out of my a--Hey, Hey, Kids!

Two things did occur to me on the trip this time. One is that the hunt is almost as much fun to me as getting the candy itself. I get excited running around hunting for the good deals from store to store. The second thing I realized is that the strangest part of the trip this time was the fact that I set out specifically to buy a ton of discounted candy, and ended up buying a bottle of grapefruit juice as an impulse buy because it looked so tasty. Seriously, who does that?

Networked Copier

2009-04-01T09:25:00.004-04:00

Good things about being able to send documents directly to the copier:

I can make a set of handouts from my office without having to stand and wait for the copier to finish in the office.
I don't even have to stand and wait for the copier to warm up if it's been shut down!

Bad things about being able to send documents directly to the copier:

Occasionally I make 35 copies of my class roster or something by mistake. On the printer rather than the copier. I have not yet accidentally done this with a 40 page paper or anything, but I still have plenty of time.
I also end up looking for things in the printer that I actually sent to the copier by mistake.
Sometimes I forget to pick up the class handouts that I made the night before. And sometimes I forget on the way down to the office. That may just be a sign of creeping senility, 'though.

Cookies!

2009-02-11T18:33:00.002-05:00

I'm glad the coordinator of the research seminar is such a health conscious individual. If I were running a seminar and brought cookies, I'd take the left over cookies home and eat them. I might even place the cookies over a wild hyena during the seminar talk to discourage people from eating too many of them. Our fearless research leader on the other hand leaves the extras in the office for other people to eat. So I go into the office after everyone else goes home and say, "Hey, look--cookies!" (I wait for other people to leave so that at least I might look like I am also health conscious. In reality, I channel Homer Simpson every time I see cookies.)

So right now I'm eating cookies while I prepare a quiz for my calc students and grade a quiz from my precalc. And I'm trying not to laugh too hard at the answers on the precalc quiz.

*munch* *munch*... mmmm.... cookies...

Precalculus Despair

2009-02-03T17:30:00.002-05:00

So this semester I'm teaching precalculus. Supposedly the students are already reasonably proficient in algebra.

Good parts of the semester include the fact that I found a book that I like. I really, really like it. It's beautifully focused. It feels like every time I start a new exercise, I think, "Yes--this is exactly what I wish my calculus students understood." And it's beautifully structured, spiraling through topics, adding layers of subtlety with each turn. I'm very happy about having such a good book in part because pretty much every semester I have been here so far, I've used books other people picked out or which were "typical" for a course at the university, and I've pretty much universally despised those books. I've stopped trusting anyone's recommendations.

I also like the way I have structured the semester, with lots of "mini" tests, which are cumulative, rather than two or three "big" tests that students cram for. It keeps the students up with the material, and it also keeps me apprised of where my students are. But this means I really do know how my students are doing, and I'm not feeling as happy about this at the moment. After the second quiz, I know there are many things that many of them cannot do. Many fairly simple things that many of them cannot do. Including things we have done repeatedly since the second day of class.

Part of the problem comes from previous deficits. Many of the students have trouble solving simple equations. Several need to be reminded repeatedly that there are real numbers between 2 and 3. Some are not sure what you might get if you were to square the square root of 5, or that -3 < -2, or whether a squared real number might be negative, or whether one might be allowed to take the square root of zero. (It's zero, by the way.) When students are struggling with these issues, it makes it difficult for them to learn about the domain and range of a function, and what the rate of change of a function on an interval might be, and how to sketch a piecewise defined function. How did these students end up in precalculus? Are they really expected to be able to complete calculus next semester?

So I have many failing students now. And tomorrow I must chide them to get the help they need if they wish to pass. There is still time, but the time to catch up is running out rapidly. And for so many of them, there is so much to catch up on.

Perspective

2009-01-23T08:55:00.003-05:00

I had just finished a Calculus II class on antiderivatives using the natural logarithm, and as I was erasing the board (filled with indefinite integrals, u-substitutions, and things like "ln|sec(t)|"), one of my precalculus students came into class to ask me something. I shifted gears to answer his question, and realized that while I considered most of the stuff on the board pretty easy, to a precalculus student, it must look incredibly complicated, and perhaps like sheer gibberish. And of course it seems transparent to me; I've been doing calculus since 1988, so it's been over 20 years now. (Amazingly, things like this have stopped making me feel old.)

It's much like the conversation I had with another colleague once: We were talking about low-level, introductory courses at the university (Big State Tech U), and meant any of the various calculus sequences.* But we observed that for the general population, "calculus" is used as a metaphor for anything unbelievably advanced and difficult. (Sort of like "brain surgery" and "rocket science", although if you are a brain surgeons or rocket scientist, you mastered calculus long ago.) Most mathematicians (and a number of other scientists) see calculus at the starting point for our fields, while most of the general population sees it as the pinnacle of learning.

*Of course, that conversation was at Big State Tech U. Now I do teach at a school that teaches a wide variety of courses lower than calculus, including lots of algebra, a general education math course, courses for elementary teachers, and even remedial courses. Not that I don't still consider calculus the first real college level math class.

My own take on Thanksgiving

2008-11-30T00:06:00.002-05:00

Weather forecasts for this past week were for snow stretching from where I am all the way down to way my other half lives. So for the first time in a number of years, I did not get to spend Thanksgiving there. This is slightly depressing, since I now haven't seen him since August. (Long distance relationships suck.) A small upside is that I have been able to catch up on my sleep, since I didn't have to make two long drives.

But what to do about Thanksgiving? As it turns out, I made a very traditional Thanksgiving dinner for myself. At least on the surface. My menu:

Turkey, dressing, gravy, corn, mashed potatoes: The contents of a frozen TV turkey dinner. (I would have skipped the corn and mashed potatoes if they hadn't been included.)
A can of cranberry sauce: It was given me in a box of food my partner was getting rid of when he moved about four years ago, but it was still perfectly good. (How often would I otherwise eat cranberries?)
Salad with shiitake mushroom dressing: The salad and dressing were both in the 'fridge. The dressing was technically expired, but seemed fine.
Green been/mushroom casserole: The one thing I actually made, because it's one of my favorite Thanksgiving dishes. And it's not like there's anything hard about making it.
Relish options included sliced pickles (left over from hamburgers in late summer), a jar of peppers (from the same box that I salvaged the cranberry sauce from), and a jar of olives (found in the 'fridge; I'd forgotten it was there).
Pre-made apple pie I picked up from the grocery because, hey, apple pie.
Coke Zero. (This at least actually is pretty traditional for me.)

The whole thing left me laughing off and on during the holiday, but to be honest, there wasn't really much to give away how faked the dinner was. I now know how to fool people if I ever have to host Thanksgiving.

Cool changes with the times

2008-11-16T19:25:00.002-05:00

I'm in the process of scanning some student solutions to post to the class website, and it just occurred to me: When I was anywhere between about 8 and 15 I thought one of the coolest things a person could possibly own would be a photocopier. I really wanted one. Now I own one. (OK, it's a combination scanner/laser printer that makes copies as a side effect.) I also have access to a really nice copier in the department for whatever I need. They are useful (I'm not sure how many days actually pass without using at least one of them for something during a semester), but I just realized it's not nearly as cool as I thought it would be.

Of course, the other thing that I thought would be the coolest thing ever would be a video camera, and that would be totally achievable too. Every once in a while I think about getting one. I still think a video camera would be cool, but now I feel like it's a kind of cool which would require me to be, you know, creative to get anything out of, and I'm not sure I have enough of that to spare anymore.

Between Hope and Despair

2008-11-08T22:02:00.002-05:00

Tuesday morning broke as a stunning day. A rain had swept the earth clean and I walked out into a bright warm day (reminding more of spring than fall) with a fresh scent in the air, as though the world were newly wrought. The scent carried me through some unknown passage to my childhood, to my grandmother's house and neighborhood, and my eyes were seeing the houses along my block through those lenses again for some reason. The air was clean and warm, and I felt uplifted.

I walked to the polling place at the municipal building, which is only a few blocks away. I had no real wait (I think because the district is too small to really have one), and soon punched a button to elect a moderately liberal black democrat with a unusual name as the 44th president of the United States, and I knew the odds were excellent he would actually win. As I walked back, I thought to myself, "So this is what the 21st century feels like." And it felt wonderful.

I watched returns that night, and worried a little until the concession speech around 11:30, when I started to hear screams of joy from the campus a block away. I felt like joining in. It felt good. I had hope for a return from the brink. (Or perhaps more aptly, a chance to at least crawl back up to where the brink was.)

The elation lasted through late Wednesday morning. Then I read that Proposition 8 in California had passed. A majority of California citizens had decided it was appropriate to take away rights already granted to a minority, to chase down those who had been married and viciously tear apart their marriage licenses, symbolically tearing apart their families, their hopes, their very lives. I'm almost numb to most of this asinine nonsense now, and most of the other ugly and awful amendments (like in Florida and Arkansas) I'm almost used to. But in California, they took away peoples civil rights. They took away their rights and their marriages. Because of the children (except of course for the gay and lesbian ones, or the children of same), or because people want to pretend other people don't exist. Because gay people having lives is apparently just icky. And the appropriate response is to take away their civil rights and explicitly condemn them as not just second class citizens, but unreal, non-existent, and in fact, unthinkable. That hurts.

By Wednesday night I was morose. I'm still flitting between moods. I feel a thrill, a joy, every time I see or think about our new president, and the possibility of what he might accomplish, even if that's only a potentiality now. A relief that so much ugliness might end. And sometimes I think of the lives being destroyed and I feel as if I'm about to vomit, or I cry and rage. I'm not sure what to feel anymore.

New E-mail Received

2008-11-08T12:24:00.000-05:00

Subject heading: "E-mail Server Back On-line"

Notes from a pre-Halloween trip to Erie

2008-10-26T01:20:00.004-04:00

For craft stores: A large hanging Halloween decoration should not be termed a "Jumbo Dangler." There's only so much I can take.
I went into one store because the sign said a "Giant Halloween Blowout" was "going on now," and I'm still looking for a few things. I found a few small islands with some discounted Halloween merchandise, and approximately 47 billion aisle filled with Christmas merchandise. (I thought about getting some fake cobwebs, but decided it would probably just confuse all the real spiders that live outside my door.)
I'm still frustrated by the lack of Halloween clothing for men.
I found nice materials for my horns this year. While perusing the gory stage makeup at the party store, I saw a boy about 10 or 12 drawn to the kits for a costume. His mother immediately told him "We're not doing any of that" and dragged him off to the rest of the costumes. I always like the sort of gruesome stuff for Halloween, because that's sort of what it's about. C'mon mom; let the kid have some fun. (I just hope she's not making him dress as a fairy princess or something...)

Contest Updates

2008-10-24T23:32:00.003-04:00

This year I managed to organize our first ever Putnam team, and even got students together for practices. Unfortunately, the students dropped like flies. Two dropped after the first practice, and two more after the second. I ended with enough students to make a team, so we were going to be officially represented--but then one more student dropped at the last minute.

I enjoyed Putnam practice sessions, which I ran a bit like a Moore method class (with me in it). I didn't look up solutions to the problems; we just tackled what we could and tried to come up with ideas. It was interesting and moderately productive. (These are hard problems.) Unfortunately, two very strong math majors chose to participate because they are involved in too many other things. In the end, our Putnam team did not score any points, but our school does appear on the list of "Schools which took the Putnam exam", which I still think is cool. I also feel pretty good that I solved a few of the problems on the exam this year myself. (Did I mention these are hard problems?) Perhaps we will do better next year.

I also got together our department's "College Bowl" team, with significant help from another faculty member. We needed four players plus an alternate, and unfortunately we only had five people come to try out, but we did have some fairly good people. I had some schemes for this year, too. It basically tests how much useless trivia students have memorized, so I obtained for our team used copies of a great popular book on memory systems (to stuff pointless facts into their heads with) and a copy each of An Incomplete Education (full of pointless College-Bowl-style trivia to start stuffing). In the end, we did very respectably in our school; we almost made it to the finals.

I also had fun this year "consulting" with the programming contest team. The programming contests frequently involve some interesting mathematics, so I've been coming to practice sessions and helping them figure out how to tackle the mathy problems. The problems are often pretty cool. Between that and the Putnam, I enjoyed doing some occasional math last year. I also like working with the programming team because it lets the students see professors "bridging the gap" between math and computer science. For some reason, we seem to have a division between the math and computer science majors in the department, which is pretty weird, because there isn't much gap I've noticed among the professors.

So what new contests will the "I-don't-like-competition" guy find himself involved in? Funny you should ask; I actually thought about trying to get together a team for a mathematical modeling contest in the spring. Of course as with the Putnam, what I'm really interested in is getting together students to do some math, not really to compete. I didn't do it this year, but I'm looking into more information about mathematical modeling for next year.

FAR, FAR away...

2008-10-24T23:19:00.003-04:00

For about a month or so I've had a deadline coming up to turn in a notebook about how great I am and why the school should keep me on. My last school called this a Faculty Activity Report, or FAR, so I keep calling it that here too. When I wasn't tenure track faculty, I didn't feel much need to worry about them. Now I feel sort of like I have to write "Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No--it's... SUPER PROFESSOR!" Able to teach hundreds of under prepared students elementary mathematics every semester while contributing heroically to the department and university, and maintaining an active research program at the same time!

On the plus side, I had a few presentations, attended some conferences, have a lot of interesting new thoughts on teaching (partly from one of the conferences), and have picked up a few new activities in the department. On the other hand, I didn't manage to get a paper published (pushed off now for a while longer) and had a fairly weak spring semester. So maybe this year is a wash.

But in any case, the notebook was turned in last week, and I took part of the weekend to go out and have fun, which I haven't felt like I had time to do much of. It was nice to take a break. Now when is the semester over? Actually, that's not enough of a break. When is summer here again? You know, so I can take another crack at those papers for next year's FAR.

Summer is over (Oh bother)

2008-08-31T00:48:00.002-04:00

I did get to spend a little over a month all told with my other half, including about a week spent up here with me. (He hadn't been able to come up before.) That was really good on the one hand, but spending so much time together also made me remember I miss him a lot. I was pretty bummed when I had to leave.

It doesn't help that he had lots of adorable kittens living with him at the time, before they were going to go off to homes. One in particular decided I was the best bed EVER. I'd feel a couple of little paws grab my ankle and hear a "mew!", which I discovered translated to "Sit down so I can lay on you and go to sleep." That's hard to leave behind, too.

In terms of productivity, I went to a conference on Moore method teaching, tried to get back into some research, got (partially) ready for classes, and worked on some projects related to our library. (In particular, given the large temporary budget we had for books last year, I wanted to find ways to encourage students to go visit the library and take out some books. This ended with what I personally consider a rather nifty poster I made and hung in our hallway featuring cool new books we have. I plan to keep swapping out the featured books periodically.) I suppose I could probably count that I did clean the apartment pretty well, even though you can't really tell anymore...

But classes started last week, so I'm through my first week. Highlights from that first week:

I discovered two students in one of my classes who had taken another class which duplicates it. On being informed that no one can receive credit for both, one was surprised (it turned out her advisor had specifically selected the class for her), and the other said she already knew that but thought she just had to take this one anyway.
Get the impression our registration system is a little goofy? It is. One of my colleagues and I have conjectured that it does not actually enforce prerequisites at all. Her analysis class contains several students who have not taken one or the other (or both!) of two prerequisite classes. Some of these managed this by simply failing the prerequisite the previous semester, so that they registered before the system knew they failed, but others seem to have been able to slip in some other way.
I helped with an introduction to the computer software Mathematica for a group of students on Friday. When we arrived at the lab, it turned out that the software was installed (as we had been promised), but that the license had expired. The first twenty minutes (in a fifty minute class) were spent talking the students through the registration procedure.
One of my classes went more smoothly than it has before, I think because I successfully managed to cut a lot of stuff out of the class time and just leave the students to read and do it. I feel like I need to add a line to the Tao Te Ching: "I teach nothing, and nothing is left untaught." (This actually goes along really well with the Moore method conference I was at this summer, come to think of it.)
I seem to have become the "contest" guy in the department. I'm trying to organize participation in one national mathematics contest, seem to have volunteered to take over a college bowl team, offered to help with running a small local math contest one professor is organizing, and have signed on to consult with a computer programming contest team. All this from the guy who basically doesn't like competition. One of my favorite authors is Alfie Kohn. Go figure.

It was a busy week, but I guess not too bad. I'm sort of glad it's a long weekend (even though I normally only teach one class Monday anyway). But it seems a shame this all has to start all over again now.

Terrible realization

2008-07-25T15:58:00.000-04:00

I realized that I now prefer short sleeved cotton shirts which button up to T-shirts in the summer because they do a better job of hiding that I'm getting fat.

On the plus side, I've found tons of really cool Hawaiian print shirts over the past year or two, which I love. I note without comment that Homer Simpson says of Hawaiian print shirts, "There's only two kind of guys who wear those shirts: gay guys and big, fat party animals."

Lessons from Cleaning

2008-05-25T22:12:00.003-04:00

After the school year ended, I had time to do some cleaning. I uncovered evidence of a bed in the back bedroom early on, and what appears to be carpet all over my floor.

Years ago, I used to do a cleaning of everything about once a week. Now granted, at the time I had an apartment that was probably a third the size of this one, and I had motivation because my then boyfriend would be coming over on the weekend. In fact, part of the reason cleaned this time is because the partner was going to come up here in a week or so. (And he did... yea! Yes, I know; I buried the lede on this one. More later.) It gradually got to be longer and longer between thorough cleanings. I'm not sure how I got to be so bad at it.

I realize now that most of my time is spent picking up something, looking at it, and wondering "What the hell do I do with this?" I keep hoping that if I clean one room at a time, and keep moving the miscellaneous undetermined junk from room to room, the piles will get smaller. Oddly enough, it seems to work.

I've also learned that I've slipped into being a Disney fanatic. I realized an alarming amount of stuff I was picking up and looking for places to put was Disney related. Plus I was listening to an audio stream of music from the parks while I cleaned. It just started getting a little funny when I thought about it.

Not scary

2008-04-25T16:54:00.002-04:00

A neighbor's fat little beagle barks at me whenever he sees me outside. But every time he tries to bark it ends in a desperate wheeze for breath. This is not really very threatening.

Perhaps someone should advise him to try the Menacing Stare.

Regional meeting

2008-04-18T21:24:00.002-04:00

I went to a regional mathematics meeting last weekend in Pittsburgh, which was fun. One of my colleagues got a van and brought a group of students down to the meeting. One even gave a student talk that evening. Unfortunately, the student government ran out of funds and couldn't pay for the students to stay overnight, but they still got to see some cool stuff. Including a trip with us for Indian food. I think that may have been a rather big leap for them; I've never seen people so happy to see rice and bread. I even got them to try gulab jamun, which is actually the most fantastic dessert ever created, but is described as cheese balls in honey, so I'm not surprised they were a little hesitant. (I told them afterwards, "But now you can go tell all your friends you ate cheese balls in honey.") I did hear that our lunch necessitated a side trip to Wendy's later when the group split up for a while.

I did stay the night, and I actually gave a short presentation on a little problem I started thinking about last summer. So that makes two presentations at meetings this year. I'm beginning to suspect that getting accepted to talk is not so difficult. However, I still have to do the publishing part, and that takes a little more work.

Fun story from the conference: On the first day, the organizers had a survey in which everyone put stickers on a poster to vote for various activities at regional meetings. When we finished, we wrote our name on the back of the sticker sheet and dropped it in a basket for a drawing the next day. When it came time for the drawing, someone stood up and told us, "The janitor threw out the basket this morning..."

Morning excitement

2008-04-18T21:15:00.002-04:00

When I was down in the basement this morning, I heard something moving around in the empty boxes I have stacked by the sliding glass door. (I haven't yet come up with a reasonable way to put up a curtain or something that isn't a huge project, but boxes sort of work.) I could tap on the boxes and whatever it was would rustle around some more. (This was disconcerting, by the way.) I finally decided it was fluttering, and guessed it might be a bat, since I know bats have gotten in the apartments before.

So I closed up the door upstairs, opened the outside door, and started peeling back layers of boxes until a bird finally slid out from between a few and flew out the door as fast as it could. I have no idea how the bird got inside. It does not speak to the apartment being well-insulated.

Better

2008-04-07T01:09:00.003-04:00

I found out last week that we're getting an Indian restaurant in Erie. It's not open yet, but it has a web address on the sign, and it seems to be a chain which has been well-received in other places. This would be very good news.

And we finally had some good weather this weekend, particularly Sunday. I decided this Sunday must have been my Easter. (I celebrate the return of the sun, not son.) Forecasts call for getting into the 60s several times this week, so I'm happy. I'm sick to death of all the snow.

Which means I actually had some motivation to do a few things. (Not lots, but some.) This is good, since I'm going to a regional MAA meeting in Pittsburgh this coming weekend and I put in to talk. There's a good Indian restaurant near the meeting, so it will be a good trip no matter what. Maybe I'll even learn something mathematical. (Stranger things have happened.)

And I guess it's only about a month or so to the end of the semester and summer, which I'm really looking forward to.

Spending money?

2008-03-30T11:04:00.000-04:00

We have somehow ended up with a largish budget for our library funds this year. I have guesses as to why this is so, but no one really knows what is up or has been able to answer why the budget is larger than usual. However, I strongly believe that the excess is temporary and will be gone next year, so purchasing more journals or database access (which we probably need) is not a good choice, as that would be a recurring cost.

I'm on the committee which makes requests to the library for new acquisitions. Despite the likelihood of losing some of the funding next year, I actually have requested some database access anyway, but mostly I'm requesting books. The collection for mathematics is actually not too bad; previous committee members have made some excellent selections, and while the collection is not huge by any measure, it is of good quality. (Most the the "classic" books that I thought should be in the library turned out to already be in the library when I first looked into this last year, which pleasantly surprised me.) However this leaves me with a difficulty: How do I spend the rest of this excess money? I have not gotten many responses from the department from my e-mail asking for requests, so I'm largely on my own.

If there were a large backlog of standard works that every library should have that we were missing, this would be easy to solve. If I could safely request more periodicals and databases, again I would have no problem. If lots of people in the department responded to my request for suggestions, again it would be easy. Instead I end up poring through catalogs and lists of reviews and trying to determine which are the good books that are worth getting. In some cases, I'm trying to make judgments (usually from reviews) about whether a book in a field I know almost nothing about is any good. Usually this is not too bad, since in any year a few hours of perusal can generate a list of a dozen or so books that are highly recommended. But when the budget is larger, this takes much longer to do.

Not using all of the funds would be a bad idea. It might result in the regular budget getting cut. (If the larger budget actually continues next year, I'll be ecstatic; we'll assume it's permanent and can expand our journal selection accordingly.)

All of this leaves me with the peculiar sensation of trying to meet a deadline for spending large amounts of money, which sounds easier than it is. (OK, I guess if I just wanted to spend the money and didn't care what it was on, I could make a list really quickly, but it seems pointless to me to get a bad book just because the budget it large. Instead, I have to make a few hundred really good selections.)

I never want to look at another book review again.

Tutors

2008-03-26T10:01:00.000-04:00

After Spring Break, I had a flurry of students coming by to ask me how to get a tutor, which they had suddenly decided they needed. I had not seen any of those students in my office hours up to that point.

I'm sure it's a direct result of students going home and hearing from parents that if they're not doing well in their math class, they should get a tutor or something. Unfortunately, they would have done better if they had just kept up and come in for occasional help when they needed it. This may be related to students who will do just about anything for extra credit but who skipped most of the credit that was offered all semester.

Long Winter

2008-03-22T20:30:00.003-04:00

It's been a long winter. I had a rather sudden return to teaching after a full winter break, and then in the second week of classes I got bronchitis. I think it's finally getting better. This is why for Spring Break I just stayed here, but didn't really get caught up on anything. Plus it dumped a lot snow on us in the first weekend of break. (Some "Spring.") The neverending massive piling of snow looks like it might finally be done for the winter, but we're still not really getting above the 40s, so I'm kind of tired of the weather. At least I feel like I can go out sometimes again.

The semi-loss of my break combined with my busy winter break means I haven't seen my partner since Thanksgiving, which is contributing to the general suckitude of the winter. I've opted not to teach any summer classes, so I'll get to see him then, and maybe get something published too. So mostly I'm just waiting for the semester to end now.

Winter Break

2008-02-14T23:47:00.014-05:00

So why has it taken me so long to catch up here? Because it's been taking me this long to start catching up with my life again. I'm not sure I'm quite ready to start the semester, and it started five weeks ago. Why don't I feel fully caught up yet? Let me tell you about my winter break, which is mostly good, but way too busy.

Once finals and grades were done (along with all the other stuff I had to do, like visit the dentist), I set off for a week to visit my folks back in Texas, which is always good. I got back on December 28, and was leaving again on January 1 to go to San Diego for the Joint Meetings of the AMS/MAA, where I was actually accepted to present. (Don't get too excited; it was just a ten minute talk.)

I left on the first as a snow storm was blowing into Erie, and feel glad that my flight got out. I actually had the miraculous good fortune on the flight from Detroit to San Diego to be sitting in an aisle seat with no one in the middle seat. And when I arrived in San Diego at close to ten at night, it was 75 degrees. (Hallelujah!) Picked up my rental car (they gave me a Prius, which I had thought about buying this summer), found my hotel and crashed. Of course, I was in San Diego about five days early, because what's the point of flying to a conference on the other side of the country if you're not going to take some time to enjoy it?

So on the next morning I took a couple hours to drive north and visit a little known tourist attraction for a couple of days:

(Yes! Score...) I had a hotel about a ten minute walk from the parks, which was great. My hotel was beautiful (and a bargain), and it even had an Indian restaurant with a buffet for lunch.

To my delight, all of the holiday decorations, events, and attractions were still running when I got there. The decorations were magnificent, and ubiquitous. (I must admit 'though that it's slightly weird to be walking into the park on a warm sunny day in January with "Sleigh Ride" welling up around you from the hidden speakers.)

I've always wanted to see some of the holiday attractions, like the overlay for "it's a small world" (one of my favorite rides anyway), seen below at night. (Occasionally, the whole thing would light up with projected images and play holiday themed music along with a light show. It was really cool.) It was good timing in another way, too; the ride is now shut down for about nine months of refurbishment.

I also got to see the Nightmare Before Christmas overlay at the Haunted Mansion.
(Which is amazing by the way. The Haunted Mansion was practically worth the price of admission itself.)

On my second night, I made a reservation for the Napa Rose, which is an amazing restaurant at the Grand Californian resort hotel at Disneyland. (This restaurant is even well respected by the Los Angeles food critics.) I had an extraordinary meal, which was essentially a four course chef's special, with each course paired with its own wine.

(Yes, I take pictures of exquisite meals. One of my colleagues found this amusing later in San Diego. On the other hand, I also realized that I was willing to spend more on this meal than I was willing to spend on a hotel room for the night, so you can see that food is a high priority for me.) I should also mention after four or five glasses of wine, all the lights and decorations in the parks are even more amazing. I highly recommend seeing Disneyland decorated for the holidays at night while slightly sloshed.

So I was a little sad to come to the third day, and after a morning at the parks, headed out to go back down to San Diego for the conference. On the way down, it started to rain. When I checked in at my hotel, they sprang an extra 20 dollar per day charge for having a car, and the hotel room was not as nice as the one I'd checked out of in Anaheim (but cost more). I was an unhappy camper. Why did I leave Disneyland anyway? (It probably didn't help that my feet were hurting from this point from walking so much the last few days, and I had to do a lot of walking to get around in San Diego too.) The rain sort of interrupted touring plans a colleague and I were talking about on the day before the conference started, too.

But by the end of the week, the sun came out and San Diego was at least pretty, as this shot of the convention center attests:

And with the aid of a Frommers, I found more exquisite food for myself and a colleague to enjoy:
(Actually, I had to sneak out for the sushi on my own. So few people seem to go for this.)

Oh, and the conference? It went fine. Saw some reasonable talks (and some not so reasonable), gave my talk without any real problems, went to my colleagues talk, and ran into several people I wasn't expecting to. (Most were from grad school, but I ran into one math major from college I hadn't seen in ages.) Then I finally flew back to Erie, got home around 11 pm on Thursday night, and realized: Oh crud. Classes start Monday.

So this is why, although I had a pretty great break for the most part, I'm still a little dazed and confused and not sure I'm ready to start the semester.

I also learned an important lesson from all of this: Disneyland is more fun than a math conference.

Starting already?

2008-01-13T22:29:00.000-05:00

It shouldn't come as a surprise, that semester is starting, but I haven't much stopped moving since the semester ended. I was here a week getting everything ready to go, then flew off to Texas for a week, then flew to San Diego, rented a car and drove up to Disneyland Resort for a couple of days (how could I be that close and miss it?), then back down to San Diego for the joint Mathematics meetings of the AMS/MAA (including giving a talk), and just got back Thursday night.

And classes start tomorrow? Yikes. I'm not ready for this.

More about the trip soon, I hope. Assuming I survive my first week.

The Perversity of Self-Referential Teaching

2007-11-30T11:45:00.000-05:00

When I taught my students version one of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (the one which tells you how to take derivatives of functions involving integrals), I said:

Isn't this easy? Don't you wish the whole test was going to be this? Well, I will go ahead and tell you that when I put one of these problems on the exam, half of you will forget and miss it.

I say this every time I teach the section, in the hopes that it might make the material stick. This time I went one step further and added:

That will be true despite the fact that I have just told you this.

I thought possibly that this statement might make at least a few more students decide to remember it. (It seemed to make an impression at least; they did laugh.)

Well I gave the exam this morning, and it turns out that in fact more than half the class forgot it. I think somewhere around 80% forgot it. Maybe next time I will try: "Everyone gets this problem every time, so don't bother to study this at all."

Spring Semester

2007-11-19T17:28:00.000-05:00

I have a schedule for Spring now. I don't have any more 8 am classes--Yea! I'm also scheduled to teach three sections of math for elementary ed students--also Yea! And I'm teaching Discrete Math, which is worth a cautious and qualified Yea (?)!

Discrete was my favorite class in college, and it was also the "sexy" class that convinced many people to be math majors. It is the course where students learn to write proofs, and the topics tend to include things like set theory, formal logic, and combinatorics. (Of course, I got to take it with a realio trulio set theorist, so how cool is that?) The only problem is that since then I've been at two other schools where Discrete Math seems to be a major problem (including this one), rather than a joy. I have no idea why this is, and I wonder if I'm up to doing the job my professor did with my class. I hope so. I think it's a very cool course, even though it's not in the area I ended up in.

I'm not sure why, but I've already had two students try to get me to sign an override form so they can take Discrete Math even though they haven't taken the prerequisite yet. Hint to any students thinking about this: The answer is no.

In which I play with squeaky toys

2007-11-16T09:47:00.001-05:00

The university is having College Bowl type of competition in which all the departments put together teams of students to compete on general knowledge questions. The Math/CS department put together a team a few weeks ago using a preliminary competition. Since I was the first person who didn't say "no" when asked, I played MC and read the questions (which someone else had downloaded from a College Bowl site.) [I received some kudos on my reading, by the way, because I didn't trip too badly over reading all the odd place and people names that fill the various literature, movie, geography, and history questions. I had to point out that this just meant I was good at reading confidently, not that I had any friggin' clue how to pronounce any of these things.] The students responded by squeezing a squeaky toy (since we don't have buzzers), then got to answer the question. We selected a team based on how people answered.

This afternoon, we had scheduled a practice round, where students would compete against a faculty team. (The faculty team won't otherwise compete in any way.) Since I again didn't say "No" when asked^*, I've ended up on the faculty team, so this afternoon I got to play with squeaky toys too. Of course, this means someone else had to be recruited to read questions, but that was apparently more appealing than having to show up on the team. I understand this, since I had the distinct impression I was going to look like a complete idiot. (There are plenty of things I know I ought to know as a generally educated person but don't; I just do my best to keep anyone from finding out about these.)

I spent the week studying by reading An Incomplete Education and setting my TiVo to record everything history related that I could find. I also looked for other random trivia that tends to show up in these things. (Did you know all 14 mountains more than 8,000 meters above sea level are all in Asia, either in the Himalayan mountain range or the Karakorum range? The first man to climb all 14 was Reinhold Messner of Italy. If you count height as measurement from base to top, the tallest mountain is actually Mauna Kea in Hawaii at over 10,000 meters, but that includes a portion beneath the ocean. The deepest point in the ocean is the Challenger Deep in the Marianas trench off the coast of Southeast Asia, which is 2 km deeper than Mt. Everest is tall.)

As it turned out, I managed not to look too foolish, and in fact one thing I found in Incomplete came up. (One of the 12 supreme court decisions the book listed as ones everyone should know.) So I feel like some studying paid off. But there was nothing about mountains.

--
^* "I'm just a girl who can't say ..."

Dementia

2007-10-24T15:43:00.000-04:00

I think I'm going senile. (Or maybe it's just a side effect of being a math professor.) On Tuesday of last week, I forgot to go to a class. (It meets at a different time on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. What really happened is that I forgot it was Tuesday, and the class started half an hour earlier than I thought.)

Then on Wednesday of last week, I forgot to leave class. (At least I forgot to get my stuff. I must have let a student distract me out of the classroom, then forgot I left all my stuff spread out across the desk until I happened across it again four hours later.) Yesterday I discovered I left all of my stuff in the classroom again.

I told my colleague across the hall about this, and she asked me when I came back from class today if I had all my books. I laughed, then left my umbrella in the hallway after I got my door open.

January

2007-10-18T21:44:00.000-04:00

So guess who had his proposal approved to speak at the national Joint Mathematics Meetings in January?

San Diego, here I come. (Hey, I wrote that dissertation. I may as well get some use out of it eventually.)

Traveling

2007-09-20T22:17:00.001-04:00

I went down to Pittsburgh for a meeting this past weekend on using technology in math teaching. I didn't really find anything that impressed me much, 'though. We did have a demonstration of "clickers" that I was interested in, but it mostly killed my interest in them. (For those not in the know, clickers are small remote control devices that students can use to respond to short in-class questions, usually multiple choice format. The results are collected and tabulated by computer and can be displayed. They've been used a lot in physics classes.) I've thought clickers looked intriguing, but I'm not sure I'd bother for anything other than a large class now, and maybe not then. It seems like a great deal of trouble for not so much gain. We also got to play with fancy calculators, which are kind of cool, but a complete pain to try to enter anything into. I don't see using anything like this until/unless the input is better. I'd just go with notebook computers if you want portability, personally.

On the other hand, I got to meet a few people and we did get to go out to eat Indian food. (I think I may have introduced some of my colleagues to the joys of it; I'm not sure.) Indian is one thing I have a hard time finding around Erie, so I'm glad I got to do that. But it all pretty much ate up my weekend, so I'm glad I've got another one coming up. It will give me a chance to finish grading my latest round of tests. Oh joy.

Starting the semester

2007-09-06T22:01:00.000-04:00

Well, here's the short notes from the first two weeks, now almost over:

An 8:00 am class four days a week is very hard on me; I'm not a morning person. It's very tough dragging myself out of bed at 7:55 every morning. I'm worried since this is a Calc I class that I may have the continuing 8am Calc II class in the spring, too.
Actually, the subjects that I'm teaching this semester are all things I've taught before, and out of the same book, even. It's kind of weird to have a schedule I essentially could have been teaching at my last job. (Well, it's the same book modulo an edition or two. I hate that publishers keep rearranging and changing the problems to force students to buy new copies. It also makes me change my assignments and homework quizzes, which is a pain.)
I let a student from one of my spring classes borrow a library book I had out. He subsequently disappeared completely, and did not take the book back to either me or the library. Since he's a major in our department, I figured I could grab him from someone's class in the first week (and perhaps shake him). But he's not enrolled in any classes this semester. His home address on the system lists Pakistan. I'm annoyed.
I use scantron forms (bubble sheets) in my calculus classes for daily homework quizzes. I ran the forms today, after going through the stack to try to correct problems with the students' forms, like forgetting to bubble things in, or using pen, or putting in the wrong information. (As it turns out, I missed one that used pen for bubbling in just a single item, which screwed things up.) I'm also noticing that they are calling the bubble sheets "scantron" here, as we did in high school. This after I spent about a decade at my last school getting used to calling them "opscans".
I'm an adviser now... apparently. I have a list of students who appear on my "advising" menu on the system. I realize we have a mixed department, but I'm not sure why all of my advisees are computer science majors. We got an e-mail suggesting that we contact all our advisees early in the semester. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to tell them, 'though.

New Toy

2007-08-25T13:23:00.000-04:00

I bought a replacement camera so I can take pictures of my students when classes start again (Monday, Ack!), so that means I can take pictures of stuff. Like the new car:

OK, now back to regularly scheduled class preparation.

The Pile is Following me

2007-08-19T12:53:00.000-04:00

Remember the pile? The giant stack of trash (including furniture) dumped out on the lawn after a neighbor moved out in Virginia? It followed me to Pennsylvania, apparently. When I came back from my trip Saturday night, I found the neighbor (on the same side as before, mind you) had left a huge pile of trash out in the yard. (Granted, a much smaller pile this time, which does not actually include furniture, but is still impressive.) Trash collection on Monday morning picked up only the bagged items, which still left a veritable cornucopia of junk. I was briefly hopeful, because there seemed to be people cleaning the next door apartment who apparently bagged up most of the remaining stuff, but then left everything. There was a local skunk which was nosing around the pile at night.

Do I just attract this for some reason?

Thankfully, the stuff has finally disappeared.

Time Wasters of the Summer

2007-08-15T13:57:00.001-04:00

Just a short list of things that have helped me waste time this summer:

I know the lyrics to Yakko's World and Wakko's America. I'm waiting for a good opportunity to whip them out.
I finished Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven. I loved the Might and Magic series, but they stopped coming out for Mac after the fifth. (I'm a fan of turn based role-playing games, because I have no coordination or patience to try to do things in real time.) However, I have access to a PC now, so I bought a used copy of VI-IX off of Half.com and had fun with VI most of the summer. I finally obtained blaster weapons for my characters, defeated the Kreegan queen, and saved the world. (For those not familiar, the series is a basic fantasy role playing game that mixes in a sci-fi element at the end of each game. So you have archers and wizards battling robots on spaceships or something. Those who know me can probably see why this appeals to me.)
At the end of July, Deathly Hallows came out. (Book Seven of Harry Potter, but you knew that, right?) I spent a day (about 12 hours) reading it, so I'm not sure if it counts as a total summer time waster. Besides, how can that be wasted time? I finally know about how Neville and Harry were really switched at birth but both have been slipped Polyjuice potion in their sleep for their entire lives. (You have to read if you want to know what really happens.) I was delighted by the book, and was equally delighted (and smug) to find that basically everything I predicted about the end came to pass. But in any case, I'm glad I finally know how it all ends up. I even apparently convinced one of my colleagues to read the whole series.
I'm not sure it counts as time-wasting, but I did spend about two weeks researching and shopping for a car. I hate doing things like that, but I always want to make sure I get a good deal on something I like. I also looked into replacement digital cameras, and next up is a navigation system.

Recently...

2007-08-15T13:41:00.001-04:00

I bought a new car. I bought the car because I no longer completely trusted the old one to go on long trips. I need to go on long trips because my other half lives in another state 7 hours away. I was waiting until late in the summer because I was waiting to see if we were going on strike or not, which was supposed to be settled by the end of July. We supposedly weren't, although this is up in the air again. I got tired of waiting, said "screw it", and bought a lovely blue Toyota Camry using my summer school money as the down payment. When the contract is settled I'll pay off an additional large chunk of it.

I would include a picture of the new car with this post, since it really is extra lovely, but my camera is broken. I discovered this when I went to take pictures of my students at the start of summer classes and found it functions perfectly except for not taking any pictures, which is a bit of a snag for a camera. I think I need to replace this before the semester starts. Interestingly, I was searching for recommendations on a new model from the same website that had suggested my original model a few years ago, and found my current camera mentioned in an article on "the worst digital cameras ever made". Which makes me wonder if I'm wise to take advice from them again.

But in any case, I got the car and got to travel down to Kentucky again for a week. I love visiting, but dislike the trip. The new car is nice 'though. It's much quieter on the road than the Focus, which is nice, because it's easier to nap while I drive. We did get to make a short trip to Lexington and found nice Indian food, which is one thing that Erie is a little short on. (Although there is a grocery store that stocks tons of Indian, including lots of nifty pre-made dishes in little pouches that you can heat up and eat. It's lovely.)

Now I'm back and have to start planning for the semester, plus possibly do something about finally publishing something. There ended up being less summer than I thought for all of this.

Superpowers

2007-07-23T23:39:00.000-04:00

I was just purusing SuperDickery.com, which is a riot, and has as a central premise "Superman is a dick," supported by a wide array of Superman comics covers showing Superman being a... well, you get the picture. But it also includes a great gallery of ridiculous super powers, including heroes such as "Kite Man", and powers like super weaving and super ventriloquism. Which got me to thinking about a conversation I had years ago with a fellow grad student in which we tried to think up reasonably good, but unusual, superpowers we could have. I picked the power to locate any specific penny anywhere at any time. I thought this was reasonably good, actually. You could track anyone by just slipping one tiny penny onto their person. Tape a penny to everything you own, and presto--no more looking for the remote. And pennies are so ubiquitous, no one notices them, but pretty much everyone (in the US, anyway) has them. Plus you'd likely be able to find your keys when they fell out of a hole in your pocket because you probably dropped a penny at the same time, even if you didn't tape a penny to them. I think it's superpower which is just at the right level of being useful without being in any sense overpowered. My friend wanted to the power to inflict pain on men. I don't think she was joking, but I don't think she was really getting into the game, either. I suspect there were unspoken issues with some man or another in particular.

I also remember a good conversation regarding the premise of massive numbers of random mutations granting superpowers in the X-men series. We reasoned that there would have to be a whole bunch of mutants with totally useless powers. Like the guy who can move his nose to any location on his body. Or a woman with unlimited flatulence. (Interesting combination, those two.)

My deep desire for a superpower 'though is to be able to teleport anywhere instantaneously. (And I've had this wish even since before I was living seven hours away from the significant other.) Consider the travel possibilities. (And say goodbye to admission fees at Disney World. :-) ) Commuting would be a snap. Live where ever you found a nice, cheap place, and work where ever you want to. Miss your favorite restaurant in another state? Have dinner there tonight. Or explore the restaurants in Paris, Hong Kong, or Sri Lanka. As an added plus, you don't even have to worry about whether you're walking in a bad neighborhood or not. If you don't like it or someone jumps you, just zap back home. You even have a good entrepreneurial opportunity: no one could beat your very expensive one-hour delivery service. (Although it might be in less demand in a world with e-mail.) Of course, if you're unscrupulous, there are plenty of opportunities to do anything you want, too. Have I spent too much time thinking about this? Yes, of course, but that's what I do. You should hear the elaborate plans I have for what to do if I should ever find a genie.

Back Again

2007-07-17T15:01:00.000-04:00

I'm back again. I do tend to have these lapses as things get busy, but I think I'm justified this time. I spent the last five weeks with a double summer session load, teaching for about two hours in the morning and three hours in the evening on Monday through Thursday. Then spending two and a half hours in office hours each afternoon, to which some of my students actually came on a regular basis. I had to resist the tendency for it to become "The professor does your homework for you" afternoons. We had a prof in grad school who was famous for that, actually. When I am relatively rested and alert, homework questions always turn into "20 questions from the Prof", which start with "What are they asking you to do here?" and end with "And does that answer the question we started with?" Very Socratic of me. When I am worn out, my answer tends to more sound more like "take the limit; watch your algebra; you'll get 13/4.")

We did not end up on strike, although we have yet to see (and vote to approve) the final agreement. At least I got to finish my session without interruption. It felt rushed regardless. (I still seriously can't believe anyone can learn calculus in three hours a day, four nights a week.)

And since I'm not teaching, I can just be amused at hearing the students streaming by my open door in the hallway this morning on the way out of a quiz, saying:

"It probably would have helped if I'd done my homework."
"Yeah--I just put down whatever I thought it might be."

Ah, the wonderful sounds of Not-My-Problem. In fact, I've had a passably good afternoon. I think I've even proved something, which makes me feel like a real mathematician. (I ran across an interesting probability problem in considering the distribution of candy in my candy bowl just before the session started, and I've partly solved it now. But the bowl is empty now, so maybe I won't get any more inspiration.) And thank goodness I did, because one of the things I still have to do this summer is get something published.

Good Shoes

2007-06-25T21:10:00.000-04:00

I went over the week end and got the most comfortable dress-casual shoes I could find, so if I have to walk picket lines next week I can do it without killing my feet. It looks like a strike might happen; there has been little change in the negotiations by the administration. (There is of course plenty of time for them to make some reasonable offer, but I'm losing faith at this point.) Who knows what craziness will ensue from the weekend onward. Stay tuned.

Worst. Movie. Ever.

2007-06-23T13:16:00.000-04:00

I've been participating in the League of Dubious Film run by friends this summer. The first I saw with them was BeastMaster, which I have no objections to because, hey, Marc Singer in a loin cloth. (Interestingly, we discovered that there are parts of this movie no one had ever seen before because we'd all watched it on TV, and TV usually cuts out shots which include boobies, for example.)

But the second movie was something called Zardoz, starring (believe it or not) Sean Connery in an orange diaper with bandoliers. He's a member of the "Brutals", one of two divisions of the future human race. He's one of the Brutals who is employed by a floating stone head called Zardoz to exterminate as many of the rest of the Brutals as possible, until he decides to stow away in the head and meets the "Eternals" who live forever in the Vortex. The Eternals are apparently very advanced and psychic (or perhaps just prone to weird convulsions; it's hard to tell) but apparently have lost the technology from our time which allows women to keep their tops on. (There does seem to be a common boobie theme in many bad movies. I keep thinking of Joe Bob Briggs.) The immortal line from the beginning of the movie is the stone head roaring "The Gun is Good! The P*nis is Evil!" This lead someone to hypothesize early on that it was a lesbian movie, but we decided after watching for a while it most definitely was not. I finally decided it must have been made by fundamentalist Christians, because while they say it's evil, they obviously can't stop thinking about it for ten minutes.

But I have to give a warning here: The movie is much worse than it sounds. It could easily have been edited down by at least an hour and have lost nothing (except perhaps all the trippy drug related sequences with flashing lights and disjointed sounds and clips). The floating stone head takes up far too little screen time. There are no other lines which compare with the "Gun is Good!" line. The only point to the movie (although poorly made) is that humans shouldn't live forever. (Or perhaps it just wants to communicate that women have boobies, which was a better made point.) It's a truly hideous experience which no one should have to sit through. And yet amazingly, any film, no matter how bad, has its adherents. There are actually crazy people who think this is the greatest science fiction movie ever made.

That said, there are apparently movies that people have found more unpleasant to sit through. I've gotten some amusement out of reading through some of the reviews on BadMovies.org, which gives Zardoz three "droplets". (I think they're slime drops, but I'm not sure.) That ranks it as a middling bad movie. Some movies get only one (described as "A bad movie, even for me"), or a "skull" (described as "This is going to hurt, lots"). Personally I'm intrigued by the five droplet movies, such as Drunken Wu Tang, which is a Kung Fu flick featuring a watermelon monster. Check out the site; it has pictures.

Updates

2007-06-09T13:04:00.000-04:00

A few quick updates:

Regarding my post Pennsylvania Registration, Take II: Apparently, Pennsylvania does send out registration renewals; they just don't send them to me.
Promoted from comments on my post "50 Years of Sitcoms": Obie Ben Ken Obie says
A fair number of sitcom plots go back to the Roman comedians Plautus and Terence, which had their own stock characters (clever slave, clueless master, oaf) and situations.
Well there you have it. Those clever buggers. (Although it still leaves unanswered who they may have stolen from. The lack of written language if you go back far enough is a real pain.)
I spent part of yesterday wrestling with air conditioners. I've added a second unit to the back bedroom and I'm going to see if these two somewhat overpowered units upstairs will take care of the whole apartment or not. Unfortunately the larger one I put into my bedroom is a bit noisier than the old one.
I've been spending time getting ready for my summer classes, although not nearly as much as I wish I had. Classes start Monday. I'm really not sure how I'm getting through all the material in one of the classes in the time allotted. I also have to say I think having a four hour class in a summer session by meeting three hours a day, four days a week for five weeks is a terrible idea. I can't imagine how any student could end up learning anything.

Gender Genie

2007-05-26T18:38:00.000-04:00

This post isn't nearly as weird as you thought it was. Or maybe it is.

It is not, amazingly enough, about a new approach to sex changes involving a lamp and a lot of rubbing. No, this is about a web site. Put the other thing out of your mind. No, seriously, I mean it.

There is apparently a program called the Gender Genie which will attempt to guess if the author visits the "Buoys" or the "Gulls" room at Cap'n Jack's Fish Shack, Argh. Alas, I'm afraid it's not completely consistent with my writing, although it seems to be right more often than half the time, so it may be on to something. Perhaps the confusion is a sign that some of my favorite writers whom I try to emulate are of the girly persuasion. Or maybe it can just tell I have The Gay.

Of course, if you read this because you're interested in transgendered fairy tales instead, try looking up "The Girl Who Pretended to be a Boy", included in The Violet Fairy Book, which is even available free as a Project Gutenberg etext. I aim to please.

50 Years of Sitcoms

2007-05-24T00:13:00.001-04:00

Lately, I've been watching reruns of I Love Lucy on my TiVo. (This is part of what I think may be a part of the development of a TiVo user: Eventually you see everything you really wanted to see originally, and start trying new things to see if you like them or not. It ultimately broadens your palette, because you never have to miss anything.) It was in fact a darned good show, and Lucille Ball was very talented.

But there's something odd about it. If you watch episodes for a while, you get the distinct impression that you can hear the last 50 years of sitcoms being written. The plots sometimes seem unnervingly familiar, and not just because people like to do "tributes" to famous scenes like the chocolate factory. It's because I think every plot that came to be used in every sitcom may have gotten its start here. Or perhaps earlier. At least according to Wikipedia, many of the plots were rewrites of plots Ball performed earlier on the radio show My Favorite Husband. And who knows how original the material was then. Maybe early humans were sitting around a campfire going "Og think he fool me... me turn tables and fool Og back!" while everyone laughed uproariously. (Who knows, it may have come just days after the first "pull my finger" joke.)

As a downside, it does mean there are few real surprises in the shows, but it's still fun to watch. Sometimes I feel a little like a friend of mine who had never watched It's a Wonderful Life. When I finally got her to watch it, her reaction at one point was "Oh, it's one of these, where he sees what the world would be like without him."

Pennsylvania Registration, Take II

2007-05-24T00:08:00.000-04:00

Last year, I thought it was weird that Pennsylvania does auto registration through AAA. (I still do think that's weird.) This year, I notice that either I missed it, or Pennsylvania does not send anything when your registration is about to run out. My stickers expire at the end of the month, but I haven't heard anything. Thankfully all that stuff can just be done on-line these days, so I'm still set.

Coke as a Health Food

2007-05-14T15:33:00.000-04:00

I noticed this recently, but had an opportunity to try it when I went out to lunch today: Diet Coke Plus, which is Diet Coke with added vitamins and minerals.

Short take is that it tastes fine, although there may be a slightly different taste--I'm not sure if I'm imagining it or not. I actually think the added vitamins and minerals are pretty silly, and I prefer Zero anyway (which is almost as good as the real thing), but there's nothing wrong with it, even if it does sound kind of funny.

And in a related topic, why is it that you always see health nuts going crazy trying to find some way to hate diet soda? There's no calories, it's not really much different than drinking water, except it tastes good. Actually, I suspect that's the objection: If you're not suffering, you must be doing something wrong.

--
Postscript: The end is in sight. If I finish grading one more final, I can be done with grades for the semester. Yea!

I so take advantage of my students

2007-05-03T20:09:00.000-04:00

"I'm happy to go over these problems, review further, or answer any questions you want for the rest of the class, but since some people seem interested in leaving, I won't penalize anyone who decides to leave."

Within 5 minutes, the room is always cleared, no matter that a final or whatever else is coming. Which means I get to leave early.

Well, almost always. Occasionally there will be a small group of 2-3 who will stay, but then I just get to sit down and have a tutoring session, which is fun and easy. For the most part, everyone takes the opportunity to leave, with (I'm assuming) the belief that they'll just study "later".

For some reason, it always makes me think of Calvin's mom telling Susie that "it's mean to take advantage of kids with no common sense" when she finds Calvin about to eat five worms for Susie's nickel.

Applied Combinatorics

2007-04-28T21:31:00.000-04:00

When I was in grad school, a friend and I noticed that one of our professors would appear multiple days a row in the same outfit. In one case, he showed up in the same outfit for a week, and only changed suddenly at the end of the week when he hosted a visitor to the school. (I hypothesized that a conversation in his household that morning probably started with "You are not wearing the same thing you've had on all week while your friend is visiting...")

This may have left me a little paranoid about what I wear to class. Sometimes (like this semester) I try to keep track of what I've worn to different classes over the course of the semester. This leaves me figuring out how to arrange my sartorial schedule to have the fewest number of repeats for each class. Fortunately, I have several classes this semester which only meet once a week, and that makes it possible to make it look like even I have a wide and varied wardrobe.

I was very relieved when the weather improved enough that I could wear some short sleeved shirts, because I was running out of long sleeved shirts for my twice a week class. Then it got cruddy again. We're down to the last week of classes, and I'm barely able to wear my warm weather clothes. At least I'm ready for my summer classes.

On the other hand, it occurs to me that this may not be necessary at all. I usually can't remember what anyone I know was wearing the previous day, so I'm not sure I'd notice if anyone was repeating. A professor in Psychology even assured me that people are very unlikely to remember. Still, I'll try not to wear the same thing all week. It'll only make future professors paranoid.

Handkerchiefs

2007-04-07T16:04:00.000-04:00

I received a genuine paper faith handkerchief in the mail from a church, because "someone connected to [my] home needs God's help and blessings." I was supposed to print my name and my "most pressing problem, by faith" on the handkerchief, and place it by the bed while I slept. Then the next day I was supposed to mail it back to them. And lest you doubt, these handkerchiefs apparently have amazing powers! According to the letter, people have had fathers and husbands stop drinking, had a son get out of jail (I'm assuming legally, but they weren't clear on this), had their home fixed up, gotten a check for $3,500, gotten big financial blessings, gotten $5,000, and gotten a check for $2,500. (There seems to be kind of an interesting pattern to a lot of these.)

I figured my most pressing problem at the moment was the rotten sinus problems I've been having for weeks, so I put that down and went to sleep. (I always do everything strange churches tell me to do in the mail.) Of course, having a handkerchief handy right by the bed when you wake up in the middle of the night with sinus problems leads to only one conclusion, and now I'm not sure if they really want the handkerchief back....
---
(1) Oh come on, now, you didn't really think I was serious, did you? The "handkerchief" is a printed 8x10 piece of paper. Like I really need paper cuts on my nose in addition to bad sinuses. Or that I'd actually listen to a church, for that matter.

(2) I remember these used to go out as "prayer rugs", I think. They've apparently now found a bible passage that sort of ties in with what they're doing, so they call them "faith handkerchiefs" now. (Acts 19:11-12, if you're interested. It looks to me to be a "We must hold high his holy gourd!" type of interpretation if I ever saw one.)

Winter is heck on roads here

2007-04-02T23:12:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure if it's from the salt, the plowing, people with chains or studs on their tires, or just the freezing and melting (except when the heck did melting happen?), but the roads are a mess after the winter. Potholes everywhere. Big ones. Yikes. Now that the snow is all melted it's easier to tell.

And oh, what's this? More snow forecast for the end of the week. Maybe it's a fluke. But this weekend is Easter, so we'll just hope Jesus doesn't see his shadow, or we'll have six more weeks of winter. And that reminds me: I need to plan my Day-After-Easter discount candy shopping trip.

Trip Report

2007-03-31T20:01:00.000-04:00

It was great to see my better half again, and also great to see some people (and a few places) I had not seen in a while. The area has been growing rapidly. I'm amazed at how much new construction (some complete and some in progress) there has been since I left in June of last year. So I suppose I would rate it a good trip. Was it relaxing?

In the words of Edna Krabappel, "Ha."

Things went fine until the car started dying on me. That didn't happen until we got to Virginia, so when it got very bad on the second day, I took it to the dealer I bought it from. Unfortunately, the person who needed to look at it was gone and wouldn't be back until the next day. We ended up stranded at the hotel until the next day, then sitting in the dealership until about 4:00. The dealer finally said they couldn't replicate the problem, even though they had someone drive it for about 80 miles. So we finally just left for Kentucky, after stopping to get a prepaid cellular phone for the trip.

By the way, to activate the phone, you dial an 800 number to an automated system which does most of the setup before it transfers you to a real person to finish. The automated system opened with, as I recall: " 'Sup? This is Symone, and I'm here to get you set up with your new phone..." and continued with responses like "OK, cool." Much eye-rolling on my part ensued. The real person (who was probably much hipper than whoever wrote the script for the recording) never said "sup" once, by the way.

We got back to Kentucky without the car dying again, so I felt like I was in good shape. Then we found out the next morning that it was going to snow in Pennsylvania for the next three days, so I set off immediately to get home. I drove the last third of the trip in increasing snowfall and accumulation, and got in around 11 in the evening. Most of my body was sore from being constantly tensed up for the last few hours. I had forgone stopping at rest stops because I was iffy about how well the various on and off ramps had cleared.

But I made it intact, and the car never died again. It hasn't really given me more trouble since, although I did have a hard time starting it last weekend. Unfortunately, it also means I feel trapped. Unless it repeats the same problem and I can get the problem positively identified and fixed, I can't take this car on another long trip. So I can't really go down to Kentucky or anything else again until either that happens or I get a new car.

I resurface

2007-03-08T20:47:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the delay in posting, but I wandered to near the edge of the earth, and fell off. I've been battling sea monsters for some time, trying to make it back up the edge. (That first step's a doozy.) Or at least it feels that way sometimes.

In reality, I've just been living day to day, trying to keep up with all my classes and at the same time find ways to be involved with service to the campus and community, and at some point I'm supposed to publish some groundbreaking research. As a good start, I went to a seminar given by another new faculty member on her research area and actually understood most of what she was talking about, which made me feel like doing a little victory dance. Now if I only understood any of my research, I'd be in very good shape.

I've gotten away with an unusually light student load this semester. One class was an upper level elective that only attracted about 15 people, another was restricted by a Dean for a special cohort and didn't get over about 25, and another meets once a week at an odd time and ended up with only 19 students. With another class of just under 40, it comes out as a moderately manageable load. Except of course I have to keep coming up with stuff to do. Especially in the topics class, which is all me. (It's never been taught before, so it's up to me what we do. I keep feeling like I'm scrambling for something interesting each week, and I fear I've already used my A material.)

In the other classes, I have no lack of material, but some lack of time in which to get the students to understand it. A recent test of consumer mathematics in one class left me with the distinct impression that many students were just randomly selecting numbers and operations in hopes it might solve the problem: "Find the interest rate? Hm... let's see, I'll add those two numbers, divide by this, and then multiply by ten... maybe that's it." Perhaps they saw too many of the old McDonald's commercials, and are sold on the tag line: "Hey, it could happen." Unfortunately, passing will not happen for a number of them. Or there are my elementary education students, who in fact I like very much and who seem to mostly try hard, but a number just don't grasp some concepts.

And I currently have my winter cold. I may continue to have it until we get spring weather, which around here may be July. I just want my sinuses to be happy again. Happy sinuses. That's the dream.

But we're up to Spring Break; I've just taught my last class for the next week or so. I'm planning on driving down to pick up my better half, then going back to Virginia for a visit for a few days. I'm looking forward to seeing him again, and to visiting some friends. And we've got a list of restaurants we need to visit again while we're in the area. That was a high priority for both of us. It may explain this expansion I seem to keep undergoing. That or all the chips, cookies, and ice cream I tend to eat at home. But I'm feeling limited on what I can do about that, since I've been tending toward depression again this year. It's not that this is a bad place (although I am getting a little tired of all the snow), but it's not where my partner is, and that's just not satisfactory. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to fix this right now. But at least I get to see him soon.

Next week will be a good one.

In which I play Real Professor (TM)

2007-02-17T17:38:00.000-05:00

The last week or so has had me feeling like I'm a real professor, which I guess I am now. I'm just not used to thinking of myself that way.

I'm serving on the library committee for our department, and got to recommend books for the library to get. After encouragement from the department, I even requested some books that might be helpful for my own research interests. (This seems odd to me, since it's pretty much just an undergraduate institution, and as such, I may be the only person to ever look at one or two of these.)

Then I gave a talk for the department. Granted, it was just a rehash of my dissertation defense, but it was a talk. (Which meant I had to go remember what all that stuff in my dissertation meant. More or less. Thank goodness no one had any questions about asymptotic values.)

And finally on Friday, I met for the first time with a newly formed presidential commission on LGBT issues at the university. Me, on a commission. We should have a bat-signal style spotlight to summon us for emergency meetings.

All this is on top of all the usual stuff going on. I'm just now grading papers from students who think that paying off a loan early could save them over $100,000 off of the $982 finance charge. (They have a test coming up, too.) Earlier in the week I was trying to teach my elementary education students how to work in bases other than 10. (It's no wonder this tends to be known as a disaster for students; the elementary teachers may not understand it.) And my topics class is working on a take-home test which has generated plenty of consternation.

But hey, I feel like a professional sometimes now.

OK, so I watch bad movies

2007-02-06T17:35:00.000-05:00

In my childhood, I went through a phase where I just loved Escape to Witch Mountain, which was about two orphans with psychic powers who turn out to be from another planet. Mostly I think I just liked the idea of telekinetic powers.

Apparently more people than just me liked to too, because it spawned a sequel, Return from Witch Mountain. I remember reading the book, but I don't remember if I saw it as a kid or not. Well the sequel was on so I Tivo'd it, and it's pretty bad but still kind of fun for some reason. I couldn't help laughing every time I saw the description 'though:

Teens help two psychic children from another world thwart an evil scientist and his henchwoman.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? I suppose it is. The scary part is, it leaves things out, like the mind control device and telepathy with an heroic goat. But it gets better: The evil scientist is played by Christopher Lee and the henchwoman is Bette Davis. (How the mighty have fallen.)

Not that there aren't worse things, like "Afro Samurai" on Spike. I might have held on for a while if they hadn't included the evil gangsta cyborg monks.

The Beast

2007-02-01T21:57:00.000-05:00

I have looked into the maw of the beast, and have survived.

As I've mentioned before, my department head apparently thought it would be amusing to send the southern boy to teach at the satellite campus twenty miles away one night a week in the spring semester. We live in a major snow belt. This is why I live within walking distance of my office.

Last Tuesday, there were predictions for a fair amount of heavy snowfall towards evening. Now the university has shut down evening classes twice before while I've been here because of heavy snow making the interstates impassable, so there was a chance that would happen again. However, I needed to be there by 3:30, we had already had plenty of snow, and the university does not generally shut down the evening classes until at least 3:00, so I knew I was going to end up traveling no matter what happened.

First, I needed to unearth my car, including shoveling out the huge drift behind it made by the plow that (partly) clears the parking lot. I do this by cleaning the car, then hauling the snow out of the way and piling it onto areas with grass on the sides of the parking lot. Other people do this by throwing the snow off into the middle of the parking lot, I suppose on the hopes that the plow may come again at some point before anyone else needs to drive anywhere. If it's that well thought out. In the course of clearing space around my car, I accidentally knocked off the side mirror again, which has been looking at little loose. (Remember when I lost the side mirror this summer?) I reattached with duct tape for now. I think it might be time to look into having this completely repaired.

Driving to class was fine; the main roads were pretty well cleared, and what snow we had at the moment was light. Around 5:30, the class took a break and discovered the massive amount of snow streaking down outside. This is not promising.

I left around 6:45, after cleaning the car again (which had gotten rather caked). I told the car I had faith in it, that it could indeed get me home safely even in this weather. I patted it's dashboard and headed (slowly) out of the parking lot and onto the road, making my way down to the state highway that runs in front of my street. So far, only mild amounts of sliding while going around corners. That unnerving sense of shift which you know shouldn't be there, the sense in your gut that part of your movement is not under your control.

The snow gets heavier, and I have the wipers on full. The road is completely white, and I'm mostly steering based on previous tracks in the snow rather than any signs of actual road. There are headlights behind me, so someone is following, perhaps too closely. Perhaps they think I should speed up. They can bite me.

There is little traffic on this road, which is mostly good. I make it to a mid point town and stop at a gas station to fill up. After I leave, I get the paranoid feeling I often do and check the side mirror to see if I've closed the gas flap. It turns out I actually haven't. I'm in the middle of nowhere, on a two-lane road with no stops, where I cannot see the shoulder because it is under drifts of snow, with thick and heavy snowfall, and there are cars some distance behind me. I hope that I actually screwed on the gas cap and only forgot to close the flap.

The snow gets heavier. We're approaching white out conditions, and I doubt I can see more than about 10 feet ahead of the car. Although my wipers are running, they are for some reason not clearing part of the windshield; ice is actually starting to build up on parts of it. I'm ducking down a little bit to see under this part. I'm also leaning forward, as if getting closer to the window will help me see through the curtain of dancing flakes just beyond it.

I'm not entirely sure where the road is anymore, but I begin to suspect that I'm on the wrong side of it. Either that or the string of cars heading toward me is. Assuming they're correct, I head back to the right, hoping that I'm not driving off the road into a ditch or snowbank. I seem to still be on solid surface as the cars finally reach and pass me.

Despite the defrost blasting on the highest heat setting and the wipers running, my windshield is getting progressively harder to see through. I'm not sure what's up with that. Thankfully the onslaught gradually slows as I approach home. I seem to have driven out of the worst of it as I get back into town. I can actually recognize some landmarks, and not just a small radius of white around my car.

There is a grocery on the road going home, so I stop for supplies and to check the car. I'm relieved to find the gas tank tightly capped and slide the flap over it. There is about an inch and half of ice frozen around the edges of my windshield wipers. It's no wonder they were not helping. A spray of defroster and some scraping loosens things up so I can finish my trip.

Amazingly, when I get home I actually find an open space in the parking lot which is not totally blocked by mounds of snow. In fact, it's the same space I came out of. I'm not sure how that happened. I'm not even sure how I survived the experience. If I were superstitious, I think this would count as a legitimate miracle.

The snow eventually moseyed its way down the highway dumped a few more feet outside, but that was long after I was in, so I didn't mind. (Although I laughed pretty hard in the morning when I found how deep the drifts were on the sidewalk I had completely cleared the day before.) And a professional driver here thought it was bad last night, so I think I can fairly claim to have driven in winter conditions now. I don't want to ever do that again.

I hope I won't have to next week.

Snow? In January? Are you serious?

2007-01-28T18:12:00.000-05:00

Looks like global warming has wimped out. We've only gotten through half the winter with unseasonably high temperatures preventing any significant snowfall.

Or as The Onion reports, "Northeast Stunned by Freak January Snowfall".

And it just keeps going... we got some heavy snow last week, then it just keeps adding. I had to drive back from teaching class on a satellite campus while it was snowing, which is a tense and terror inducing experience for me. Yup, I'm pretty much a southerner.

Classes even got cancelled on Thursday evening this last week. (I'm told because the highways were closed due to wrecks.) This is not good: since the class only meets once a week, we're now a week behind.

I just continue to hope desperately that no major snow hits on Tuesdays when I'm out at the satellite campus. A small amount is enough to panic me.

And now it's doing it again. I keep digging back out, and it keeps pulling me back in.

Admittedly, as I keep shoveling the walk and the drifts on either side of it get deeper and deeper, I keep thinking I could make a really rocking snow fort between the sidewalks if I just scooped out the center and packed the sides. I wonder what my neighbors would think? Especially if I hid out in it all day and threw snowballs at anyone walking by.

Repeated Conversation

2007-01-25T17:19:00.000-05:00

From today, with groups of students handing in a group work assignment:

Me: This problem asked you to show that these numbers are composite. You only listed them.

Student: But they are composite!

Me: But you haven't shown this. You just listed the numbers.

Student: But it's right--they are composite!

Me: How could you show the numbers are composite?

Student: I don't know. What's a composite number?

Repeat for most groups.

Academic Year Interstitial

2007-01-17T14:00:00.000-05:00

Spring semester has started, much too soon... it always does.

Over the break, I put together my "notebook", explaining what I've been doing at the University for the last year, except in my case it was what I've been doing at the University for the past five months. I'm hoping that matters, because I have the feeling that most of the sections on scholarly development and university service essentially boil down to: "I got nothin'." At least I can say I won Time magazine's person of the year.

I feel the same way about the courses I'm teaching in the spring. I have three sections which meet once a week for two and a half hours, and I'm feeling slightly lost about what to do. One class now counts for a whole week. The classes will only meet 15 times! In one respect I like the longer sessions; it feels like I can do some things (like group activities) which take a little time to start--we don't have to break suddenly in the middle and assume the students will still remember what they are doing when we start the next class. But what do I do about tests? I can't really see successfully covering new material the same class as I give a test, but I don't see giving up three weeks of class to give three tests either. For the topics course, I'm thinking I should be able to get away with some take homes, but I'm not sure that will work in lower level courses. So I'm experimenting. One course I'm doing just quizzes, basically every week. Another I'm actually giving an hour test and then moving on to new material. We'll see what happens.

Then there's the textbook for one low level course I'm teaching. I was pressed for time last semester, and ended up selecting the textbook that most of the rest of the department uses for the same course. I've been reading it over the past week or so, and I hate it. It's annoyingly filled with bubble-gummy pop culture references to everything under the sun, from Jurassic Park to "Judge Judy", in some sort of attempt to be hip and exciting for what I'm sure the author thinks of as "those wacky college kids", or equivalently, "gen-y" or "gen-z" or maybe we've cycled back to "gen-a". There is also a formula, neatly boxed, for everything. In each section, we have a sequence of carefully labeled problems. Each problem has its own formula, and an example of plugging numbers into the formula. It's a frigging how-to manual on steroids. Nowhere does it ask students to actually think about anything; it asks them to memorize, plug numbers into formulas, and regurgitate regularly. (The author has the gall to then title the book Mathematical Thinking.) Oh, and then there's this other little kicker: sometimes it's just flat out wrong. I'll look for another book for the next time I teach this course, and if I don't find something better, I'll roll my own. The list of topics isn't that complicated.

The Return of the Marshmallow

2007-01-15T17:43:00.000-05:00

One of my friends in grad school accused me of being a marshmallow when it came to grading. I guess I took the more optimistic view of how many points to give an answer. ("Well, he didn't answer the question correctly, but he understood that the writing needed to go on the paper, and most of it has correctly formed words and numerals. Let's give him half credit!")

I can tell that the marshmallow has clearly returned.

I have not gotten a single complaint from a student or request for a higher grade.

I obviously did something very, very wrong last semester, and I'm worried about anyone else finding out.