Rejection Letters

I finally got my last rejection letter tonight (obviously I already had a job, so it doesn't matter much), but it makes for an interesting record. Of ten applications total, I got eight rejection letters and two job offers. But one school I never heard from again. (Yes, if you're counting, one school actually sent two rejection letters. As near as I can tell, they had a more detailed letter they sent out to the short-listed candidates (which I got), and a very generic letter they sent to everyone else. However, they apparently forgot to remove the short-listed candidates from the longer list, so I got both letters. All things considered, I may have dodged a bullet on this one.)

Now the one school I never heard from is interesting, since they actually interviewed me. And then... well, cue the crickets chirping. That was last year, and they ultimately hired someone (they have a new staff member this year), but I never heard anything back from them. I was leaning towards not taking the job if I got it actually; the school was in a sort of dire situation financially and academically. I don't honestly think they were going to even have a math major in another ten years. So no great loss, but still, a post-card would have been nice. Particularly to one of the three people who got an on-campus interview. So really, again, maybe I'm dodging bullets here.

All of this takes me back to applying for grad schools, where I also got a fair number of rejection letters. (Darn my college math department's near zero grade inflation since the 1960s.) I still remember one rejection letter in particular, although I can't remember exactly what it said. Northwestern University had the nicest rejection letter I'd ever seen. It actually succeeded in making me believe that they were genuinely sorry they couldn't accept my application, as if they felt it was the school's loss. Someone there wrote a beautiful rejection letter, and it helped some during a somewhat depressing time. Cheers to them.

No Bridges for Me

I won't have to live under a bridge next year after all; I found a place to live. It's in a line of townhouses mostly populated by other college professors, and I'll only be about a five minute walk from my office. (Actually, I think it's only really a full five minutes if I have to slog through six feet of snow and have to wait to cross the street.) No garage, but then I won't have to drive to work most of the time.

Now I'm back and spent part of the day trying to get movers. I have two appointments, one e-mail estimate, one "no can do", and two people who never called me back. It gives me something to do for the rest of the week. Plus the decision of what to take and what to leave. I've got some fairly old furniture, some of which is just cheap stuff assembled out of kits. I think at least those are not coming with me, if I can find someplace to get rid of them. It may be easier to just buy new furniture when I get there. I understand Pittsburgh has an Ikea store. Imagine me with real furniture!

I've also been engaging in partial packing of my office. I figure if I pack up a small book box and take it home each day, by the time the movers come, I'll have my office packed up and home. Good theory, but I'm finding carrying even one book box down the four flights of stairs and out to where I can park my car a little bit of a challenge. (It doesn't help that the school closed the parking lot that was close to my office. They feel a need to build another building there instead.)

I suppose I need to return the books I have from the department which are still current. Fortunately, we changed editions of the calculus book a few years ago, so I should be able to keep the old edition anyway. And who gets my old finals? I know normally we have to keep this stuff for at least a semester, but I won't be here to keep it. I'm somewhat surprised in at least a few cases I haven't already heard more complaints from students, but all has been quiet on the e-mail front for a while now.

It should be interesting to see what my state of mind is like in about a month. Although by that point it should be mostly over.

More Pseudo-Randomness

• For reasons I cannot fathom, my students apparently also believe 3³ = 9. Perhaps someone is teaching this? It may be related to the fact that a friend of mine who teaches high school noticed a blackboard left up by another teacher with gems such as 1/2 + 1/3 = 1/5.
• The brown and black cat has lost his collar, and the teenage girl who lives next door with her mother claims that the cat is hers now. The mother had originally said the cat wasn't theirs. I'm not sure what's going on. He also seems less willing to share the porch with the shy white cat now.
• Hint to my multivariable students: If you are asked to produce an example of an absolutely convergent series and justify your choice, any series which you justify using a comparison test with another convergent series is the wrong choice for this problem.
• Overheard from students (not mine) going into a final exam: "I didn't start studying until about an hour ago..."

I have just given my last final, and am mostly done grading it. This is good, as it means I can leave tomorrow to try to find someplace to live next year. I hate sleeping under bridges, especially in places where the snow may come that high anyway.

DonutFest 2006

Once again from our white board:

Is that Ooga Booga giving a thumbs up to donuts? Yes, of course.

Have we been eating too many donuts? Yes, we have.

Are we going crazy as we get into finals? No comment.

I missed something

I missed something significant in the article I mentioned below about some financial aid being set aside for students who take a sufficiently "rigorous" program in high school, which I came across in conversation with someone else today. The article points out of course that some schools do not offer all of the options that are required for students to qualify for this aid. Students at these schools will of course just be out of luck.

Now, just as a thought experiment, which schools have the fewest options for students? Would these be wealthy schools or poor schools? Which schools can afford to make sure they offer all courses for an "advanced" diploma, including silly computer programming courses? Which schools can recruit teachers to make sure every student who wishes to can take two years of foreign language? Which schools can afford to support AP and IB programs for its students? All of these things are required for a student to qualify for this new financial aid.

And why exactly are wealthy schools wealthy and poor schools poor? (Remember that US schools are financed locally, and usually through property taxes.) So this new program is in essence transferring 4.5 billion dollars of federal aid into funds that can only be used by at least moderately well off students. (The same bill which authorized this new aid also cut $13 billion in college spending.)

So if you're foolish enough to be born to poor parents and consequently attend a poor school, you will of course have limited opportunities up through high school. But should you manage to do well and learn anything anyway, there won't be money for you to go to a college which might help make up for what you missed out on in high school; the money has been reserved for students wise enough to be born to middle-class or higher parents.

The Advanced Diploma Sucked Canal Water

(Borrowing a phrase from my junior high band director.)

I just ran across an article about new federal aid for college students who take a "rigorous" program of study in high school. It's a big deal because the federal government usually doesn't set curriculum for the schools. In the current list of requirements (different ones may come out in a different year), the following caught my eye; students will need to

"Have an advanced or honors high school diploma, as offered in at least 19 states."

My high school (in Texas) had an "Advanced" diploma option, which was a steaming pile of horse shit, pardon my French. I had planned to get the advanced option, but I took a lot of courses in high school. I took four years of Spanish (the new requirements for this financial aid require two years of a foreign language), I was in band for four years (I was in Orchestra too, but just practiced with them during home room so I didn't have to take it as a course), and was zipping through all the math courses on the way to Calculus. I even took an elective honors history topics course one semester dealing with issues in American national security. (The best high school history course I took, by the way. We did a lot of research and a lot of discussion and debate.)

In any case, when it came time to sign up for classes for my senior year, I was stymied. I had several required courses that I needed to take which took up slots. (These were courses that everyone had to take before graduating. There were no honors courses which substituted, and having spent the previous year taking nothing but honors courses, I was sort of appalled by what I saw in these classes. One of the most amazing experiences was taking "Health" the year immediately following acing the AP biology exam with 5/5.) I obviously wasn't giving up band (it was my major hobby, it covered my PE requirement, and I was already considering continuing with the oboe). I didn't want to give up on Spanish after three years (and in my last year I got a chance to spend a week in Spain, which was awesome). English of course was required anyway. But the advanced diploma had an additional requirement I hadn't met: I had to take a "the computer is your friend" basic computer programming class. It covered programming in BASIC on an Apple IIe, I think, which I could already do in any case. But if I didn't take that course, I had room to take calculus.

So I took calculus instead of programming in BASIC and graduated with a regular diploma rather than an advanced diploma, which really didn't matter, because no one has ever asked what kind of high school diploma I got. No one even asked for college admissions, and at this point most people are more interested in what I did for my PhD anyway.

But are we now at a point where someone else trying to decide between an advanced mathematics course and a rinky-dink introduction to programming risks losing college financing if they make the "wrong" decision? I really hate the cut and dried lists of rules that we have to substitute for good judgment most of the time.

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OK, to be totally fair, the calculus course was pretty much a waste of time. Thankfully, I started teaching myself calculus the summer before I started the class. This is good, because our teacher was pretty much an idiot. I working on my own through the year and ended up way ahead of the class by the end. I remember asking my calculus teacher one day about the convergence of a series because my answer didn't agree with the answer in the back of the book. He just didn't say anything. It was years later that I realized he didn't know what I was talking about. On the other hand, I found the experience was very useful when I taught Advanced Calculus a few summers ago. I had gave my students several homework and test problems in the following form: "My high school calculus teacher taught us that (blank). Prove rigorously that he was wrong."

Book Buying

I've been having a lot of fun recently picking out books to get with the faculty development money I need to use up. I feel a little like a kid in a candy store; there's all these cool books that I've either used personally or had recommended at some point, or are just classics that "every mathematician should have." I've realized three great things so far.

First, Half.com totally rocks. (When it works. I've also run into weird glitches, like one book that always appears for sale, but which is never available when you actually try to buy it... it's a phantom book I think. Or the time I received confirmation that a book had been shipped, followed by a note from the sender that "I can't send you this book" and a refund three minutes later.) When it works, you can get some older texts for cheap, and there's tons of old math texts that are still great. I don't think this would work as well in a lot of other fields, but things don't usually stop being true in mathematics, so we still read and reference a lot of old books. A lot of new ones too, but still plenty of old ones. (I remember one of my professors in college joking about a false "theorem" that was "proved" in a journal article one year, and found out ten years later to be incorrect. He said the theorem was "true between the years of...". My partner was also surprised to see I referenced papers from the 1800s in my dissertation; he considered anything older than perhaps 1980 to be tremendously dated and highly suspect.)

Second, Dover totally rocks too. I discovered Dover has been going crazy putting out ten-dollar paperback reprints of tons of great math books. (Again, this works great if old texts are still useful to you.) They always had some good stuff, but it's sort of amazing how much is available now. I'm waiting on a lot of these because they're so cheap and plentiful now, and mostly using grant money for more expensive (and harder to find) texts. But eventually I think my bookshelf will overflow with them.

Third, I must still really like math, because I'm really enjoying this process and it's exciting to think about all the things I could be reading. (I know you would assume I still like math, but every once in a while, I find myself wondering.)

I'm just slightly disappointed that my splurge is coming to an end. But I've promised myself that every few months I can buy myself a new math book, even if it's kind of expensive. I just have to remember that it's not just spending money; it's professional development.