Ending the semester

On Friday, I walked a mile through the streets of Philadelphia and caught a train to New York City.  The train stopped under Manhattan, and I walked through a tunnel full of people to catch a subway running uptown.  After an hour under the city, I finally climbed concrete steps into the rain.  Lunch, and a talk, and then I walked back into the subway and under the city and a train carried me out and away into the dark.

Three hours later, exiting another metro station and lugging my laptop to a gray hotel, I glimpsed the Washington monument stretching into the fog of a winter evening, lit like a torch.

These are things that people come to see, said the lights.  Except to you, it is only a little architecture against the skyline to remind you which talk comes next.

This morning, the common final exam began at 7 am.  I left my house just after 5:45 am, and made my way through the dark to my office.  In my building, I hurried around the cleaning staff to and from the printer, to and from the computer.  Why hasn't that TA picked up his exam box yet?  Can I move the proctor in your room to the basement of the Martin classroom building?  Someone found a printing error on form B; please announce it to your students.  We are out of scantrons in the chemistry building.  There isn't enough light in the business auditorium.  My student is ill.  When is the alternate?  And meanwhile, 1500 students sat with pencils in hand and tried to remember, for three hours.

This is how semesters end, in a blaze of light and motion and anxiety, with faculty and students hurtling past the major monuments, the lit torches pointing up into the winter fog.

December

... is already starting out well.

Jonathan's cast was removed.

Tim's mustache, grown for a good cause in November, was also removed.

Things are looking better and better around here.

Somewhat problematic:  big crunch time until finals.  Two more classes to teach, then I fly out to visit three cities and give two talks before I return home to give two finals.  But then things ease up a little tiny bit.  Maybe.

Maybe I'll start writing again.

Volunteering

A few weeks ago in church, while in the midst of a discussion, a woman asked a rhetorical question.

"Doesn't it just make you feel wonderful when you're helping someone?"

And I thought about my latest foray into volunteerism, and honestly answered:  No.

I have been volunteering since October at Jonathan's school, running a once-a-week after school math program for kids.  I wanted to be able to include all the kids who were interested, so I paid all the up front expenses myself (particularly the background clearance fee to work in the school), and have been charging the kids nothing with the idea of helping them have fun with supplementary math.

It hasn't really worked as planned.

The first issue was that too many kids were interested.  We had 25 sign up and turned 10 away in a single day.  I have not been trained in managing 25 kids that age.  The meetings have been chaos.

The second issue was one I discovered later.  I want to include kids who like math, who come there for the fun of it. I have a couple of kids who haven't been participating, who complain all through the hour long session, and can't wait until it's over.  When I pulled them aside and suggested they stop coming, since they clearly hate it, they said their mom would be mad if they didn't come.  She wants them to attend and learn something.  So the kids show up and resent having to be there and drag the class down because Mom thinks that they should be learning something.  I'm not running the program for Mom.  I told the kids they would not be able to come back if they don't start participating.  We'll see whether my talk has any effect.

Another problem is location.  Because of space issues, we're borrowing a teacher's classroom.  The teacher has almost no blackboard space at the front of the classroom.  I can't plug in my laptop.  That means I get to communicate via interpretive dance....  ?

So how does volunteering make me feel?

Completely exhausted.

Quantum states

It snowed all day Friday, making for a scary bike ride home.  This afternoon Jonathan and I took a couple of neighbor boys up to the park near the mouth of the canyon and went sledding.  There were lots of people out, and the snow was wearing itself off the local sledding hill.  Jonathan had his arm cast wrapped up in a couple of plastic bags, with his coat sleeve pulled over on top.  After the first time down the hill he said it hurt, and I almost took him back home.  But the arm felt fine quickly, and he was ok after that.  We spent at least an hour running up and down that hill afterwards.  That's good for everyone.

***

This week has been an eventful one, locally, nationally.

Lots of losing.  Failing.  My mother's big cause, the culmination of a lot of work on her part, was voted down.

Is it really better to have tried but failed?

In quantum physics, the state of a particle is generally changed by the action of measuring it.  In real life, before having tried, there are two possible states: success and failure.  Before you invest the time to try, you have to believe that success is a more likely outcome.  But after you've tried, and the measurement has been taken, and you have failed, there is only failure.  There is no more potential for success, unless you re-run the experiment, adjusting something.  Unless you start over, you're just a failure.

That hurts.

Let the world run without trying.  Leave the quantum states unmeasured.

Broken arm

Jonathan broke his arm on Wednesday.  He was out gathering candy from the neighborhood, in the dark, and he tripped over a scooter left on a lawn between houses.

Wednesday night he came home in tears, and Thursday morning I spent the time with him at the doctor's office, waiting, and then at the radiologist's, waiting, and then waiting, until I abandoned the waiting to Tim, who took Jonathan in to get the cast.

The boy is fine now, and was happy to show off the cast to his friends in school on Friday.  In four weeks we'll go in for more waiting and get the cast taken off.

Meanwhile, watch out for sharp toys on dark lawns.

Assorted evidence of insanity

I woke up at 5am on Tuesday, and as I rolled over to drift back to sleep, a little voice reminded me that my grant proposal needs to be submitted a week before its official deadline.  And then I started counting backwards from the official deadline, and jumped out of bed.  It's due at the end of this week.  Not next week.  Stupid, stupid voice in my head.  So I spent the next two hours writing.  And guess what I'm doing tomorrow morning?  

Speaking of writing, I have far too many writing projects looming over me, and I don't seem to be able to finish any of them.  All those projects are really stressing out that same little voice in my head -- the one in charge of keeping things organized and running on time.  It can't keep track of what needs to be done and when, and it is lashing out against me in its frustration.  I'm not quite sure what to do with it.  To make things worse, the writing projects themselves keep bothering me, too.  They all clamor for my attention, and when they don't get it, they pile on the guilt -- at least the work projects do.  The fiction projects don't just pile on guilt.  They scream at me to do something about them.  And unlike the work projects, which stay down when I tell them to except for a whimper of guilt, the fiction ones climb after me, and attack when my guard is down, such as when I'm drifting off to sleep, or walking over to work.  If I were this single minded about work projects, I'd be winning my Nobel prize.

Jonathan needed a Wednesday after school program.  So I volunteered.  I offered to run a math program for kids, grades 3 through 6.  I have taught it three times so far.  There are too many kids.  There are so many kids that even the simplest example takes forever to explain.  And every kid has an idea for an answer to every question.  Or if they don't have an idea, at least they have something else that they really really need to share.  And if I don't have a question for them to answer?  Then they have one for me!  They talk on top of each other and on top of me.  And they generate random, unexpected answers that I have to think about, and that I have to ask everyone else to think about, but it's hard to think when you really really need me to call on you.  Oh!  Oh!  Please!  Please let me spew something random!  Me, I come home totally wiped out.  But I don't think there is anything I can do about it.  How could I justify squelching such enthusiasm, especially for math, of all things?  

Today I forgot my keys.  I biked to school in the rain, and then went to lock up my bike and found my keys were not in my pocket.  So I looked at my watch.  I had to teach class in eight minutes.  Home was a 15 minute bike ride in the wrong direction.  So I wheeled my bike up to my department office, begged to borrow the master key, let myself into my office and parked my bike behind my desk, and ran off to do my teaching.  Later in the day, someone saw me wheeling my bike out of my office, and said I was very smart to have brought it in out of the rain.  Except that I felt like a complete idiot for having forgotten to bring my keys.  

I think I'd better stop.  I am coming up with too many items that point to my insanity, and I can't afford the time to see a therapist.  Must write....  Aaah!  

Gender bias

Soon after my birthday, I read a couple of articles that I found extremely depressing:

From Scientific American:  Study shows gender bias in science is real.  And from Inside Higher Ed:  Study shows scientists are biased against women.

I read the Inside Higher Ed article first.  The article depressing in and of itself:  Scientists were given identical resumes for hypothetical students, with just the names changed.  One name obviously female, one obviously male, and asked to rate the students.

... [T]he scientists were asked to rate the students' competence on a 5-point scale. Male faculty rated the male student 4.01 and the female student 3.33. Female scientists rated the male student 4.10 and the female student 3.32. On salary, the gaps were also notable. The average salary suggested by male scientists for the male student was $30,520; for the female student, it was $27,111. Female scientists recommended, on average, a salary of $29,333 for the male student and $25,000 for the female student.

That's bad. The scientists didn't think they were being sexist. They just honestly thought that Jane wasn't as competent as the identical John.  Which makes me wonder (a) do I do this?  I hope I do not.  I must be vigilant and try to make sure I do not.  And (b) am I a victim of this?  Would I ever know if so?  Is my work valued less because I have a very distinctly feminine name?  (I have wondered in the past, but what can you possibly do?)

The most depressing thing about the article, however, was the comments.  The blog from Scientific America summed it up best:

[M]ost people who read this will have one of four reactions:

1) This is not surprising, but I’m glad we have something concrete to show what we’ve known all along.

2) This is surprising and disturbing.

3) Figure 2 is misleading because the y-axis does not start at zero. Therefore, I will reject everything else exposed by this study.

4) Equally qualified women should be discriminated against, because they could go off and get pregnant. 

On the Inside Higher Ed blog, which is supposedly of interest to my academic colleagues, there seemed to be a huge number of comments #4.  And also comments along the line of "The women are rating the female students just as badly as the men, so it can't really be sexism."  And "Yeah but maybe the women looked the same on paper, but they wouldn't be as good later in life because women never are the best of the best.  Those are the men."

These are comments from educated people, the educators of America.  Sometimes America sucks.

You know what, American educators?  (1) It's none of your business if they go off and get pregnant.  And the fact that they might doesn't make them less effective workers and poorer scientists.  (2) Women can also be sexist to women.  In fact, historically women have been our own worst enemies (see for example women's suffrage).  (3) Studies show over and over that it isn't the gender that's holding the women back from performing at the top.  It's the culture.  A relatively recent study published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, for example, showed that we Americans are hurting both our men and our women in science by our cultural attitudes.  Sure math is great later in life, but you're a loser if you're good at it as a kid.  The peak performers in the highest tier math competitions in high school and college are both male and female, but they're coming from other countries where kids and adults value math as much as basketball.

As I have mused about this in the past, the advice I receive is along the lines of, "just put your head down and do the best work you can and don't worry about it."  Which is excellent advice, and how I've lived my life.  But sometimes things need to be worried about.  But I'm not big enough to do all the worrying on my own.

Reader, please go worry for me.  Thanks.  That's much better.