CAG@ICH#45
It's your professionalism that I respect.
- Howard Ashman, Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
In the same vein as the three topics for today, i'll make an attempt at some consistent structure in these posts, and this may ultimately imply some regularity in their writing.
Welcome to the coffee3!
I know at least six people who make espresso for themselves semiregularly at the coffee3, and twice in the past two weeks someone has deposited cookies there for all to partake of. After a month and three batches of espresso ground, this feels like a moderate success. But it is a general tendency for grad students not to clean up after themselves, which we all try, to varying degrees of success, to overcome. The instructions i'll post tomorrow should resolve some of this at the 3 (Is that a sensible nickname?), but i doubt all. It hasn't accomplished any tangible community-building, but that was merely a happy potential aside to the objective of providing cheap and decent coffee to grad students without much in the way of workplace convenience.
This gets to the core problem: how to provide quality espresso-brewing in the workplace. I honestly think that this is better done by motivated employees (in this case, grad students) than by some overseer in the upper echelons of the department with an office large enough to house its own brewing device. Essentially, this works best as a cooperative endeavor. Indeed, one of us had the idea and located vacant space, another of us made an informed recommendation for a source of ground, and yet another of us has the financial and scheduling convenience to replenish it regularly. Perhaps, then, we have done a small bit of community-building, having involved these three around a common coordinated project.
coffeehouse musician of the moment: Ulrich Schnauss
My roommate Matt introduced me to this suddenly-well-known electronic composer, offering up his copy of Far Away Trains Passing By upon my request for a new batch of study music. It is quite possible to state how much i enjoy this album: Not since Metropolis Pt. 2 has a single album held my attention through so many repetitions, and this time during such diverse activities as research, driving, and in-house conversation. These are (mostly) wordless songs of trailing thoughts and unexpected reminisces, which reinforce themselves with an undulating loss and resurgence of theme. One might make a few key tweaks to one's young professional career to produce a sample of images from which an album-length music video would spill out quite naturally, encompassing romances, researches, binges, and burnouts, with enough intermittent kite-flying melodies to give pause to reflect upon the story as it progresses. This is theme music for the time of our lives over which we worry slightly more than we should, and accomplish slightly more than we realize.
It was outputmessage who introduced me to "shoegaze" (and without whose performances i'd still be confused by the term), and it has become Schnauss who made it, for a glowing brief period, my genre of choice.
balancing depth and comprehension in a 45-minute lecture
Everyone talks about balance. (Even Nick Loehr, the most exemplary mathematician i've ever met, chose the sociological balance of groups of coworkers as the subject for his lecture for the undergraduate mathematical modeling seminar.) And even on the tritest scale, it's a challenge: I want my students to understand what a proof is. I won't back down on this without a long talk with someone who knows. They don't need to be able to prove everything they use, but i want them to understand that all of the mathematical methods they'll ever be exposed to have a rigorous foundation of basic simple principles, so they don't waste time in their own fields questioning the validity of the mathematics instead of their applications of it. This notion of proof as absolute certainty is something they'll never come across anywhere else, and for many of them in any other class. Elsewhere, it's strong evidence. This is not to say that it's subject to honest debate in the scientific community, but they should understand the difference between proof and consensus.
Opposing this resolve is the very obvious and powerful fact that most of them don't care, and are much more interested in learning the correct applications of mathematics to their respective fields. Now, it is certainly not my job as a mathematics instructor to convince them that what they're learning is important to their fields (I leave this to their own departments and advisors, who require them to take the course.), and they likewise have little interest in my pure personal motivations for studying mathematics. So what they are completely justified in expecting from me are (a) clear and memorable methods of solving problems and (b) a working understanding of them, most naturally (and, as far as i know, only) acquired by doing examples and problems.
How many examples is enough? There's no way i can reach everyone simply by moving slowly enough in class and doing enough examples there. This question therefore translates, approximately, to the following: How many students should be left behind in lecture? Those who can't keep up, despite there being no presumption of inferiority or ill-deserving on their part, are obligated to complement lecture with office hours, emails, classmate conversation, and other means of building comprehension. I haven't answered or rephrased the second question yet, but the first-order correction to my teaching style is to plan ahead meticulously, allowing for as few pauses to think as possible, thereby giving every student as much information in their notes as possible. This is what it means to be professionally mature, i think: the willing (indeed, obligatory) partial sacrifice of flexibility in exchange for greater clarity, consistency, and volume. This makes me sigh with resignation at least once per day.
constructing a mutually respectable dialogue on faith and reason
The mutual respect supposedly linking instructor and student may be less related to that between conversers on personal beliefs than i have traditionally supposed. The issue, from the outset, is that in order to have a meaningful dialogue the two conversers must have mutual stakes. So, either they are both subjecting their beliefs to scrutiny by the other and are (at least theoretically) willing to give up those they can't defend; or neither is willing to admit any corrections, the dialogue being strictly informative. In the latter case, provided this understanding is reached, there should be no difficulty except to maintain this agreement. So set this case aside.
Being professional in a conversation must mean (at least) keeping on topic, responding to a point instead of retreating to a talking point, and (as Joe Biden says) never questioning the other's motives. Once you've opened yourself up to the possibility of being mistaken, there must be no recanting this. You are vulnerable, but in a respectful discussion you will not be persecuted for it. Somehow, to learn that you are wrong from someone else is humiliating under any circumstances, unless you're several degrees more mature than me (or discernibly less human; both would be impressive). We must get past this. So, i ask: What is the source, origin, impetus for this all-intrusive fear that prevents rational discourse even between those not being televised or staking their careers on having perfect judgment, and how can it be countered? It is with this question that i temporarily drop the subject, for until it is resolved i see no hope for the forcibly preoccupied majority of people the world over.