The liberal I wish I was

I read this on Daily Kos the other day, and I can't get it out of my head.

The person I hope to become when I grow up does not greet political arguments with ire or emotional responses. She greets them with facts and counterarguments that hold in the starting domain of the person arguing with me. She seeks to find common ground with the arguer, and attempts to find who is correct.

Correct is a muddier issue when dealing with political arguments, but for now, I use the definition that if a person starts with a set of axioms, and then is consistent within those axioms (even when it works against their own interests), then conclusions that can be drawn from those axioms are, in some sense, correct.

This response to a 53%er does that. And it reminds me why I am a liberal.

The letter in response to the following:

I am a former Marine.
I work two jobs.
I don’t have health insurance.
I worked 60-70 hours a week for 8 years to pay my way through college.
I haven’t had 4 consecutive days off in over 4 years.
But I don’t blame Wall Street.
Suck it up you whiners.
I am the 53%.
God bless the USA!

 The responder writes:

Look, you’re a tough kid.  And you have a right to be proud of that.  But not everybody is as tough as you, or as strong, or as young.  Does pride in what you’ve accomplish mean that you have contempt for anybody who can’t keep up with you?  Does it mean that the single mother who can’t work on her feet longer than 50 hours a week doesn’t deserve a good life?  Does it mean the older man who struggles with modern technology and can’t seem to keep up with the pace set by younger workers should just go throw himself off a cliff?

And, believe it or not, there are people out there even tougher than you.  Why don’t we let them set the bar, instead of you?  Are you ready to work 80 hours a week?  100 hours?  Can you hold down four jobs?  Can you do it when you’re 40?  When you’re 50?  When you’re 60?  Can you do it with arthritis?  Can you do it with one arm?  Can you do it when you’re being treated for prostate cancer?

I've lived in a place where 50 year olds work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, no sick days with pay. Where illness mean loosing one's job and depending on family for food. These 50 year olds looked like 80 year olds do in this county due to the back breaking work they've undertaken for the last 30 years. They lived in slums in a developing country.

And is this really your idea of what life should be like in the greatest country on Earth?

I know what my answer is. The author continues to describe his understanding of the "American dream".

Look kid, I don’t want you to “get by” working two jobs and 60 to 70 hours a week.  If you’re willing to put in that kind of effort, I want you to get rich.  I want you to have a comprehensive healthcare plan.  I want you vacationing in the Bahamas every couple of years, with your beautiful wife and healthy, happy kids.  I want you rewarded for your hard work, and I want your exceptional effort to reap exceptional rewards.  I want you to accumulate wealth and invest it in Wall Street.  And I want you to make more money from those investments.

  I wish I had the grace to write this letter.

What do you want?

This post title is the third in the series of references I've been leaving all week. I think that I'll stop at the end of this week, partially because lines 6 and 7 are very hard to fashion posts around.

I have a student attending class today from my partner's department who I can't seem to discourage from taking my class. I should point out that my partner and I are in very different fields. We are in departments that don't really have reason to talk to each other.

He claims that there are a lot of students from his department taking my class. Whether or not that's true, it is irrelevant as to why he wants to take my class. His purported reason is that he has to take class A for his degree. He has sat in class A, and finds it too abstract. I suggested to him that he take class X, the prerequisite for my class, and something that can be a plausible prerequisite for class A. He claims that he has had a course by the name of X in the university he has transferred here from. I know the syllabus of class X. I think there is a problem here in the naming scheme. I point out to him that class X covers the necessary material at the appropriate level of abstractness, unlike the class he took, which was more concrete.

He won't budge. My class it is. He has heard that my class teaches abstract thinking. But not just the quarter that I am teaching, which, for reasons I cannot fathom, I know that some people in this student's major choose to take. He wants to take the entire year. He doesn't want to audit, he wants to register. This will ask him to master skills that he has no hope of ever needing, unless he drastically changes direction.

I'm left asking, really sir, what is it that you want out of this year? But, at the end of the day, I believe the student knows better than me what he/she needs, and if not, well, its his/her funeral. I'm wondering how long I'll see this student.

There is a hole in your mind

Why else would I think that planning an activity at 4am when Epsilon is teething, and therefore not sleeping well consistently (or at all) would be a good idea?

Epsilon was up at midnight, refusing to go back to sleep. We just conducted our planned activity then, on the theory that it is 4 am somewhere.

My partner and I have been making an active effort to suffer through a bit of inconvenience to celebrate holidays in both our backgrounds. Between living in different cities, and not being particularly religious, this has been hard. But we made it work this time... sort of.

Now it's plenty of coffee, and thank god for daycare. Happy holiday for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.

Also, the extra credit remains unclaimed for naming the reference in the last two post titles.

And so it begins...

...again.

Today is the first day of classes.

I think my dread for the start of term is more out of a habit formed over 20 years of classes during the term and "freedom" over the summers. This year, I'm actually finding that the greater part of me is looking forward to the start of term. I've have a few terms off teaching (in exchange for more doubling up on other terms) and I've been finding that teaching actually helps keep me organized. I'm actually more productive when I have to schedule my day around the needs of students, their classes, their exams, and regularly orgainized department seminars. Huh, who knew? Not what I would have told you I would react to teaching a few years ago.

In the meanwhile, here's my current open letter to my students:

Dear all,

Just so you know, I don't actually care why you want me to sign your drop card on the first day of classes. You don't have to shuffle your feet, or look down, or come up with a reason. I don't know you. You don't know me. You don't want to take my class. Great. Have a great undergrad career.

I don't actually care if you want to audit my class. If you show up to class regularly, you are one more shining face I can beam at early in the mornings. If you choose not to show up in my class, then I don't know why you are auditing it. If you want your homeworks graded, talk to the grader, and see what he wants to do with you.

If you want to sit in on this class, but you don't have the prerequisites, you don't need to ask my permission. If you follow what's going on, great. If you don't, it's your funeral. It's not going to affect your grade, or my work load, do as you please.

In short, the only form for the registrars' office I want an explanation attached to is a course conflict form. And when form is for a conflict with the course that my class is a prereq. for... well, I'm just confused.

Yours truly,
Your Instructor

And on that note, 5 points of extra credit if you know what science fiction series is referenced in the title of this post.

When science fiction comes knocking

My partner and I have been bantering back and forth on this bit of news from CERN for the last hour or so. Really? FTL neutrinos? That would be ... well. Now that I try to write it down, I don't know the word for it. Cool? Scary? More science fictiony than I'd like the world to be? A restoration of a sense of symmetry that I've always craved to have about the universe, that my inner scientist has squashed for logical reasons?

My partner and I have resorted to glib silliness as we wait for the experts from other particle accelerators to weigh in. He thinks it's an artifact of instrument errors coinciding and amplifying to produce an outcome many many standard deviations out. I think someone forgot to divide by 2.

If true, the implications are just... too wild for this to be true. I'm holding my breath. Not to find out if this is true, but because I'm curious how this happened.


Update: Randall Monroe does it again. This had me laughing out loud.

Two thoughts

1) One of my summer students was complaining about the difficulty she was having fitting a class into her schedule that would allow her to keep working with me during the term. The crux of the problem is a course conflict with  a humanities breadth requirement. She could fill out the paperwork for a course conflict, but she wants to attend all the humanities lectures because humanities classes are hard for her, and she is afraid that if she doesn't attend lectures, she won't do well in the class. While I feel for her predicament, a little voice inside me is gleefully chanting "English is hard, lets do science!"

2) When applying for jobs, especially at state universities, I tend to be conscientious about filling in the form from  HR about diversity. I approve of universities trying to increase the diversity of its applicant pool, and full disclosure on a piece of paper that no one in my prospective department will see is an easy way to support them. Race, fine. Gender, fine. Marital status, ehn? Well, its a different country, privacy norms are different. Sexual orientation, WTF? Um, get out of my bedroom please?

I answered it. The options were fairly comprehensive. I wonder if this means that the university is more serious about dealing with LGBT issues than others. I'll keep you posted if I get the job.

Lectures and firewalls

I taught a class a while back that was videotaped by the university. The purpose of this exercise, as stated by the university, was to allow my students to refer back to the lectures as a resource, as well as their notes, homeworks, handouts, etc.

In actuality I think it encouraged students not to show up to a 9am lecture, but on the other hand provided a useful tool for me to improve my teaching, as I could suddenly see what I looked like to the students. None of this is surprising.

What surprises me are the 2-3 e-mails/year I get from students at other universities who stumble across my lectures on-line and want to know if they can have access to them. The videos can be accessed with a university username and password. I have unfortunately signed away copyright rights to the videos and I do not think I can do anything to help these students. (My own notes for those lectures, even if that would be a resource they would be interested in are in a scrawl that I would be embarrassed to give to anyone else as a reference.)

It disturbs me to have my lectures behind a firewall like this. I wish my university had a system closer to MIT's open courseware. I think next time I am given an opportunity to have my lectures recorded, I will try to do so in a more open environment.