Tomorrow I'll be taking part in Practical Pedagogy's roundtable discussion, Out in the Classroom, discussing whether, how, and when it is useful or desirable to out oneself to one's students. There are even fliers!
I'll probably post my preliminary thoughts later today, after I do some mathing. It looks like I'll be the token science geek among the humanities folk.
Technically, I do have a degree in physics. How crazy is that? All kinds of hella crazy, that is how. I am such a total incompetent in a lab setting. The number of solid-state electronic components I destroyed...Those things can really stink up a room if you burn them out.
THAT EVENING: Let's brainstorm!
First off, there's a huge difference between being out to one's students and being out to one's colleagues. As I see it, at least. The grads and faculty in the math department are people I work and talk and party with: of course I'm going to be out to them. But with students, the whole character of the relationship is totally different. Mathematics instruction at an undergraduate level is often, and would almost have to be, rather authoritarian, top-down. The instructor has Truth sloshing about in their head, and aims to regurgitate it into the beaks of their downy little chicks. It isn't a dialogue. As such, I generally try to keep my personal life out of the classroom. I think many, if not most, of my fellows do the same. There have been students I've gotten chummy with, but those have been exceptions rather than the rule; from a purely personal standpoint, I wouldn't particularly want to share much about my private life with anyone I wasn't chummy with. And it's a math class. The subject matter is all completely impersonal. One doesn't want to distract or detract from the math.
From a purely pedagogical standpoint, I see no reason to make anything of one's sexuality when teaching mathematics.
At the same time, though, I do think it'd be quite nice to have a more visible gay and lesbian population in mathematics, and in the sciences generally. Visible, that is, to outsiders. I knew from a very young age that I'd end up in a scientific or technical field, and by the time high school was coming to an end, I'd picked physics. I wondered, at the time, if I might be 'the gay one,' the one homosexual in the entire department. And, as far as I know, I was, for a while. (We did eventually get another homosexual, I believe my junior year; poached him from Iowa State. Wonderful chap. I've still got one of his dreadlocks.) It's an odd sort of feeling. The whole outsider thing, you know? Which is not to say there's anything wrong with heterosexuals. Some of my best friends are heterosexuals. But. There isn't yet a strong public perception of the sciences or of mathematics as being welcoming to the openly queer, and that can be discouraging or disheartening to queer types (or "queeros" if you will) thinking of going into exactly that sort of thing. It was, a bit, to me. I presume the experience generalises somewhat. It seems like a sensible way to fix this would be to get more mathematicians living obviously queer lifestyles.
Which is where I come in. I'm in a position right now--broad-minded department, liberal city, West Coast--where I can be as homo as I want to be and it's not going to do me any harm. But what can I do without distracting from the math? So far I've mostly smiled a lot and raised my eyebrows. There has to be some more efficacious technique...I can try to let my inner fag peek out while I'm lecturing; it seems so far like it's only a very few of the gay students who catch on to that. But then, they're my target audience, aren't they?
Or are they?
Scissor Sisters show tonight at the Paramount. Don't wait up.
Keep your eyes on Canada. The Bloc Quebecois may try to bring down the government over the budget. They're going to DEFCON 3 or 2 or something. It could just be a ploy, I suppose...
EPILOGUE: "Lady, either grow a dick or get off of my ass."
gubbins: "something whose name is either forgotten or not known"
George Bush still wants to kill the Hubble Space Telescope. According to the Washington Post, NASA may instead be told to devote its resources to Bush's Mars proposal. You remember that one? The totally useless harebrained fucking pointless one? The one that'd never happen anyhow? The one that even total space geeks like me hate?
Bush obviously has no idea what useful science looks like. The Huygens probe sent to smog-shrouded Titan--now that was some science! Photographs of an alien shore, of pebbles of water ice worn smooth in lakes of liquid methane...Hints of volcanoes spewing ice and ammonia...Another world! A world with its own chemistry, its own geology, even its own weather. How exciting is that? I'll tell you--damned exciting.
Much as I'd like to get equally worked up about the idea of sending men and women to walk on the surface of Mars...It just isn't practical. Even if NASA devoted its every hour and cent to the project, the mission simply would not happen in the end. Human beings are squishy sacks of filthy fluid, and they require a lot of coddling to keep them slopping along in the icy depths of space. Not to mention all the fuel required to get them and all their kit to Mars and back in a reasonable amount of time, 'cause these fleshy sacks of fluid don't have nearly the patience machines do. The cost, the mass, the limited flexibility, the engineering issues...It's just a pie-in-the-sky kind of idea. Chemical rockets just aren't good enough. Until something better comes along, the prospects for manned missions deep into space will be marginal at best.
That man. I don't think I'm even going to refer to him by name any longer; I'll just call him That Man. He just doesn't seem to actually understand anything. And I mean anything in the entire world. That Man, it has been said, listens to his gut. You know what comes out of guts? A lot of shit.
I've been slacking off with the blogging and the Canada and so forth lately. It's a good thing the world has Gary Farber in it, to shine the Light of Truth onto the latest blockbuster political scandal to strike our snowy neighbours to the north: Citizenship and Immigration Minister Judy Sgro has resigned following allegations that she agreed to protect a Brampton pizza-shop owner from deportation in return for lots of free pizza. Also garlic bread.
Sgro, you may recall, also made headlines last year during Strippergate,
when it was alleged that she provided a temporary visa to a Romanian exotic dancer who'd volunteered with Sgro's campaign. Larry Zolf wrote a column on that back in December, in which it is revealed that Sgro favoured importing exotic dancers to make up for a shortage of home-grown Canadian strippers. Won't someone think of the poor strip-club industry?
Of course, there's lots more on this in the Toronto Star, among others. If you slog through their free registration, you can still read all their articles. Unlike certain other papers I could name...
What can we learn from all this?
Let's compare and contrast Canadian political scandals with those of the United States for a moment.
In Canada, we have Pizzagate, Strippergate, and Sponsorgate.
In the United States, on the other hand, we have Lying-and-Fearmongering-Chief-Executive-gate, and of course Torturegate, and We-Totally-Fucked-Up-Iraq-gate, not to mention that old chestnut, The-Country-Is-Being-Run-By-Amoral-Mendacious-Buffoons-gate. Pretty much everything about US politics right now ought to be a scandal, really. There is simply no longer any connection between what the President and his chums say and any sort of objective reality.
It must be nice to live in a nation that can get all worked up over a couple of pizzas, where the populace hasn't been numbed into a sort of shell-shocked complacency by the sheer horror of being alive...
Here's a zippy little article on the evolution of integration that I found while preparing for tomorrow's multivariable calculus lecture. (I'll be showing the young 'uns the triple integral, and was wondering if I could make the idea of Jordan measure comprehensible at this level.) The bit at the end is the interesting part--I hadn't realised that the existence or nonexistence of certain measures could have set-theoretical consequences. Like inaccessible cardinals. Who knew?
Mother Nature, you ignorant slut, you're getting snow all over my bamboo.
Just in case you were wondering.
In 2002, according to the OECD, Canada spent 9.6 per cent of its gross domestic product on health care, both private and public. Among the 26 countries surveyed, it ranked sixth in terms of health spending.(The United States devotes 14.6 per cent of its gross domestic product to health care but consistently ranks lower than Canada in terms of results like life expectancy and infant mortality.)
...
But one fact appears to be true: The more privatized the health system, the faster its costs rise. The reason, according to virtually every study into the issue (including one commissioned by Klein), is that universal medicare produces tremendous economies — mainly in the area of paperwork and administration.
Three cheers for socialism!
I've ended up teaching a multivariable calculus course this quarter. Our first topic is the double integral. I didn't actually make any notes for myself the first day, and found myself improvising while trying to think up a practical scenario in which we'd want to do a double integral. What I ended up saying was something along the lines of "Imagine you're on a magical adventure in an enchanted kingdom beyond the Moon, when you're abducted by the vicious King of the Moon Men, who threatens to throw you into his Lake of Fire and Torment unless you can correctly compute the volume of said lake from its depth at every point."
On Wednesday I made very careful notes.
Today I slipped again, and explained to my students that, while integrating over a simple rectangle might be enough to save us from the clutches of the Emperor Tomato Ketchup and his Swimming Pool of Fear, we are faced with the King of the Moon Men and his curvilinear Lake, a much trickier proposition altogether.