I have an hour and a half break now. That’s a good reason to write. This morning I proctored an exam; that was depressing even though it wasn’t my class. Out of 13 students only 7 showed up and one never tried to answer anything. All math teachers need to be reminded that this isn’t just their students. Math is a required course that requires both thinking and work, students need to be motivated to do both. A requirement is not motivation.
Robert Heinlein wrote a short story, The Man Too Lazy to Fail. I had to check the title, I always remember it as The Man So Lazy He Had to Succeed. I like my title better; that’s why I misremember it. It’s about somebody that hated doing work so he kept coming up with labor saving devices and methods which were the foundation for his success. After six millennia teaching I have decided that’s the most important thing I can teach my students. Notice that I said that math requires both thinking and work. That’s the key. People that are good at math maximize the thinking to minimize the work. Most people, not just students, consider thinking to be work, hard work to be avoided. The philosophy of thinking about h0w to solve a problem before working on it is akin to the maxim “measure twice cut once.” If you make a small energy and time investment early you can save yourself time and energy in the long run.
The problem is that I don’t consider thinking, work. I do puzzles for fun. I enjoy thinking. I suspect most of My Gentle Readers feel the same way. My Gentle Readers are not representative of humanity. That’s why they enjoy reading a blog. I don’t know why they are so much more attractive than most. I can’t see a causal relationship there in either direction. That’s an unexplained empirical fact.
My teaching philosophy differs from that of many others. Many simply give a mechanical procedure to solve problems that leads to students doing the same 20 steps all the time, without motivating them. When faced with a problem that can be solved rapidly with a little thought the students end up taking 20 minutes to solve the problem, and that’s when they get every step right. They often don’t.
When I teach I make it clear what the goal is and encourage the students to find the easiest way there. If a student was at 6th Avenue and 33rd street and wanted to get to Madison Square Garden some teachers would have the students take the D train up to 59th then switch to the Downtown 1 train and take that to 33rds street. I’d tell them, You want to go one block west, walk it. Look, you can see MSG from here.
Now for something completely different, a man with a tape recorder up his nose. No, that’s Monty Python. I’m going to talk about my work/life balance. I had a huge change in my life since I started teaching full time. I no longer have all the time in the world. I have to wake up at 5:30 AM every day which violates all that I consider holy. I set my alarm at 9:30 every night to remind me to go to sleep. What is my new work/life balance? Ignoring the go to sleep alarm, or at least treating it as simply a suggestion. If there is something I want to do at night I will. Not every night, there is a balance, but I don’t deny myself the big things. On Friday I’m seeing Tracy Grammmer, on Tuesday the Knicks play the Heat. A week from today I’m seeing Sunny War. Last night I spent rewatching Wednesday. Of course there’s a penalty for not sleeping, sleeping when you don’t want to. I slept right through Wednesday’s dance, the thing that made the show go viral. I went back and watched it later.
I made a very much guilty pleasure dinner. Our oven is still broken and I started to fry things. It’s gotten so bad that I didn’t just fry the frozen hash browns, I fried the bratwurst I ate with them. I forgot how great fried food tastes. Sure a fried brat is unhealthy but now and then it’s worth it. Balance, everything must be balanced.
My roommate tested positive for COVID yesterday. I tested when I got to school and was negative. I tested again this morning before I left. I hate the idea of being Typhoid Mary. I’m not going to test tomorrow but I will test the next day. I am wearing a mask all day at school except when eating and drinking, and I’m doing that with nobody in proximity. If I get through this without getting sick I’m going to lean heavily into the hypothesis that I have natural immunity. Perhaps I already had a symptomless case before there was testing and acquired it. Either way I’m not wasting any anxiety on worrying about my health.
Wise Madness 