Mama PhD

The last couple weekends around home have been math weekends. Not by choice, not by design, not for fun. My daughter brings home a fair amount of math homework from middle school. She’s actually pretty good at it but she doesn’t realize this, because (her words) she thinks her friends are all better than she is at doing it. To be fair, the work is hard.

Since I took last week off from blogging I’ve got several topics rattling around my head that are a bit unformed, and certainly disconnected from each other. Here they are, my short takes from the past few weeks. Stay tuned; I may develop these further in upcoming posts.

As noted previously, my son has not "applied himself" as thoroughly as he might have in high school. He has instead focused on music, and we have fought to keep him in music electives and after-school band projects against the efforts of teachers and administrators who felt strongly that his music was a destructive distraction from more serious academic studies.

In 1900, the mathematician David Hilbert listed 100 mathematical problems that he felt would be good problems to address in the next century. Many of these have been solved, but some still wait for solutions. I found myself thinking of this recently as I realized that the season of Lent had begun. While this is traditionally a season of fasting and repentance, many today also approach this season as an opportunity to find ways to bring about a more just world. I found myself thinking of the Hilbert problems because it occurred to me that those of us in higher education could bring our collective minds together to address several issues that, like the Hilbert questions of years ago, seem to need addressing.

My partner, Ted Hardin, and I will be in New Orleans on Thursday for the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) meeting on general education and assessment. (We’re just missing Mardi Gras, darn it!) We are helping to deliver the keynote speech with biologist James P. Collins on “Learning and Discovery in an Era of Change.” We’ll be focusing on environmental issues and how interdisciplinary practices affect new forms of teaching and student learning.

The controversy about Hugo Schwyzer has raised a more general question: Is there a place for men (not just Schwyzer himself, but any men, no matter how enlightened and sympathetic) in women's studies courses?

In economics, we talk about a free market bringing consumers and producers to an allocation that will be in everyone’s best interest, a result that does not require any consideration by the participants of the well being of others in the economy. This idea, sometimes called the “Adam Smith Hypothesis”, relies on several assumptions, some of which make sense and some which might be suspect in our modern economy. One of the assumptions needed for such a powerful result is the assumption of free information, that those in the economy have access to reliable information that they do not need to pay for. This assumption comes to mind when I realize that I am one of the last people in North America who is not yet a member of Facebook.

I recently commented on the poor attendance at a black history month event on our campus. Last night, however, I had the great honor of introducing one of the original Freedom Riders, Hank Thomas, to a room filled beyond capacity with students, staff/faculty, high school students, and community members.