Mama PhD

My daughter was surprised to hear that university professors don’t usually give each other valentines. In her world there’s a...

Dean Dad’s Monday blog post, titled “Raising Arizona,” deals with two bills currently being debated in the Arizona legislature that could have chilling effects on higher education. The state is already dealing with at least one issue regarding K-12 education that those of us in higher ed would also do well to pay attention to.

Ann Hassenpflug has an interesting article on the difficulty of teaching a graduate-level education class when parents whose childcare arrangements have fallen through bring their children to class. A lively and sometimes heated discussion follows in the comments.

There are many times in math that we encounter behavior that appears to repeat or cycle back on itself. For example, one often finds strings of repeating digits when trying to convert a rational number into a decimal, or one can observe cyclical behavior associated with the trigonometric functions. Such behavior came to mind recently as I realized that we are moving from winter into a spring that will eventually turn into summer, and that, as a mom, I needed to plan for such a change in seasons.

Geez. What a week it’s been for women’s health rights. The Susan B. Komen Foundation flip-flopped after the online outrage for defunding Planned Parenthood. (Over a million Planned Parenthood Tweets!) Now the Obama administration appears to be hedging on a decision to require all health plans, including Catholic universities and hospitals, to cover contraception.

A reader emailed recently to alert me to the publication of a new study of working mothers, in the journal Gender and Society. (An aside: I hate the term “working mothers,” as I think it devalues the actual work of mothering. I’ll try to find other ways to say it as I write about the study, but to date I haven’t found a good substitute.) The findings didn’t really surprise me, but they were confirmatory: most working mothers, single or married, find value, fulfillment, and meaning in paid work outside the home.

In school, I was known as a "gifted underachiever." I scored high on standardized tests, won writing competitions, and excelled in subjects that were considered "frills," such as music, drama, and art. But my homework was disorganized, my math and science skills rudimentary, and my grade point average mediocre at best.

I once attended a seminar presented by the National Endowment for the Humanities on the Philosophy of Math. As an economist teaching in a math department, I was obviously the participant with the most unusual background, as most of the other participants were philosophers of math, many teaching in philosophy departments. While there, I recall one woman discussing the question of “is there a middle number?” Since there is no highest or lowest number, the question became whether there is a middle number. Her conclusion was that there is, indeed, a middle number, and that number is zero.