west of the moon

multiplication tables.

Today in class, the history of math and engineering in West Africa and in Egypt.  It's a great topic that I hope I did justice to, because looking at the development of mathematical concepts in very different cultural contexts can possibly help us not take math too much for granted--it's not just a fixed thing that underlies other science, it is itself a historical artifact that has roots in actual physical practice.  The lecture also involved a live demonstration of mathematical technique: the methods used by the ancient Egyptians to do multiplication.  Math, live without a net, and I didn't make any addition errors while working on the chalkboard. 

I do have a possible problem, though, that I'm not sure how to deal with.  A few of the students use laptops to take notes, and that's great, I don't necessarily have any problem with that.  But this building does get wireless through the campus network, and the predictable result is that I'm pretty sure one of my students was messing around on the internet in class.  I can't say entirely for sure, but when there's one guy in the middle of the room who's looking at his computer instead of looking at the teacher, not obviously typing much, and breaking out into these really big grins at moments that do not correlate to any particularly entertaining piece of the lecture?  It seems an easy bet that he's paying attention to IM or something rather than to me. 

What I don't know is what, if anything, I should do about it.  It's not necessarily my concern if a student isn't paying attention when I talk--I wouldn't speak to a student about daydreaming or doodling during class, after all.  And it's not obviously disruptive to the other students in the way that talking on a cell phone would be.  It's disrespectful, but that's not actionable.  Maybe I should just let this go.

tuesday misc.

Three things:

1) At the end of the summer, I asked a lot of people for book recommendations.  While I am still very busy, I'm not dissertation-crazy busy, and I have time to read fiction (and non-academic non-fiction) again.  My friends are wonderful people, and I got a lot of great recommendations, and I'm starting to work my way through the list.  Short takes so far: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is brilliant.  Salvation on Sand Mountain (a semi-journalistic account of life among snake-hangling evangelical preachers) was a great read, entire worth the time if you can track down a copy.  The Master and Margarita, despite being recommended by basically everyone, didn't work for me at all.  (I am actually ashamed to admit that, as though it renders all of my other judgments worthless.  I think the problem may have been the translation, though, and I'm going to try again.)  Lisa Goldstein's A Mask for the General was wonderful, even though I found the main POV character really annoying.  (I suspect she's supposed to be annoying, at least a little bit.)  Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel was... you know, I should have been more sympathetic to this book, or at least much more interested, because I think I generally agree with his thesis, but I just couldn't get through it.  It felt stickily condescending, something on the smug/smarmy axis.   

2) I could not be more ready for the Coming of the Hour (a.k.a. the end of Daylight Savings), as I am already very tired of it being so dark when I wake up in the morning.

3) I have the best students ever.  I know that many new teachers feel this way, but in my case?  It's true.

autumn!

It felt like fall this morning, strong winds and swirls of dead leaves on the ground, that dark gold quality to the sunlight.  This afternoon, it's summer again, like it's been all week, but this morning?  Felt like fall.  We don't get much of that out here.

genius, perspective, time shift.

I'll confess to being completely surprised by the students in my seminar.  The seminar deals with the theory of evolution by natural selection, how it was developed and how it's been applied and interpreted in the 150-plus years since.  There's an attitude that seems to be common among my students that I just plain wasn't expecting--the more they read about Darwin's social and intellectual context, the less impressed they are with him.  Evolution theories were kind of floating around the intellectual atmosphere in Europe at that time, especially in England, and his work grew out of this large and very active community of knowledge.  It's as though the students feel that this makes him less of a genius and more of, I don't know, a craftsman or something.  Doing the skilled labor of science, but not contributing much of distinction.  (I'm stating this more forcefully than they do, but I don't feel as though I'm really misinterpreting the argument.)

And it's very strange for me, this response.  My job isn't to impose an opinion on them, after all.  My job is to help them learn to evaluate the information I'm giving them.  They're not understanding the material incorrectly--Darwin's work was embedded in a knowledge culture, he wasn't some kind of maverick loner.  On my own, though, I don't put much stock in the "maverick loner" model for scientific discovery.  I see science as a community activity.  It's true that major shifts in theories often involve someone either coming from the outside of a scientific community or the incorporation of an outside body of knowledge, but even the canonical "great men" of science have built on, relied on, grown out of the work of other scholars. 

The dilemma, though.  Like I say, my job isn't to impose my opinion on them.  Part of my teaching philosophy is that it's always okay for students to disagree with me on questions of interpretation, as long as they have their facts right and they're proceeding thoughtfully.  But I do disagree with them on this, and I'd like for us to discuss it, but I'm trying to be sensitive to the classroom dynamic.  How do I, as an instructor, participate in the debate, without squishing dissent?  The seminar dynamic is a tricky one.  In lectures, it's more clear-cut: it's my classroom.  I'm glad to have it be an interactive classroom, but I'm pretty comfortable with being the authority figure.  In seminars, though, it's supposed to be a collaborative classroom environment.  I've heard professors describe their role in the seminar as something akin to a sound engineer; you bring up certain channels of discussion and tone down others, you try to get more (or less) sound out of particular students, but the whole -point- of a seminar is that the discussion, while instructor-guided, is student-dominated.

We've also had some trouble getting off the ground with this seminar.  It's the fourth week of classes, but it's going to be our first real course meeting.  The first week, registration was still in flux, and some students couldn't find the room, and the end result was that I only had one student that week.  The second week was Labor Day, and no class.  The third week, we spent almost our entire class time in an instructional session at the library, learning how to use the online catalog and the journal databases.  The registration is still in flux--since the last class meeting, we've lost three auditors, but might have gained another registered student.  We'll see who comes to class today.

I've been hesitant to talk too much about the lecture course, or any of my classes, because I know that some of the students have found the weblog.  But let's be honest--I don't think it's a surprise to any of them that this is my first time teaching this class.  As we're going, I'm making notes towards future adjustments to the course.  (Such as the previously mentioned "don't spend the whole first lecture on completely abstract concepts.")  In the last week or so, I've been questioning the course structure, whether it actually makes sense to start with Greece.  So much of the science we talk about in the early Greek period draws heavily on Egyptian and Mesopotamian bases.  Wouldn't it have made more sense to start with the Africa unit, where I've put the bulk of the Egyptian science?  I'm still not sure.  (One advantage to starting with Greece, though--the secondary literature is more developed, and there's a greater chance that the students have some prior experience with these concepts.  We're here at the start of the fourth week of class and I've just had two new students register for the class.  It will be -much- easier for them to catch up on two and a half weeks of Greek science than it would be for them to catch up on the African science.) 

Mostly, though, I'm just feeling a little dislocated in time, having trouble remembering what day of the week it is.  At any point in time, my attention is so focused on the next lecture that a part of my brain has already shifted ahead--by the time I get home on Thursdays, for example, I've spent so much of my day thinking about Friday that I'm half-surprised to find that it's still Thursday. 

Oh, I remember the other thing I meant to post.  Given that so many of my friends have also started teaching this year, I figure that some of y'all might find this as useful as I did: Ten Ways to Make Your Teaching More Effective.  Particularly helpful (for me) on the subject of pacing and lecture structure, and I'm tentatively planning on taking their suggestion for optional mid-semester evaluations.   

"never such a baby."

Best thing I've found so far this semester (and it had me laughing out loud on the bus this morning), from the second volume of Janet Browne's Darwin biography.  She's talking about Alfred Russel Wallace, specifically his trips through Malaysia, and she mentions that he spent part of the trip caring for an infant orangutan.  The infant had been orphaned when Wallace shot its mother for a specimen, but he was already convinced of the connection between men and other primates, and he apparently took care of the orangutan much like it was a regular child.  Here:

There was never such a baby as my baby, he told his sister.  "I am sure nobody ever had such a dear little duck of a darling of a brown hairy baby before."

So wonderful, the image of Wallace tromping around the jungle with his little hairy baby. 

catch-up.

So hard to find time to write anything.  It's been a whirl of lectures, receptions, and visiting friends and family; currently buried under a pile of Hellenistic astronomy and mathematical geography.  Sneaking away from Ptolemy and Aristarchus just long enough to say hello.

Matt's father is the current out-of-town visitor, and last night he took us to a baseball game.  It was a great time, despite it being one of the worst baseball games I've ever witnessed.  The Giants were playing Colorado, and while the Giants certainly weren't fielding their A-team, I think we were seeing the absolute dregs of the Colorado roster.  Worst pitching ever, seriously.  Their starting pitcher was pulled towards the end of the second inning, with a total pitch count that was more balls than strikes, and the guy they had in when we left (towards the end of the eighth inning) seemed like he wouldn't have been able to find the strike zone with a map and a flashlight.  He knew it was going badly, too, and was taking really long pauses between pitches, kind of standing there frozen in terror.

The semester is going well so far--I keep meaning to link to the most recent Teaching Carnival, with special section on "first day of class" posts.  My first day of class is best not spoken of here, other than to say that I have learned important things from it.  (Namely, do not pack your first lecture entirely full of abstract concepts and theory frameworks.)  Today, as our class unit on science in the ancient Greek world made the transition from the Hellenic to Hellenistic periods, I got a little carried away and spent far too much of class time on a step-by-step account of Alexander's conquest of the known world.  Alexander is vitally important for understanding why later Greek science had such a different character from earlier work, but that doesn't mean I really needed to spend valuable class time on things like the reasons he burned Perseopolis or the refusal of his troops to move further into India.  Oh, and then there's the small matter of my having consistently referred to Alexander's "westward" path across Asia when he obviously was moving eastward.  (On that last point, I'm lucky in that I've got a great group of students who understood that I meant "east" even though I was saying "west".) 

Euclid is calling, though, and it's back to work for me.

wiki wiki.

Of all the things I could be posting about, why yes, I'm going to try and assemble my thoughts about Wikipedia first.  Why?  Because apparently I can't get away from it.  First it was the matched set of articles in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, then a series of weblog posts from James and Liz and Sage.  What really struck me was the contrast in attitudes towards Wikipedia; the two magazine articles were nearly identical in a lot of ways, and both struck the same position of tentative optimism.  Sure, it might be a mess, but it's an interesting mess, they both seemed to be saying. (For what it's worth, and despite all the criticism I end up tossing it's way, I mostly agree with that evaluation.)   James and Sage are also both Wikipedia supporters, and James in particular makes characteristically persuasive arguments in its favor.

But then there's Liz's post, which is a great expression of frustration with the whole enterprise.  She references two things in particular, the Wikipedia entries on danah boyd and Women's Rights.  In both cases, I find the "discussion" pages a lot more interesting than the actual articles.  danah's article in particular has generated a huge volume of discussion, most of it on three major points: the proper capitalization of her name, whether or not she is sufficiently "notable", and what constitutes a valid source of information for Wikipedia content.

Trying to work out my thoughts on "notability" and validity of inclusion in Wikipedia, I tend to (for whatever reason) refer back to my high school a lot.  It has its own Wikipedia entry.  (Which is, I suppose, itself kind of an impressive thing.  Matt's high school doesn't have its own Wikipedia entry.)  Through said entry, I know that a number of graduates from my high school are also "notable" enough to have their own Wikipedia entries.  I realize it's slightly futile to compare their relative notability to danah boyd's; not only are they all in different fields, but the people who argue that danah isn't sufficiently notable have probably never thought about whether or not Brody qualifies.  (Wikipedia is, as James reminds us, not a monolithic entity.)   That said, it's not clear to me why the entry for danah, who I don't know personally at all but know by reputation as a researcher, is subject to such volatile debate on the notability factor, while the entry on a decade-old murder case doesn't appear to cause any of the same consternation. 

That's the thing, right?  Everyone acknowledges that the cooperative authoring model is both the strength and weakness of Wikipedia, but this is a side effect that I hadn't thought much about--the wild inconsistency in the application of community standards.  (Not to mention the very definition of the community's standards; reading through the discussion of guidelines for establishing the notability of academics actually gave me a headache.)   Or just wild inconsistency across the board; the lack of a centralized editorial authority may be what allows Wikipedia to grow so fast, but it also means that (for instance) there's no point to asking why it's appropriate to open the entry on Woman with a photograph of a naked woman but not to have a naked man at in the first screenful of the entry on
Man.  The parallelism there is the kind of thing that a centralized editorial authority might be concerned with, but the vast chaotic debating masses of Wikipedia have (at least for now, temporarily) come to a different conclusion.  (The discussion pages for both entries do show an active debate on the question, although much more active on the Woman page.)

One of the things you hear a lot from Wikipedia advocates is that the best way to criticize the content is to edit it--if you see something that's incorrect, fix it.  And yes, within the Wikipedia ethos, that's absolutely the right way to do it.  But here, let me illustrate one of my recent encounters with Wikipedia.

It starts with me, at my desk, doing one final pass through my lecture notes before heading to class.  I'm doing a segment of my lecture on the geography and early history of ancient Greece, and I've got a reference in my notes to the area in question being "roughly the same size as Alabama, or England."  It occurs to me that it might be nice to have an actual number attached to that statement, but I don't have a reference book handy in my office, so I check Wikipedia.  (That's pretty typical of how I use the internet in general, and Wikipedia in specific, in a teaching context.  I don't generally find it useful at all for the actual instructional content, but it's often helpful for finding maps and other pictures, pointers to more useful reference materials, and the occasional stray fact.)  The entry on Greece gives me a number just shy of 51,000 square miles.  For comparison's sake, I check England and Alabama too; England is roughly comparable, but at Alabama I run into trouble.  The text of the article says 52,000 square miles, but the sidebar says 152,000.  This is -clearly- a typo, and having just recently read James's admonitions on the subject, I figure that I'll fix the typo.  Except that I can't figure out exactly what to do with the CSS tags, and somehow the idea of explaining my actions in that "edit summary" box is kind of daunting, so I leave it alone.

And that's in a case where I'm on firm factual ground and only have one tweak to make.  (I'll be surprised if the tweak hasn't been made already by the time you, O Reader, get around to following my links.)  What about my old friend William James, whose entry more-or-less entirely disregards his work (and influence) as a psychologist?  (I don't consider the passage on his theory of emotion to constitute sufficient coverage of his work.)  It's not even that I don't have the time (although I don't, really) to devote to filling the gaps in this record, it's that I really just don't have the energy to start interacting with the Wikipedia community in any kind of involved way.  It's like a very small and extremely pre-emptive version of what Sage was talking about, in terms of "expert burnout".

There was something else I wanted to say... oh, right, on the Women's Rights entry.  Again, the discussion page is both fascinating and exhausting.  And it brings me right up against my biggest problem with Wikipedia, which is that I fundamentally don't believe in the existence of a neutral point of view.  Even for the most basic and bare-bones fact-list kind of entries, there's always a selection process, a creation of context in terms of what's included and what isn't. Anything that aspires to greater explanatory or analytical power is absolutely going to involve lack of neutrality.  I understand why Wikipedia sets objective neutrality as a goal, but given that I think it's something of a mythical concept, it's probably not surprising that I'm not more interested in getting involved with Wikipedia.