Category Archives: Passing thoughts

Midweek self-criticism: disdain for other flavors of geekery.

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Given that at least some denizens of the internet assume that I (like all my comrades in academia, especially at a public university system in California) must be a card-carrying Communist, public self-criticism may become a semi-regular blog feature here. (Verily, given how judgmental all that grading makes me, I ought to use some of it on myself.)

Anyway, the other night I was mulling over whether I wanted to watch the documentary film Helvetica, a film that explores the typographical font of the same name. I’ve spoken to people who have seen it and have really enjoyed it, and yet, I found myself resistant.

On the surface, at least, I put down my resistance to my impression that Helvetica is maybe a documentary best appreciated by font-geeks. While I appreciate a well-balanced font as much as the next producer or consumer of written language, I am not a font-geek.

At least, I’m not a font-geek at present. Maybe my hesitance to watch Helvetica was really a matter of fear — fear that the film might turn me into a font-geek. Not that there’s anything objectively wrong with being a font-geek, but I have lots of other kinds of geekery on my plate at the moment, and I worry that adding one more might be a geek too far. Also, I’m not sure I want to find myself staying up late switching the fonts on all my old web pages, handouts, and manuscripts (which is maybe something that a serious font-geek might do).

But, if I’m worrying that the activation energy to turn me into a font-geek is sufficiently low that an 80 minute movie could push me over it, maybe there’s an uglier side to my resistance.

I must acknowledge the possibility that what I really fear is that watching Helvetica will turn me into one of them (i.e., a font-geek), and that my real problem, should this outcome occur, is not that it will be time consuming to indulge in this additional geekery, nor that it will displace some existing geekery in which I currently partake. Rather, maybe I’d have a problem with letting go of my disdain for this other sort of geek that I am not, with their strange ways and odd interests. The emotional distance is similar to what I imagine a non-Trekkie would feel toward Trekkies when watching the documentary Trekkies.*

Am I a person who needs to hold on to disdain for others, even to the point of disdaining myself if I should find myself like those others in my appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of typographical fonts? I hope not.

Having recognized my error in resisting Helvetica and my own potential membership in the fellowship of font-geeks, I affirm my willingness to watch the film, as well as my commitment to hold no other geeks in disdain for the focus of their geekery.

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* I haven’t actually watched Trekkies, either. I don’t dress up in Federation uniforms or go to cons, and I never got too immersed in the shows in the Star Trek franchise that came after the original series, but I acknowledge that I’m at least a low-level Trekkie.

Tuesday headdesk.

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Did you ever go to your class and give what feels like a really good lecture on the reading (because the students look engaged, and they’re asking really good questions about both the specifics and the big picture) …

And, it feels like it’s connecting in a really effective way to issues discussed in the last class meeting (simultaneously reinforcing some of those points and challenging them) …

And, you didn’t even really have to dip into your list of half a dozen current situations that raise similar kinds of questions, because the students are all over it and have raised half a dozen such current situations of their own …

Only to discover
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An ambiguous instruction.

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In one of my classrooms today, I found the following on the lectern:

PleaseDistribute

“PLEASE DISTRIBUTE IN YOUR CLASSES.”

Well, the first class I taught in that classroom today includes symbolic logic. In that class, we have distributed. We have also associated and commuted.

In the section of “Philosophy of Science” that follows in the same room, not so much.

Professorial conundrum.

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I usually work at home on Mondays (since it’s easier to get in the 16 hours you need to work if you don’t have to spend two of them operating a motor vehicle). But today, to accommodate a student who needed to make up a quiz, I came in to the office.

The student arrived about 20 minutes ahead of our prearranged time, but I was happy to let him get started.

About 15 minutes after that, a colleague asked if I could strategize with him about a collaborative project that will involve some serious grant-writing in the next six weeks. In order not to disturb my quiz-taker with our talking, we went to the department conference room, just down the hall. First, of course, I informed my student that I’d be just down the hall if he had any questions. He indicated his awareness of this information.

Maybe 12 minutes later, I returned to my office, whose door was still open. There was no sign of the student making up the quiz. Nor, for that matter, was there any sign of his quiz paper. However, there is a folder on the desk where he was sitting that appears to be his, and a set of earbuds on the floor near the chair in which I left him sitting.

So … does this means that he abandoned his plan to make up the quiz? Or that he took a bathroom break only to meet with a bad end in the men’s room? Or that he was abducted (or disintegrated) by aliens?

As a practical matter, how long ought I to remain in my office to see if he’s actually going to return?

Blog note: resurfacing.

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You will have noticed (if you haven’t given up on me altogether) that things have been very quiet here.

I have been slogging through the toughest semester of my academic life. I’m including in this consideration all 26 of the years I was a student and each and every one of my pre-tenure freak-out semesters here. When people ask how I’m doing, I’ve taken to replying that my job is trying to kill me, and I’m only joking a little when I say it (because I don’t believe that my job itself actually has intentions).

I’m hopeful that things will get better, but honestly, it’s hard to know. The increased workload doesn’t show much sign of receding (because, you know, the state of California is still broke, so public employees should just be thrilled to have jobs rather than agitating for more resources, or for job demands that might allow them to sleep occasionally or spend a weekend day with their kids).

What I do know is that cutting out the blogging to try to stay on top of the work is not working for me. It feels like, for me, the blogging is a crucial mechanism for reflection. Without it, I feel like I don’t have a sense of what I’m really accomplishing, or of why it matters, or of who I am as I’m hurtling though it. I feel stuck in my head in a tangle of chaos, and that’s not making my stupid workload any easier to live through.

All of which is to say, I do not know when my blogging will “get back to normal” as far as the longer pieces on science and ethics that I used to write before work ate my brain, but I will be writing something here regularly, because it’s the only way I know to survive this.

Blogrolling: Reaction Crate.

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Longtime readers of this blog will know that one of my professional interests (which I even talk about occasionally here) is the philosophy of chemistry, a subset of the philosophy of science with a fairly small number of practitioners.

Well, I’ve recently found a new blog, Reaction Crate, whose tagline promises “Philosophy, Chemistry, and Other Reactive Things.”

So far, there’s a cool post on chemical classification by microstructure. And, there’s an extremely helpful post about how to get into grad school in philosophy or history and philosophy of science. The blog’s author, Julia Bursten, is a third year grad student in the HPS department at the University of Pittsburgh, so she knows of what she speaks — and she’s writing about it very engagingly.

Check it out!.

Students who can rock a midterm and make me laugh.

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I may have mentioned once or twice before that I really dig my student. Not only are they really committed to learning the stuff I’m trying to teach them (while working many hours, commuting long distances, taking care of families, etc.), but a bunch of them are also really funny.

That they can maintain a sense of humor while taking a midterm is already impressive. That they can produce really good answers that make me laugh is even better — especially since it makes my experience of grading 110 midterms in a sitting a bit more enjoyable.

Two examples from the most recent midterm that are too good not to share:

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Scary repost: Neighbor kids, ergot, and zombies.

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A conversation that happened just over two years ago as my better half was clearing plates from the kitchen table and I was cooking something.

Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: Hey, I thought our kids like zucchini bread.

Dr. Free-Ride: They do. That piece was [the kid across the street’s] — always gladly accepts a snack, never has more than a few bites.

Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: Huh.

Dr. Free-Ride: I think that’s why when our kids are over there, there are so many snacks. If you have a kid who only eats a little at a time, you have to feed continuously.

Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: Why don’t our kids eat like birds?

Dr. Free-Ride: I’m going to guess that genetics have something to do with it. But their metabolic reserves will carry them through when zombies have disrupted Trader Joe’s supply chain.

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What a nine-year-old doesn’t know about teaching.

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Last night, the younger Free-Ride offspring came upon me grading a stack of quizzes. (Suffice it to say that the younger Free-Ride offspring did not grab a pen and offer to help with the grading, although there was a bit of showing off by explaining the informal fallacies on the quiz to me. “Am I as smart as a college student?”)

But then things took a turn that reminded me that there are some pieces of my everyday experience that are total mysteries to a kid.

Younger offspring: Did I say the right thing to explain what was wrong about the reasoning?

Dr. Free-Ride: Pretty much. See for yourself on the answer key.

Younger offspring: (Noticing the answer key is handwritten, in purple ink) Wait, did you have to write the answers yourself?

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, of course.

Younger offspring: It’s good that you’re smart enough to know the answers.

Dr. Free-Ride: I’d better know the answers, since I wrote the quiz.

Younger offspring: (Eyes widening) You had to write the quiz yourself, too?

Dr. Free-Ride: Kiddo, where did you think quizzes come from?

Younger offspring: I didn’t know.

As the new-ish semester kicks her butt, your blogger surfaces for a moment.

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Verily, the new semester is kicking my butt.

Lots of students means lots of name-face correlations to memorize (something I’m still working on), and, of course, lots of papers to grade.

A departmental edict against making more photocopies than are absolutely necessary means I need to spend extra time converting what once would have been handouts into PDFs and web pages, and making sure the links to them actually work. (Also, I need to convince the students for the Logic and Critical Reasoning course to actually bring copies, be they hard or soft, of the homework questions with them to our class meetings.)

It probably doesn’t help that soccer coaching is on my plate and that my team plays weeknight games as well as really-early-Saturday-morning games. (It does help that my team seems to have embraced teamwork from the get-go, so huzzah for that.)

As I’m treading water over here, a couple of things I’m pondering:

  • Sure, I’m saving trees by not duplicating and distributing full syllabi, detailed descriptions of assignments, and such. Probably without all those handouts more students are actually accessing the course websites (where I have always mounted electronic versions of the handouts). However, now I’m wondering whether the barrage of handouts at the first class meeting actually helped to scare away people who didn’t really want to take my class, thus freeing up spaces for the scores of people who were telling me that they were desperate to add it — not just because it filled a requirement for graduation, but because the subject matter really speaks to them.*
  • For a long time, I have graded student work in ink that is not red whenever possible, on account of gestures some of my pedagogical mentors have made to research suggesting that red ink on work they are getting back conveys to students OMG I did it WRONG! and am STOOPID!. This is not, as you might guess, a mindset that is conducive to learning more stuff. However, now I’m starting to wonder if we may be training a new generation of students to recoil from comments written in purple ink.

Things have to settle down soon. Right?

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* I have my suspicions that the extent to which any of my courses “speaks to” people who want to add it might be contingent on how badly they need it to graduate, how swiftly their planned graduation date is approaching, and how nicely my course fits in their schedule. Not that I’m cynical or anything.