“The journey not the arrival matters.” - T. S. Eliot
“You know as well as I do it’s not about what you look like, or your job, or how successful you are. It’s about having people in your life that you love and who love you… that’s all that matters.” –Miranda Bailey on Grey’s Anatomy
Had a great time with the “gurlz” in Columbus this weekend, played a lot of music, laughed a lot, talked a lot. I love you guys!
Also went to church on Sunday, and sang this, among other things. I always liked this one:
Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of God’s unchanging love.
I came back to my apartment last night to find water dripping, no, gushing (kind of like someone had turned a faucet on), from my ceiling! In the kitchen. And the bathroom. And down the walls. And in my closet. And through the overhead light fixtures. Turned out that the radiator main for the building broke, and all the water was coming out in people’s apartments. Not fun. Check out some pictures Martin took: Yesterday and Today.
Taizé puts a list daily bible verses, the main one for the day, on their website, and I check it most days. I liked this one.
The Lord said to Samuel: Take no notice of appearance. God does not see as human beings see: they look at appearances but God looks at the heart. (1 S 16:1-13)
I saw this editorial in the NYT today (yesterday?) about math education in the US and Singapore. Now, I realize that it’s not often the US is compared to Singapore, that small Southeast Asian nation at the tip of Malaysia. And while the US considers itself to be top in many areas, that’s not the case with math education. Singapore gets 1st prize in that. And maybe we don’t have to be first in that. But I know that I am not nearly as well prepared as other people from other countries. They’ve worked more problems and had to memorize more than we had to here. And while that seems boring and rote, it’s the only way to really know what’s going on. I’m not saying we should make math classes so rote that we only memorize and copy, because intuition is important. But it takes a lot of problem solving to get to that point sometimes. And because we as a country can’t do that, we’re destined to be behind most other countries in math and science until the system is changed. We have to.
The countries that outperform the United States in math and science education have some things in common. They set national priorities for what public school children should learn and when. They also spend a lot of energy ensuring that every school has a high-quality curriculum that is harnessed to clearly articulated national goals. This country, by contrast, has a wildly uneven system of standards and tests that varies from place to place. We are also notoriously susceptible to educational fads.
One of the most infamous fads took root in the late 1980’s, when many schools moved away from traditional mathematics instruction, which required drills and problem solving. The new system, sometimes derided as “fuzzy math,” allowed children to wander through problems in a random way without ever learning basic multiplication or division. As a result, mastery of high-level math and science was unlikely. The new math curriculum was a mile wide and an inch deep, as the saying goes, touching on dozens of topics each year.
Many people trace this unfortunate development to a 1989 report by an influential group, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. School districts read its recommendations as a call to reject rote learning. Last week the council reversed itself, laying out new recommendations that will focus on a few basic skills at each grade level.
Under the new (old) plan, students will once again move through the basics — addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and so on — building the skills that are meant to prepare them for algebra by seventh grade. This new approach is being seen as an attempt to emulate countries like Singapore, which ranks at the top internationally in math.
There was a New York Times article today about a recent report by a panel discussing women in the sciences. Basically, they found that the policies for hiring, tenure, promotion, etc in academic institutions were created for (and by) men, and thus hinder women as they move through the “academic pipeline.” Much of this shows up when women have children, but men aren’t penalized for this like women are. Very interesting, but I totally agree with it.
The report also dismissed other commonly held beliefs — that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families, and so on. Their real problems, it says, are unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes, and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”
In the same vein as the Anna Quindlen piece, we have Lee Ann Womack:
I hope you never lose your sense of wonder
You get your fill to eat
But always keep that hunger
May you never take one single breath for granted
God forbid love ever leave you empty handed
I hope you still feel small
When you stand by the ocean
Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens
Promise me you’ll give faith a fighting chanceAnd when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance
I hope you dance
Almost only counts in horseshoes…and hand grenades, as my dad always says. Well, it seems that mathematically speaking, that’s not necessarily the case, according to a blurb in this (Oct. 2006) issue of Discover magazine.
Infinity seems like a wildly remote concept, but sometimes you can tame it with some very simple math. Consider a zero followed by a decimal and an infinitely long string of nies, written as 0.99999…. What is the value of that unending series? The answer, strangely enough, is that it just equals 1. Here’s a way to prove it. First define x to be 0.9999…. Next, multiply x by 10 to get 10x. We know that 10 times 0.99999… equals 9.99999…, so this means 10x equals 9.99999…. Now subtract x from 10x to get 9x. This is just 9.99999… minus 0.99999…, which equals 9 (the parts to the right of the decimal disappear because they are the same). So 9x equals 9, which means that x equals 1. But by definition, x equals 0.99999…, so we conclude that 0.99999… equals 1! –Alex Stone
That is,
x = 0.99999…
10x = 9.99999…
10x - x = 9.99999… - x
10x - x = 9.99999… - 0.99999…
9x = 9
x = 1
Thus, 0.99999…=1.
Craziness!
Another great column by Anna Quindlen was in Newsweek this week:
But for a long time I’ve had the uncomfortable feeling that the result has been a generation enveloped by a black miasma of imminent disaster. It’s not that they hear about the dangers of drugs: they hear about them in school presentations, public-service announcements, print ads, TV movies, “After School Specials,” cable documentaries and, of course, from responsible mothers and fathers. They’ve heard about them in elementary school, middle school, high school and college.
The net effect could be that the drumbeat of danger becomes persistent white noise, unremarked, unheard, unheeded. But that wasn’t my concern when I realized that my daughter was going to hear the same warning about date rape in summer that she’d just heard in spring. Once, someone asked me what single quality I most wanted to pass on to my children. Without hesitation I replied, “Joie de vivre.” Love of life. That sense of waking up in the morning and thinking that there may be good things ready to happen.
…
Even when we talk about September 11, we can tell a tale of human goodness as well as evil, a tale of those who saved strangers as well as those who murdered them. For all the sleazebags who will try to lure a kid into a car, there are many Good Samaritans who are just concerned when they see a 12-year-old trudging along the road in the rain. I suppose we live at a time when we can’t afford to let them accept the Samaritan’s ride. But we also can’t afford to have them think that Samaritans no longer exist. All these lectures, lessons and cautionary tales can’t be to preserve a lifetime of looking over one shoulder. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”