jumpingfish

1. Background

Years ago after I returned to work following surgery and lymphangiograms and more surgery and radiation therapy and chemotherapy for cancer, a colleague sat with me at lunch.

“You know, chemotherapy isn’t natural,” he said.

There just wasn’t much further that conversation could have gone. It was clear what he was implying — I was corrupting the gene pool.

Fast forward to today, and we have billionaire tech bro masters-of-the-universe breathing new life into eugenics.

2. Canceling Cancer Funding

I claim that bro-rebranded eugenics is hard at work. For example, Google around a bit. You’ll find articles about the Trump administrations cuts to cancer funding.

Admittedly, the story is a bit more complex than sensationalist headlines let on (link: snopes), but there is a reality on the ground that makes the full truth of the matter misleading — funds were just temporarily delayed and meetings temporarily suspended. Yet temporary or not, the actions have had consequences. Clinical trials got canceled in the temporary absence of dollars to pay salaries. Fundamental research projects got shut down in the temporary absence of approvals from review boards who are forbidden from collaborating with researchers.

Some cancer work was canceled.

1. Read the Instructions

I walked over to their desk when they raised their hands.

“Mr. Hasan,” one of them asked, “can we just write our work for problems 2 and 3 over here?” They pointed to the right of problem 1.

“No,” I said.

“What!? We can write small!”

“Did you read the instructions?”

They had guilty looks on their faces.

“For shame,” I joked. “Read the first two sentences out loud.”

They looked at the top of the paper and started to read out loud.

I have not left you any room on this sheet for your work on problems 2 and 3. To get credit for this assignment, you must do all your work for those problems on separate sheets of paper, closely following the steps we did in the notes.

“Oh,” they said.

2. Why Would I Do this?

You might ask why I do this. Am I just mean-spirited? After all, if they can write their work anywhere, doesn’t that demonstrate mastery of the core underlying skill?

Well, that is sufficient only if you have an incomplete notion of what the core underlying skills really are. There are in fact two.

You see, what I’m doing in this lesson is preparing them for the next. Tomorrow, the problems will be more confusing and the technical steps involve many more details than today. If they squeeze their work into an arbitrary block of white space they’ll “lose lock” on what the heck they’re supposed to be doing.

In tomorrow’s problems, being organized will be a necessary precondition for getting the math right. Without that, the whole process will be a dizzying blur. (I know this from personal experience as a student many years ago.)

So no, I do not do this to be mean. I am intentionally teaching (1) organizational skills and (2) mathematical skills together to prepare them for what’s next.

Because without mastering both, they’ll be toast on the next test.

The poor man. Not invited to the party with its fancy festivities and marching military parades. Unable to hobnob with his besties, Xi, Vladimir, and Kim. He whines that they are conspiring against us.

Conspiring. You think!?

1. Are Those Your Books?

As the room was emptying, a student walked up. There had been many questions that first day of class, questions about rates of change and concavity, about what the diagram really meant. I figured she was following up.

“Mr. Hasan,” she said, “are those your books?”

I put down the whiteboard marker.

“Those books on the shelf?” I asked, looking to the back corner of the room where an Aztec calendar, multicolored posters, and a big Canadian flag (Elbows up!) hang from the wall — the “culture corner” of an otherwise relatively bland math classroom. She nodded.

“They are. Why?”

“Even that Silmarillion?”

We walked to the corner where a dozen books sit on a bookshelf that the previous teacher left behind. I took The Silmarillion off the shelf and shared how I had rescued it from a library discard pile at the school where I used to teach.

“Is it a First American Edition?” she asked.

“Let’s look.” I said.

We flipped the book open and looked: First American Edition. 

Her eyes widened.

2. I Have Something For You

At home that evening, I checked the bookshelf in the living room that holds all my Tolkien books. Those three shelves are barely enough for them all — the product of years of scouring used bookstores and joyful trips to Ontario where the production values of Harper-Collins editions of Tolkien books put American versions to shame (Elbows up!).

I looked closely at the second shelf. In 1977, a girlfriend had given me a hardback copy of The Silmarillion. It had just been published, and she knew I was a fan. But I had a vague memory of having parted with that well-worn copy, being enamored of my annotated Harper-Collins edition. I was curious if I had indeed ditched the older edition.

As I ran my figure slowly across the titles, I found it. It was sans dust jacket, but it was indeed the one she had given me, including the note she wrote on the inside. And on the copyright page it also said, First American Edition.

So at the end of the second day of that Precalculus class, as the room was emptying, I walked up to that student.

“I have something for you,” I said. She cocked her head in mild confusion.

I took her to the culture corner in the back of the room and pulled that copy of The Silmarillion off the shelf.

“I found my other copy of this. I don’t need this one.” I held the book out to her. “You may have it.”

Her eyes went wide.

“You mean it’s mine to keep?” she asked, holding it to her chest.

“Yes. It’s yours to keep,” I said.  

Ada

Years ago I dove into the programming language Ada. The NASA lab was funding me was deep into it, but they were far away, and no one here was interested. Here, it was either FORTRAN, or it was C. But I had drunk the Kool-Aide. Ada was difficult to learn in isolation but not impossible. And it enabled amazing things — things that gave me big ideas. Still, there was no one to talk to about it.

My son periodically jokes about how his mom told him years later that I would come home late at night and go on interminably about Ada. She was a captive audience, and I was desperate to share my excitement. But as I went on, her eyes would droop, and her head would begin to bob.

“Ada…,” so their joke goes. “Zzzz.”

LaTeX

Over the last severn years of teaching Algebra 2, I’ve assembled a year’s worth of guided notes in a format that… in a nice format. 

I’d love to talk to you about my rationale for the visual appearance of the notes. And I’d love to talk to you about the LaTeX-based system I’ve built (See it here, if you dare.) There is much to say about the system, from the gorgeous math, to its ability to generate a “blank” student version of the notes and a “filled in” teacher version with answers and commentary in red. 

Wait. Don’t leave yet.

The system enables the generation a full year’s worth of notes (either the student or the teacher version) as a single PDF in book form, including a hyperlinked table of contents that will take you directly to (say) Lesson 4.3. 

No, wait. I haven’t finished.

The VS Code/LaTeX build automation allows a single set of LaTeX source files to generate either version without any duplication — a capability based on Unix symbolic links. The unit tests. The GitHub integration. I’d love to talk about it.

I see that I’ve lost you. 

“LaTex-based algebra guided notes…,” so it goes, “Zzzz.”

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