jumpingfish

Two girls giggle at their desk in the middle of the room. I look up. They are staring at me.

“Mr. Hasan,” one of them says as the other laughs. “Look at this.” She holds up her phone with a picture of a hand holding a spoon to a boy who’s about to put it in his mouth. 

“I gave him a spoonful of crushed tortilla chips,” she says.

“And he ate them!” the other one says.

They then proceeded to explain who this boy is and how one of them is trying to figure out how to ask him to prom. (Although he’s their age, he’s not a student at our school.) 

Ok fine. Except that they are asking me for advice. Not a good plan. For various reasons, prom is a blot on my memory. Whatever. I think to myself how I’ve wished someone had given me advice to just make sure your date has fun. Why was that not obvious? So I give them my answer.

“Here’s what I think,” I say. “Just tell him, Hey! I know something fun we could do…” 

The two of them immediately erupt into uncontrolled laughter.

“Mr. Hasan?”

“Yesss?” 

“Mr. Hasan, I need to do math at midnight.”

“I see.” 

“Midnight. That’s when I’m in math mode.” 

“Math mode? At midnight!?” another student said. “At midnight I’m like…” He tilted his head, rolled his eyes back, and hung his tongue out of his mouth.

No kidding.

1.

“Is there anything you want to tell me, Simon?” I asked in an email message. “I would like to talk to you about your quiz, but before I do that I’d like to give you a chance to tell me anything you think I ought to know.” 

You see Simon, who is normally an in-person student, was remote that day. Strange, I thought at first without paying it too much attention. But then perhaps not unexplainable, I began to suspect later, when I saw that Simon’s quiz was virtually identical to another student’s answers. 

They are close friends, and although Simon has been in-person, Simon’s friend has been struggling as a remote student. Accustomed to making good grades and tremendously frustrated by the challenges of being remote and some other perhaps more serious challenges at home, Simon’s friend was distraught.

And they seem to have collaborated on the quiz. Not only were their answers identical, but so were their mistakes. And they both coincidentally omitted the same problem from their turned-in work.

Simon fessed up in his reply. Moments later, Simon’s friend sent a separate message accepting all blame, asking that Simon not be penalized.

2.

They were truly busted. You see, I had not told them anything other than asking Simon if he had something he wanted to tell me. 

I sent the a message to the two of them — the first time we were all “talking together”…

First of all, I just want both of you to know that I am very proud to be a teacher of two students so dedicated to supporting each other. In so many ways, you both are awesome.

Secondly, typically in this case both students get a zero. This isn’t a typical case. I’ll give you what you scored on the quizzes you submitted. The scores aren’t particularly great, so there’s probably room for … improvement.

Here’s what I ask…

And so I proposed that they collaborate on a new version of the test that I would send them. This one would have the answers (as do their homework assignments). I told them that I expected them to solve all the problems, show all their work, do the work neatly, and furthermore explain their work to me. And finally, I asked them to put a box around their answers and put a checkmark next to the box if their answers agreed with mine.

“This won’t be for a grade,” I told them. “And I don’t want it to jeopardize your six-week grades in your other classes. But I want you to learn this material. Maybe this will help.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, they took me up on the offer.

Here is a rabbit hole for Saturday.

• In the morning, I click on a few links that lead me to an article in Quanta magazine discussing how imaginary numbers might after all be essential elements of reality rather than mere mathematical conveniences. This is a big deal for me. It has consumed hours of my free time literally for years. I won’t go into it here (which I know you’ll thank me for). Let’s just say that I’m still shaking my head from reading the beginning of the article. I don’t finish reading because…
• I click on a few links that lead me to Sabine Hossenfelder’s awesome physics videos, the most recent of which is (whaddaya know) “Do Complex Numbers Exist?” Her book is good. Her blog is great. Her video explanations are tremendous. I listen to her slowly, periodically pausing to do morning chores. I don’t finish listening because…
• I stumble onto a brief (100 page) synopsis of General Relativity by Alan MacDonald. I have two his two little books on Geometric Algebra and Calculus. The synopsis is written with the intent of getting to the core ideas without too much mathematical complexity, seeking in particular to avoid long diversions into tensor analysis. I won’t go into the tensor analysis point (which I know you’ll thank me for) other than to say that my feelings on the subject turn out to be (strangely enough) tied up with the whole problem with imaginary numbers, but let’s just stop there. I don’t finish the synopsis because it’s 100 pages, and because…
• MacDonald’s article talks about time (which any discussion of spacetime inevitably will), and I find myself browsing through links again and find a reference to Jorge Luis Borges’ essays on the refutation of time. I knew his name. I didn’t know his writing. Now I do. I love how he writes. And I find myself searching the public library hoping to find ebooks (to no avail, they are all checked out — a concept that defies rational explanation). But web searches are of course your friend, and I find the two essays I’m looking for in a PDF someone had stashed away. I don’t finish them, because…
• In the first essay, Borges writes, “Two arguments led me to this …: Berkeley’s idealism and Leibniz’s principle of indiscernibles.” And not surprisingly, a web search of Liebniz’s principle leads me to the awesome Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for “The Identity of Indiscernibles”. But I don’t finish reading it because…

… morning had become day. Breakfast and lunch had come and gone. The yard work was finished. Afternoon ended. Dinner done. Stars shining. 

And because I started writing this story about a rabbit hole I had stumbled down.

1. Burying Compost 

The compost pile was no longer covered by a four inch crystalline cap. I was digging in the leaves burying the week’s compost.

I confess that even though I had shoveled a little snow, scraped ice off the windshields, tried (and failed) to make a snowman, and picked up slushy ice with my bare hands to boil, being able to empty the compost bucket unmolested by the polar vortex was a luxury.

2. Smelling Rotten Onions

The fair and industrious Trudy was replenishing the bird seed in the bird feeders.

“Do you smell something like rotten onions?” she shouted across yard.

I pointed at our expanse of wild onions that had begun to blossom just last week. They were lying limp on the ground, their leaves colored a wet, dank, dark green.

“Oh right,” she said.

3. Watering Winter Greens

As she pulled the shade fabric off her garden bed in the galvanized tub, Trudy discovered to her industrious delight that her Kale and Chard did fine. Although being covered they had missed the snowmelt and so the soil was dry.

She went into the house and fetched a pail of water. (Our three 200-gallon rain barrels being functional again, there is no need to melt snow in buckets for flushing.) With joy in her eyes and images of kale in tomorrow’s breakfast smoothie, she poured water on the greens.

They don’t call them winter greens for nothing. 

4. Opening Café Trudy

As I sit here writing, Café Trudy is opening for business. We have friends from across town who are coming to use the shower. We have friends from Buda who still have no water, and they will be coming by after lunch to fill some containers and for some socially distant socializing. Jennifer and Paul are coming by later just to hang out.

So Trudy is wiping down the blue and purple tables and chairs with Clorox. And she is talking to our next door neighbors. And she is preparing to take Miss Izzy for a long walk, which Miss Izzy more than deserves as she has been such a patient apocalypse companion.

And the birds are singing as she does all this. I am somehow reminded of something like this.

5. Taking Showers

We turned the water heater back on not long after the Next-door messages started flying about city water coming back on. The faucets gasped and sputtered. The aerators clogged with deposits and then flowed nicely once flushed.

“I’m taking a shower,” Trudy announced. She had a towel in one hand and clean clothes in another as she marched across the living room, her head held high.

Soon after, I did the same. And as I sit here writing, my legs are still warmer than they’ve been in over a week. And my hair, well let’s just say that my slicked-back doo is très passé.

6. Taking Stock

Compared to so many people in Texas, we had it easy. We were never cold. We didn’t go hungry. We had water to drink. We slept comfortably. Our water lines didn’t break. The Ash tree didn’t fall on our cars. Trudy found groceries when our supplies started running low.

We were some of the fortunate ones.

And I sit here now euphoric with warm legs and clean clothes, marveling at the warm sun and listening to the wind chimes singing in the wind that is blowing mercifully out of the southwest.