jumpingfish

Sometimes I catch glimpses from an alternate multiverse. I have a classroom of students, and I give them open ended assignments, assignments where they read a passage that their professor has strategically selected. They come back (the next day?) to the class and give a summary report and provide some answers to additional questions that I pose independently to each of them.

“Read pages 1-11. Give an overview to the class. Pay particular attention to the passage on Kepler. Do some additional research. Give the class a summary of his equal area law and how it is related to angular momentum.”

“Read pages 12-18. Give an overview of the class. Pay particular attention to the passage on Newton and Leibniz. Do some additional research. Give the class a brief summary of their two notations for derivatives.”

“Read pages 19-25. Give an overview of the class. Pay particular attention to the passage on Copernicus. Do some additional research. Give the class a brief summary of how and why he used epicycles in his model of the solar system.”

The thoughts pop into my head from time to time — usually when I am reading a book that would be an ideal assignment for the students to read from. And of course, I have no such students, none who could handle such an assignment. I never will. Mine struggle with simpler things. My contributions to their lives will very likely not involve mathematics. But there will be contributions. That is certainly something, and it’s something important. 

Still… there are those glimpses and the echoes of alternatives.

“Mister,” he said.

The classroom was full of students milling around in the moments remaining before the bell.

“Mister,” he said again. I looked over at him. “She took it to school!” 

He was talking about his sister. She is very sick and until recently had been getting chemo. The other day, he told me that the treatment was over — that they weren’t giving her chemo, anymore. And when he told me that, I told him I wanted to draw his sister a picture, at which point we walked over to my desk, and he watched me draw a full page “stick figure” extending an arm that grew large in cartoonish fashion similar to the Keep On Truckin’ bumper stickers from decades ago. It was a simple picture with a ballooning hand reaching out to do a high-five with the words “Good job” underneath and a big cartoonish exclamation point. 

At the time, he said, “She’ll want to draw you a picture herself, Mister” which made me smile.

But it turned out even better than that: she took the picture to school to show to her friends. Because she needs to be proud of having made it through what she made it through.

It was Saturday just after lunch. Tony was on the floor of our kitchen. There were ice maker parts spread about. 

When he had arrived, Tony had pulled the ice maker out of our freezer and tested the water supply, which was fine. He mumbled something about how the valve must be ok, so he went to his truck for a new ice maker, one which didn’t have a wiring harness. (Why would we replace that if we don’t need to, he explained.) He put everything back together, and … no joy. So he went for a third ice maker, one with a new wiring harness. He put this third unit into the freezer, and … no joy. Unflustered, he went around the back of the refrigerator and tested the water supply valve again. This time, it didn’t work.

He had tested it once, and it had was fine. And then he had tested the ice maker itself, and it had was fine. Then with everything reinstalled, nothing worked. Every time he was almost done, the problem moved around. 

In the end, it was the valve. 

“Do you know anything about quantum mechanics?” I asked him as he was packing up his tools.

“No,” he said.

I explained the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (which I probably mangled — sorry Dad). You know: that the exact position and momentum of a particle cannot be simultaneously measured, that the more precisely you know one, the less well you know the other. I smiled contentedly at the silly analogy for what we had just been through — that the fault moved around each time he tested something, that we had witnessed our own little uncertainty principle in action.

“Hmm,” he said. He packed his tools and rebooted the two new ice makers. Trudy wrote him a check. And Tony left 30 minutes late for his next appointment.

Thursday Afternoon

On Thursday afternoon after school, I was in my room winding down. A few students had been getting help, but they were gone. K came running around the corner. She was in shorts and a jersey and was covered in sweat. She had a smile on her face.

“I was worried you might be gone,” she gasped. And she handed me something that looked like a certificate.

It was an invitation for teacher appreciation night. She had chosen me to come stand with her at the beginning of Friday’s home game.

“Can you be there?” she asked.

“Of course!”

Friday Evening

When the time came before the game on Friday, they lined us up on the sideline for the national anthem. And then, athlete by athlete, teacher by teacher, they planned to call us out to center court.

“Let’s run,” K said. “You used to run marathons, so we can run, right?”

“Right!” 

And when the announcer called her name and mine, we dashed through a tunnel of up-held arms. We ran out to center court, where we stood, athlete-teacher-athlete-teacher while the crowd applauded for the girls and for the teachers they chose to recognize.

“I have a gift for you,” she said as we left the court.

Each of the girls had a little bag for each of us. In my bag, was a tall can of Arizona green tea, a bag of Chex Mix, and an autographed ball — in my case, a ball with a bit of a math pun K had written on it.

That ball will be featured prominently on my desk tomorrow morning.

The images have begun to arrive from Ultima Thule as New Horizons begins a long, slow data dump.

Lest you misunderstand, this is not one of those.