jumpingfish

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.”

Dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah

#silentsunday

Morning and evening light on Half Mile Lake:

We left this behind a month after we’d left Austin. Tell me again, why did we do that?