Matthew Daly

So I promised in an earlier post that I would talk about the anti-racist mathematical movement as I understand it (which is admittedly not well yet).

At a certain level, it seems to be a web of issues and I will mention them and then leave them without support or defense. One complaint is that mathematics is taught from the perspective of how it came to be understood in Europe, which often times ignores that virtually all of elementary mathematics was independently discovered by every culture in history (Chinese mathematics in particular often beat key European discoveries by a millennium or more) and that mathematical discoveries that Europeans knew were often the product of Arab, Indian, and Egyptian influences but we often don't highlight those contributions as such. This bleeds over into the same sorts of "dead white man" issues that literature and the physical sciences have faced over the years -- both that mathematical discovery is closed and that people of color have no talent for it anyways, which will discourage a student of color from mastering the material and furthermore from contemplating a career in a mathematical field. And that, in turn, is connected to all of the other ways that we fail to expect mathematical mastery (let alone excellence or prodigy) from students of color.

As I say, there is no lack of very important discussions to be had there. And my role in those various discussion would range from pulling out my cheerleader uniform to mildly defending the status quo all the way to heavy skepticism. I cannot help but become more informed as my own education continues, so perhaps I will someday come to know enough to speak on some of them in the future. In the mean time, I will speak of my first-hand experience with an issue here that I do know.

(For those who haven't been following along at home, my experience is as a math tutor for students studying for the GED and other related math tests at around the 8th grade level in the United States. My students are mostly black and Latino, nearly all female, I suspect virtually all living in poverty, and a significant number attempting to overcome learning disabilities and similar challenges.)

I will illustrate with an actual example that happened in the past week. About half of my students are taking a formal GED math class that my tutoring sessions are intended to supplement, and this past week they took the Official Practice Test. (A sufficiently high grade in this test would allow them to "graduate" to being allowed to retake the Math portion of the GED.) Here is a relevant portion of a question from that test. I won't display the rest of the question because the last thing I need is a cease-and-desist letter from the ACE, but trust me that an understanding of this sentence is a fundamental part of solving the problem. Again, I want to highlight that this is not a third-party product but an actual question generated by the American Council on Education that is a part of the gate-keeping process for GED diplomas.

"A restaurant menu lists 5 appetizers, 6 main dishes, and 4 desserts that are specialties of the house."

When I reviewed this question in my class, one of my best students shot up her hand and said "I'm sorry, but what does 'appetizer' mean? I'm sure I've seen the word before -- I mean, it's not like I've never been to a restaurant -- but I don't know if I've ever had one." And a few of us kind of talked out that it was like a plate of potato skins or chicken wings or shrimp cocktails that everyone at the table could share while they were waiting for the main dishes to be served, and she seemed to get it (although it was an embarrassing topic for her so I can't be certain).

But you see what happened there. If you're a middle-class white kid like me whose family ate out at sit-down restaurants on the average of once a week, you're answering an easier question than that student of mine did. Because we know that an appetizer isn't a specific sort of main dish, so we just multiply those three numbers together and move on. My student has to go looking deeper for contextual clues to figure out how to process these numbers. I can accept the argument that those clues are buried deeper in the problem, but there is a larger probability that she's going to miss those clues, and even if she does find them she will have less time and less morale than someone who "just knows" these non-mathematical facts.

And this is the sort of thing that you find quite a bit of once you're looking for it (and it is even easier when you have students who are comfortable enough to "admit" that it's their fault that they don't understand poorly-worded questions). How many days are there in June? What is the standard restaurant tip? What is an "at large" delegate? What does "reservoir" mean? Some of these questions are less unfair than others, and reading comprehension and setting up word problems are truly valuable skills that need to be tested. But when the word problems that you set up are biased against some classes or cultures, you really don't get to then dump on those classes and cultures for underperforming on the test.

I should start getting used to talking about me, especially since I'm doing some interesting stuff that I'll probably have to be talking about before long.

I've been spending the last handful of weeks as a volunteer math tutor for the Rochester Educational Opportunity Center, helping folk to get their GED and qualify for an LPN license and similar sorts of job training and college prep opportunities. The organization I am working for is a non-profit affiliated with one of our local state universities that does all this training tuition-free for qualified prospective students (and it seems like pretty liberal standards to establish the economic need) and it really seems to do a lot of good in helping people to chart out a better future. For me as well: it's not a paid position and doesn't even count as field work for a Masters in Education (even though the affiliated university is the one at which I'll be studying), but it'll be a leg up to have the experience in both the schmoozing sense and in being actually prepared for a room full of adolescents.

And so far it's been going really well. The staff is thrilled to get all the help they can, and they've been very helpful and welcoming. The students have been very generous with their praise as well, and even though there is selection bias in my hearing primarily from the sorts of student that I am helping, I can also objectively see that they are growing from one class to the next. That has more to do with my students being eager to be taught and willing to invest the time and brainwork than in the role that I'm playing, but again I am a critical catalyst in that reaction and if I don't give myself credit for my part then I can hardly expect people down the road to independently offer me future opportunities.

At the same time, it has been very challenging and I have yet to even comprehend the scope of the challenges. Math anxiety is a significant hurdle, and I don't have any specific strategies for dealing with it. (Nor do I have any personal experience with it at this level no matter how much I know about other sorts of anxiety.) I have also come to appreciate that people who talk about anti-racism math have their thumb on a very real and important problem. Again, I see it when I see it, but I'm still soaking in it and I've got to figure out how to confront that. 95% of my students are women, 90% are people of color, and I'll go ahead and guess that at least 95% of them aren't commuting from my upper middle-class neighborhood. In short, the only thing that comes easily to me in this class is the math.

But those last two paragraphs are both true and coexist in balance. My best isn't good enough, and my students deserve even better than my best. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't do what I can do. The alternative to me teaching this class isn't Jaime Escalente taking over the class for me; the alternative is no class at all. I need to fail a little bit better every day, because a lot of people are still going to succeed in spite of me because of me.

I voted today.

In the New York primaries.

They don't have the awesome tamperproof mechanical voting booths any longer.

The replacement technology doesn't have a big red lever that makes a definitive and satisfying KA-CHUNK sound when you pull it and register your vote.

...

That is all, I guess.

NORMAN, Okla. — Prolific mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner, known for popularizing recreational mathematics and debunking paranormal claims, died Saturday. He was 95.

Martin Gardner was the most influential of my math teachers in junior high. I didn't get credit for his classes, but he taught me that math was far more interesting than what the official curriculum was revealing. He, along with Raymond Smullyan, turned me from a student who liked math into a nascent mathematician. I cannot imagine how my life's journey would have been different had I not been exposed to his work.

Rest in peace, Mr. Gardner.

So shortly after writing yesterday's post, I got an email from my Census boss saying that those of us who didn't get enumerator jobs could maybe do some clerical work this week since it is OMGWTFBBQ week preparing all of the casebooks for everyone who didn't mail in their forms. He gave a phone number which ... didn't get answered by a person and the voicemail was ignored for at least an hour. I then made another one of those bold decisions that I've become capable of, that since I know where my grandboss sits I can go see her even though if I don't know the number of her direct line. The worst that could happen is that I get escorted out by security.

The best that could happen is what did happen. I said "I heard you need help", thinking that she'd tell me when to come back. She brightened and said "let's find you a chair!" and I spent twelve of the next thirteen hours working. And and my chair turned out to be right next to the superboss who was the most capable of being concerned about my falling through the cracks and working to get me into the final round of training next week when all this dust has settled. That's no sure bet, but at least this time I'll know. But at the least, making the decision to seek my fortune instead of waiting by the phone probably made me nearly a thousand dollars in income this week alone. There's probably a moral in there somewhere.

The work itself is routine office work with the printing and the collating and the cross-checking and the metric-keeping. But it's fascinating to be there. First off, during a recession, Census workers turn out to be the cream of the unemployed crop, so everyone is a caterer or a masseuse or a retired businessman with a lifetime of world travel. Plus we all get to comment on how inefficient the work processes we're doing are, and how we'd do things differently to make the work easier for people in the field. And I even get to share my bounty of Excel wisdom with a cow-orker who needed to make a spreadsheet report. So that was my lesson for the day, both in my work and in my work outlook: to find the awesome you've got to penetrate the corporation and meet with the people. They're awesome and smart even if they look neglectful and ill-conceived from a distance.

Also, holy cow I don't know for certain, but I think I printed out and ran my hands over 7000 pieces of paper yesterday. I'm not sure I've ever done that in a month before now. Now I've got to go make lunch and head back so I can collate and punch holes in those papers I think.

I've said it before, but if Wonderella and I agree that you are off the rails, then dude, you are seriously off the rails. However, people seem to eagerly argue that the KFC Double Down "sandwich" is the greatest abomination in fast food history.

Please.

Even if you handicapped them by putting a bun around it, it's a double chicken sandwich with cheese and bacon. That doesn't even survive the first round of the Fast Food Abomination playoffs. When I was living in California, Jack in the Box would routinely offer specials like double cheeseburgers with three slices of cheese, five strips of bacon, and ranch dressing. But this? Burger King has spent years with "buy one chicken sandwich, get one free" coupons, and you have to know that customers were routinely eating both of them in the same meal. Take a deep breath.

My only question is why people are going into a KFC and ordering processed products like this when their signature fried chicken is so outstanding and you can just SEE that it's made out of a whole chicken with breading and fried in oil and nothing mysterious except exactly what the specific herbs and spices are.

On a slightly broader and less silly note, Nate Silver at 538 does an interesting deconstruction of the issue (which is a great relief from that site's normal operation these days of relaying Obama's talking points without even pretending that it's about poll analysis or statistics any more), and I think he is onto a good point when he talks about the utility of understanding nutritional benefits and harm per calorie. I think that there are two tough parts about meal planning with an eye towards maintaining weight. The first is making sure that you're taking in the proper amount of calories considering what you burn off through your basil metabolism and exercise, and the second is making sure that you don't accidentally shoot your entire wad of sodium or polyunsaturated fats on a single small portion of it. And the data that we get doesn't always do the best job of driving that home. I don't think that Silver has the magic bullet right off the bat, but it's an interesting avenue for exploration.

Barring any surprises, the facility enumerating phase of my Census work ended this afternoon. Then more training next week (with our team being split into as many as twenty-one pieces waaaaah) for the door to door operation. It was a lot of fun, being a beautiful day and kind of a FUBAR dorm to count so we stretched out the schedule to make a few final passes of the floors that we were assigned to maximize our count and put off the inevitable breakup for an extra half hour.

But something happened. Yesterday I went through my floor interviewing the people I could find and leaving forms for the people I couldn't, except there was one woman who I met that was too busy for the interview so I left her the form. So I come around this afternoon to pick up the forms, and hers has a post-it note saying that she's a photography major and would I mind if she took some pictures of me?

And, I, uh, well, huh.

I know my powers of self-image are totally borked, and also that I'm not a horrific looking person especially if I make an effort to clean myself up. I can smile at babies in checkout lines and they smile back, so I'm aware that I'm not a freak. But I never like pictures of me. I don't know if it's the freezing in time or the perspective switch needed to form a two-dimensional image, but I can pretty much count the number of pictures of adult me that I've liked on one finger. In fact, the very reason I don't have a userpic here or on my LJ despite having a digital camera and a USB port is that this process is one of the things that I'm afraid of.

I'm going to sleep on it, but I think I'm going to agree to her proposal. I'm certain to learn something. But I can't stop looking at my bottle of clonazepam and asking WTF is in these pills that I could think of agreeing to model for a woman that I only met for twenty seconds. Strange days indeed.

I have two exciting facts to share with you.

First, I love my neti pot. I'm not even using fancy salt, just a big ol' canister of (noniodized) table salt. (Everyone says that potassium iodide is a major irritant, and I saw no reason to be skeptical on that point.) The final test was last night, when I had a horrible non-productive cough that became a very short-lived and productive expectoration after a single run-through with the neti pot. I asked a pharmacist a while back and he said that it was known to be non-harmful but that the claims of helpfulness were only anecdotal. Well, add me to the anecdote list.

Second, if you're going to use a neti pot, get used to the process BEFORE your sinuses are completely blocked. It works either way, but the experience is just a little more real when there's more mucus than water coming out. And I've never seen it in instructions anywhere, but I say switch nostrils from time to time because IME the process seems to clear out the "lower" Eustachian tube as well.

I don't think I've ever been a fan of April Fool's Day. In fact, I suppose I'm antagonistic to it, as opposed to things like Groundhog Day that we seem to only do this year because we did it last year.

I mean, what's up with a holiday that celebrates unreliability? I see people who spend a day spreading a lie and wonder how that fills them compared with a day where you go out and tell the truth. I appreciate the creativity (when the hoaxes are creative), but direct the energy into something that will persist and grow! Okay, okay, I admit that without April Fool's Day we probably would never have had tauntaun sleeping bags, but I'm having trouble thinking of another boon.

This is just one more in a long line of indications that I am the personification of Lawful Good. I appreciate and adore individuality, but you need a strong structure in which to nurture creativity or else you are constantly under attack from people stronger or smarter than you. You deregulate the financial markets and greedy people will propagate a housing bubble that first drives up your property taxes and then leaves you on the hook to bail them out when the bubble bursts. The internet is high among the most awesome of human accomplishments, but we now have access to a larger supply of misinformation than ever before in history, allowing us to find data to justify our prejudices faster and more widely than ever before. Chaos within order should be like stars in the night sky; enough that we can appreciate their beauty but not so much light that we would be blinded to everything around us.

Perhaps on the first of October we might make a point of going around and being intentionally honest with one another. I like those days much better.

A government employee is me! My badge, let me show you it. All your personal information are belong to us. Okay, I'm through applying dated internet memes to my current job status.

My current job is as a General Quarters Enumerator. If you live in a house or apartment or an ordinary Housing Unit (HU) like that and had a Census form mailed to you but you didn't return it, then you can look forward to another month of increasingly desperate letters before someone walks around and knocks on your door. In the meantime, the Census will be busy counting General Quarters (GQs) like college dorms, nursing homes, prisons, military barracks, and other things like that. So I'll be working with administrators at each GQ and then come in to either conduct interviews or distribute mini-forms for the residents to fill out privately, and then double check and cross-tabulate everything over eight different federal forms and then collate everything and turn it in to my supervisor. And then assuming everything goes well during the next month, as we run out of GQs in our region, I'll get transferred into new training for the HU Enumeration operation that will last for who knows how long.

Oh, and the other neat part is that early next week before the official Census Day (April 1), I'm going to be running around town with my crewmates doing Service-Based Enumerator (SBE) to count homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and stuff like that. I'm really excited that I just got a call inviting me to join in the Targeted Nonsheltered Outdoors Location Enumeration (TNSOL), which is quintessential doublespeak for counting people sleeping in doorways and under highway overpasses in the middle of the night. Seriously, I'm psyched that the Census Bureau takes their mission of getting an accurate head count of America that seriously, and I am looking forward to participating in and learning from such a rare historical opportunity.

The training itself was fabulous, and I'm just wow. I'm a "shy" person, but I'm really getting a buzz from learning about what is expected of me and believing that I am capable of doing it, and also that my supervisors seem to agree. It's still temporary part-time work, but it's going to be a big step for me personally and professionally in making 2010 the first non-sucky year in quite a while.