On perspective and Zoom.

In Unique, neuroscientist David Linden describes the cultural associations between smell and taste.

Most people from the United States will say that vanilla, strawberry, or mint odors smell sweet.

On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense. Sweet is a taste, not a smell. A substance cannot smell sweet any more than something can sound red.

…

There’s nothing intrinsically sweet about these odors – we’ve just learned to associate them with sweet taste.

As a counterexample, in Vietnam, where caramel and mint are used primarily in savory dishes, their odors are not typically described as sweet.

This association is sufficiently powerful that its effect can be measured in the lab.

For people whose past cultural experiences have led them to associate mint smells with sweet tastes, pairing the scent of mint with a sip of sucrose solution makes them believe that the drink is more sugary than it really is. When mint scent is paired with a sip of mildly acidic water, the drink seems less sour than it really is.

This experiment didn’t assess people’s perception of alcoholic drinks, but people in the United States probably make the same mistake about the bourbon in a mint julep.

Our assumptions – particular to our own cultural experience of the world – can powerfully deceive us.

A mint julep mixed perfectly for someone from the United States would taste bitter to someone from Vietnam.

Viet Thanh Nguyen – author of The Sympathizer, which I’ve written about previously – strives to draw attention to our cultural blindness. The way our minds’ innate self-deceptions allow us to overlook or misinterpret the experiences of others.

My spouse and I have often felt grateful for Nguyen’s work. His essay about the sinking sensation he felt after teaching his child to read was particularly beautiful. (I linked to it in my own essay about teaching a child to read.)

Which is why we felt so dismayed by Nguyen’s most recent New York Times editorial.

Nguyen explains why he enjoys teaching over Zoom. He’s prompted with students’ names; he can see their reactions up close; student voices contribute to the lecture from the same up-front position of power as his own; typed remarks can overlap without distracting; lectures are recorded for students to review later.

All well and good. Nguyen is quite intelligent. If he thinks Zoom is good for lectures, I’m inclined to believe him.

But lectures aren’t the best way to learn.

For many subjects, project-based learning is a more effective way to educate students. Many of my spouse’s resources – designed primarily for teaching college-level biology and introductory Earth & space science with a social justice bent – are available on her website, here.

For the better part of a decade, I’ve hosted a poetry class in the county jail. We read poems and discuss how they make us feel. Our discussions touch upon contemporary scientific research, mythology, economics – all safe enough topics, for most folks – but also religion, addiction, trauma, violence, relationships, loss – which can be tough for anyone to talk about, let alone a room full of men who won’t get to see their families for months.

Because people cycle through the county jail, I never know who will be coming to class each week until I get there. For a few months, I might be with mostly the same group of men. Other weeks, I won’t have met any of the dozen or so people previously.

And there’s a huge difference between what we can accomplish – between what sorts of things feel safe to discuss – when the people in class haven’t met me before, and haven’t been in a class like that with each other. If we haven’t built the necessary emotional connection, we can do less. The class is worse for all of us.

Recently, the jail has allowed a small number of classes over Zoom. But Zoom doesn’t let you make the same emotional connection.

People sometimes complain about the supposed invasiveness of Zoom – the camera snatches up your personal surroundings, the pictures on your wall, the books on your shelves, your family in the background – but it’s by no means the intimacy of being there.

*screenshot from a video by Rose Bythrow*

My spouse says, “Over Zoom you can’t tell who’s hungry.”

It would be nice if she meant this metaphorically – that it’s hard to tell who’s eager to learn. But, no. Many students aren’t eating enough. They are hungry.

Worse, we read Nguyen’s paean to Zoom on a snow day.

Streets near my spouse’s high school school were well-salted and plowed, but we live in a sprawling, semi-rural area – the school district serves families from a mix of socioeconomic backgrounds. There are hills and valleys – not everyone can get a satellite signal at home. And the for-profit cable companies certainly haven’t connected those families to the modern world with wires.

Still, the pandemic has made “e-learning days” seem like a reliable alternative. If it snows, kids learn from home.

“What’s Zoom supposed to do,” my spouse asked, “for my students with no heat?”

This isn’t (only) a concern for fluke events like the avarice-fueled power outages and heat losses in Texas. My spouse grew up in Albany, New York. Every winter was cold. The infrastructure to heat homes there was secure – for children whose families had money.

My spouse’s family didn’t. Her father failed to pay the electric bill. The power was shut off. And then the district called a snow day.

If my spouse and her sibling had gone to school, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Warm classrooms, a hot meal.

Instead they were stuck at home, shivering. Wanting so badly to go to a neighbor’s house. But then the neighbors would know.

In the United States, where poverty is often stigmatized as a moral failing, people hide the ache of want.

Which is why Zoom is so horrible. Zoom makes it easy. When you only have to disguise a small corner of your life, you can convey the illusion that things are okay.

Even when they’re not.

header image from Zoom corporation’s “About” page

On grammar in Latin and English.

I spent most of my time during high school doodling in notebooks – during an entire year of biology, the only thing I learned was that the word for several fish of a single type is “fish,” but the word for several fish of different species is “fishes.”

For dissections – earthworms, giant crickets, pig hearts, and frogs – we were partnered with whomever sat at the table with us. My partner always brought the newspaper and ostentatiously checked stock prices during class. The kid in front of me spent a few weeks reading A Confederacy of Dunces.

My eyesight wasn’t good enough to read over her shoulder.

At least the distinction between fish and fishes turned out to be correct. My statistics teacher was a baseball coach – he didn’t know calculus, so the only explanation he gave for the workings of a Gaussian distribution was that the numbers were printed on a chart.

The baseball team had a winning record, though.

Even in English class, my brain was filled with junk. We were taught not to split infinitives or end sentences with prepositions. These are sensible rules in Latin. An infinitive – like “to read” – is a single word in Latin, so it would be quite strange to put another word in the middle. Latin also has strict rules about word order — a sentence would be garbled if the preposition was in the wrong place.

But we weren’t learning Latin! We were learning English, and – lo and behold! – the grammar rules of English are different. In English, word order is flexible. A lot of nuance comes from the arrangement of our sentences. English doesn’t have as many tenses as other languages – there’s no subjunctive – so we English speakers need to scrape out nuance where we can.

In my high school English class, we were also taught not to use “their” as a singular possessive. Even now, I rarely do – I don’t write “Each student brought their book,” I instead sacrifice the meaning of my sentences and write things like “Students brought their books.”

I was hoodwinked! Instead of using the word “their” as a singular pronoun – which it is, in English – I trusted my teachers when they claimed that this word was exclusively plural.

Hogwash! The equivalent claim would be to say that it’s incorrect to write:

You are reading this essay.

After all, “you” is a plural pronoun. And “are” is the plural conjugation of the verb “to be,” which I used only to match the expected conjugation of the pronoun “you.” The correct thing to write is:

Thou is reading this essay.

See? There’s only one person reading, so I need a singular pronoun, “thou,” and a singular conjugation, “is.”

From What’s Your Pronoun? by Dennis Baron, I learned that the pronoun “they” has been used as a singular since the 1300s.

In a sense, singular you is even more of a newcomer on the pronoun scene. The plural you was applied as a singular pronoun to address royalty as early as the thirteenth century and was used in other situations demanding deference and formality – call the monarch thy majesty instead of your majesty and it could mean off with your head.

But you doesn’t appear as a singular in all contexts until the 1600s, when it slowly, slowly starts pushing out thou, thee, thy, and thine, second-person singulars that English speakers had been using since the days of Beowulf. The th- singulars persist even now in some English dialects, and nineteenth-century grammar books regularly demanded singular thou and thee, along with thy and thine, even though these pronouns were no longer considered standard English.

It consoled me somewhat to read that students have long been taught outdated, inaccurate information. It’s not just my brain that was filled with rubbish.

When a cabal of misogynistic grammarians worked to replace singular they with he in English textbooks, people tried to protest.

In 1885, in an article titled “The New Pronoun,” the Atlanta Constitution printed:

There is nothing awkward or ungrammatical in [singular they] so far as the construction of English is concerned. It is ungrammatical when measured by the Latin method – but what has Latin grammar to do with the English tongue?

If you wanted, you could even make a scientific argument for the validity of singular they – in quantum mechanics, the state of each single particle is described by a superposition of states. Immediately after a measurement, wavefunctions can “collapse” to be composed primarily of a unique form – after a photon passes through a polarizer, it’s fluctuation will be parallel to the polarizer’s axis. But even this “up and down” state can be expressed as an equal superposition of two perpendicular polarizations tilted forty-five degrees. Indeed, the latter expression is the only useful way to describe this photon if it’s about to pass through a second polarizer tilted forty-five degrees from the first.

We are not monolithic. Each and all of us can be described as an amalgam of many different traits.

But we don’t need any scientific justification for the use of singular they in English. This grammatical usage is deeply enshrined in our language, and the singular pronoun “they” can best convey the plenitude of many individual humans’ identity & experience.

It’s still difficult for me to use the word “they” as a singular pronoun in formal sentences – my crummy education was pernicious. The proscriptions are deeply ingrained in my brain. But I’d like to think that I’m not totally calcified in my ways. And I’m quite grateful that Denis Baron prepared such an erudite history of English pronoun usage. What’s Your Pronoun? is a lovely little book.

I hope that my kids’ brains will be less muddled than my own. When we read stories aloud, we typically correct unnecessarily gendered language. Girls and boys become kids. An actress is an actor, too. Our Curious George lives in a world of fire fighters and police officers.

I was reading Rob Harrell’s gorgeous Monster on the Hill to our kids when our three-year-old interrupted me. At first, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. I asked her to repeat herself.

“You should say spouse.”

from Rob Harrell’s *Monster on the Hill*

She was right, of course. I’d unthinkingly read the text as written. So I felt embarrassed … for a moment. Then I remembered to feel proud.

On white supremacist vegetables and watchful eyes.

Recently, my hometown of Bloomington’s farmers market has been covered Fox News and The New York Times. Not because the vegetables sold here are particularly deserving of national attention. The market was deemed newsworthy because one of the farm stands is run by outspoken white supremacists.

Although Bloomington is a fairly liberal college town, this region has a sordid history of hate. The national Klan headquarters is less than 30 minutes away – when I was in college, the campus diversity coordinators warned students not to stop in that town, not even to buy gas. Even right here in Bloomington, there was a fracas at the local high school recently because some students decided to honor a friend who’d died by using cremation ashes to print bumper stickers – but they printed stickers of the Confederate flag.

Teaching poetry in the local jail has made me much better at recognizing supremacist imagery. Most people know that the Confederate flag is bad news, but I’ve gotten to see a wider range of hateful symbols tattooed onto people’s flesh.

COs bring twelve people to each week’s class – often two to four will be Black (in a town where the total population is approximately 4% Black or African-American), and the rest are usually white guys. It’s pretty common for one or two of the white guys to have visible supremacist tattoos. Which doesn’t even include questionable stuff like the dude who got an poke and stick of the words “White Trash” in elaborate two-in-tall cursive letters during his time there. Tattooing runs afoul of the jail’s “no self mutilation” policy, but most COs studiously overlook the guys’ rashy red skin and burgeoning designs.

When I’m there, we often read poetry that directly addresses racial injustice. I’ve brought stuff by Reginald Dwayne Betts, Ross Gay, Terrance Hayes, Adrian Matejka, and Tracy Smith. Sometimes these lead to good discussions. Sometimes our class gets totally derailed.

In one of the poems titled “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” Hayes pulls off a stunning trick. The same line is included twice, but the word “haunted” changes from a verb into an adjective after the language slides into a less formal diction. It’s a beautiful moment. The first time I brought this poem, we talked about the clinginess of the past, the way not only our own histories but also the histories of our forebears can stalk us through time.

The next time I brought this poem, several guys reacted by saying that Black people don’t talk right. Then they went off about sagging pants. All this from southern-accented white guys whose missing-toothed, meth-mouthed mumbles and guffaws I could barely comprehend.

We had to quickly move on.

Or there was the time when we read Betts’ “Elegy with a City in It,” a fantastic poem that uses a spare, stark set of words and sounds to simultaneously evoke both the deprivations of the inner city and the epic grandeur of The Iliad, which uses a similarly constrained lexicon.

Many gone to the grave: men awed

by blood, lost in the black

of all that is awful:

think crack and aluminum. Odd

what time steals,

or steals time: black robes, awful

nights when men offed in the streets awed

us.

If you read the poem aloud, you’re chanting the same phonemes over and over, but their meanings twist and turn as they spill from your tongue. That’s what I wanted to discuss.

Instead, a few guys latched onto lines like

Black,

Mario, Charles, they all blackened

the inside of a coffin …

and this offended them because “white people have it bad, too!” As though Betts could not describe Black pain without trivializing their own. Soon somebody was saying “All lives matter” and that he’d voted for our current president. This guy was in jail because he’d been caught selling heroin to support his own habit. The president he’d voted for had recently recommended executing drug dealers.

Somebody else shook his head and muttered, “y’all are fucking [stupid].”

We moved on.

In my classes, I work with a wide range of ages – sometimes guys as young as seventeen, sometimes men in their sixties. My spouse, as a high school teacher, works with younger people – anywhere from fourteen to eighteen years old. But ideology can set in early. My spouse has had students whose families were prominent in the Klan.

At the beginning of the year, she asks each student to fill in the paper silhouette of a head with words and pictures of what inspires them to succeed. She then posts these along the ceiling of her classroom. Several times, she’s had to ask kids to erase supremacist imagery.

So it isn’t terribly surprising that some farmers at our local market have hateful beliefs. Right-wing supremacist movements are major terrorist organizations in this country, and they do a lot of recruiting. As our nation has become slightly less horrible, though, many of these people learned to be circumspect. They maintain a divide between their private and public language.

People who rely upon public, liberal venues like our farmers market can’t be too outspoken with their hate.

Indeed, the white supremacist farmers who were recently outed tried to be circumspect. But they must have felt lonely, and they grew too careless. Under a pseudonym, they posted on the Identity Evropa message board. This is a website devoted to the ideologies that have inspired the vast majority of terrorism in the United States. Theoretically, this is a venue where people get to cultivate their hatred anonymously. But one of their compatriots was caught painting swastikas on a synagogue (see image below) and blew their cover. Sort of. The vandal was interrogated by the FBI, and his remark unveiling the farmers’ pseudonym was buried deep in a 200-page sentencing document.

Through assiduous work, a team of activists was able to prove that these farmers were white supremacists.

The activists who had worked so hard to gather evidence were obviously against hate. They wanted to take action. But the plan they favored wasn’t very flashy. They would organize a boycott of that farm stand. They also proposed that the city use the sellers’ farmers market fees to fund grants for people of color, with the understanding that our nation’s long history of racism has inequitably skewed the demographics of agricultural land holdings.

To stay at the farmers market, the supremacists would have had to support a cause they loathed … and they were making less and less money here. I was told that, during the boycott, the farmers had begun padding their bins, bringing fewer vegetables each week so that they could still appear to be selling out their stock.

Unfortunately, the tropes of social media have changed public discourse in our country. I assume it’s relatively uncontroversial to claim that social media prizes style over substance. Quiet, careful plans are at a disadvantage in the attention economy.

As word spread that these farmers were white supremacists, patrons demanded that they be banned from our market. People of color now felt unsafe in that space, for obvious reasons. There’s a difference between the perceived threat level felt by a pale-skinned activist and by somebody who is recognizably a member of a racial minority.

The mayor, whose spouse is a constitutional law professor, rightly argued that the farmers would be able to sue the city on a First Amendment case.

Still, people felt that we had to do something more visible. Passively allowing outspoken white supremacists to hawk their tomatoes at our market would seem to be tacitly endorsing their political stance.

Everybody has a right to believe whatever garbage they want. Do you sincerely believe that people of northern European descent have a genetic inclination toward greater intelligence? You’re wrong, and you’re a jerk, but you’re allowed to believe that.

The problem is that white supremacist organizations like Identity Evropa use terrorism to back their asinine beliefs. Implicit threats of violence, delivered by people known to stockpile military-grade weaponry, are different from “mere” hate.

If these farmers couldn’t be banned, then we’d hold signs in front of their booth. Eventually, a protester was arrested – the police had asked her to stand in a designated “announcements” area instead of in the middle of the market – and, as always happens following an arrest, her home address was published online.

She was soon inundated with death threats.

As coverage of the dispute increased, right-wing militia types were also drawn to our town. Three percenters, unaffiliated gun nuts, other supremacists – they began to support that farm, undermining the boycott. And these radical Protestant faux-constitutional terrorists made sufficiently credible threats of mass violence that our mayor had to shut down the entire market for two weeks at the height of the growing season. Other farmers were suffering.

Calm, careful behavior from the original activists – assiduously combing through those lengthy, dull documents, not to mention their efforts to infiltrate local supremacists’ in-person social circles – had undoubtably helped. Hateful ideologies were exposed, and efforts were made to impose consequences.

But then our visible protests made matters worse. We’ve helped the proponents of hate to make more money.

And, now that we’ve drawn attention to them, we’ve inadvertently connected these white supremacists with their allies. They will no longer need to post on public forums, which was the only reason that activists were able to prove that they supported these ideologies in the first place. Now these supremacist farmers are invited speakers at right-wing events.

As this whole struggle was unfolding, my spouse and I participated in a poetry reading. We shared poems written by people in our local jail. We were joined by one of the authors, a man who had just been released after five months inside. He described what it was like to write while he was there – breathing fresh air in the outdoor rec courtyard only nine times in five months, having access to a pencil sharpener only once each week, and feeling forced to confess to a crime that he swears he hadn’t committed because they promised to release him for time served.

Our audience clapped for the poems and stared aghast during our banter, which is probably as it should be.

We closed our set with a piece from M.G. This poem was written in February, before the public turmoil regarding our farmers market began. At a moment when so many of us were warily watching that space, it seemed important to remind people that there have always been watchful eyes gazing at the market.

The farmers market is just down the street from our five-story county jail.

MARKET

– M.G.

As I look out this window of bars

There’s a farmer’s market.

People coming and going.

I wonder if I have any friends over there.

The sun is warm and bright.

One day soon I will be at

That farmer’s market.

I hope to see my friends again.

On re-watching The Matrix, twenty years later.

The Matrix is an incredible film. The cinematography is gorgeous. The major themes – mind control, the nature of free will, and what it means to reject the system – are no less relevant today than when the Wachowski sisters first made their masterpiece.

The Matrix also features many, many guns.

Graffiti in a tunnel in London. Photograph by Duncan C. on Flickr.

I recently read many of Grant Morrison’s comics. After The Invisibles, which was rumored to have a major impact on the visual style of The Matrix, I felt inspired to re-watch the film.

For the most part, I still loved it. But the action scenes were, for me, a person whose spouse is a school teacher, viscerally unpleasant.

On my spouse’s second day of student teaching in northern California, a child arrived at her school with an assortment of lethal weapons that included a chain saw and several pipe bombs. The child was tackled; the bombs did not explode; nobody died. Media coverage was minimal, even in the local news.

On multiple occasions, classes at her schools have been canceled due to credible threats of violence. A few years ago, a student lingered after the bell, wanting to talk. “I have a friend who I’m a little worried about …” Later, after this kid had unspooled more details to a guidance counselor, police officers came. The troubled student was sent away for treatment. Once again, nobody died. Media coverage was, to the best of my knowledge, nonexistent, even in the local paper.

Crisis averted, right? No need to alarm everyone with a write-up, a terrifying enumeration of the arsenal retrieved from a student’s locker. Although, in a town this small (population: one hundred thousand), plenty of people heard rumors through the whisper network.

Students today are growing up with far more stress than I experienced. Among top students, more emphasis is placed on applying for college, and the process of getting accepted to the “best” schools is more arduous. There are more AP classes, more clubs to join, more service projects to undertake, plus the pressure of having some uniquely-honed skill that marks the possessor as somehow deserving of a spot at schools like Harvard, Stanford, or Yale.

That’s rough.

Only a subset of students are subject to those particular torments, though.

But also, simply existing has grown more stressful for kids. For every single student inside the building.

Growing up in a house where the parents are seething with rage, slowly and arduously divorcing, is pretty hard on children. That is now a burden that all students have to bear. The political atmosphere of the United States is like a nation-wide divorce, with the two dominant political parties unwilling to agree on common norms, or even facts.

When individual people argue, they often cloister their perceptions inside bubbles of internally-consistent narration. It’s quite common for each parent to sincerely believe that the other is doing less than a fair share of the housework. There obviously is an objective truth, and you could probably figure out what it is – by installing security cameras throughout their home, a couple could calculate exactly how many chores were being done by each person. But in the moment, they just shout. “Well, I unloaded the dishwasher five times this week, and I was cooking dinner!”

I have a pretty extreme political bias – I’m against regulating behaviors that don’t seem to hurt anyone else (which adult(s) a person marries, what drugs a person consumes), and I’m in favor of regulating behaviors that endanger a person’s neighbors (dumping pollutants, possessing weaponry). But I also talk to a lot of different folks, and I live in the Midwest. It’s pretty easy to see why a person with different religious beliefs than mine would find my political stance immoral, if not downright nonsensical.

The Republican Party – which by and large espouses political beliefs that I disagree with vehemently – is correct that the United States was originally founded as a Christian nation. The underlying philosophy of our constitution draws upon the Bible. And the Bible does not promote gendered or racial equality. In the Old Testament, the Bible tells the story of a people who were chosen by God for greatness. In the New Testament, the story is revised such that all people, by accepting Jesus as lord and savior, can join the elect; still, the New Testament draws a stark contrast between us and them.

From a Biblical point of view, it’s reasonable to subject outsiders to harm in order to improve the circumstances of your own people. Indeed, it would be immoral to do otherwise.

It’s like Alan Greenspan’s devotion to the concept of Pareto Optimality, in a way (“Pareto Optimality” is the idea that a distribution of goods and resources, no matter how unequal, is “optimal” if there is no way to improve anyone’s circumstances without making at least one other person worse off. Even a situation in which one person owns the world and no one else has anything is Pareto Optimal, because you can’t help the masses without taking something from that singular world owner).

Using an expensive jar of oil to anoint Jesus’s feet is fine: she was helping the elect. It was be worse to sell that oil and use the money to aid non-Christians, because then your actions only reduce the well-being of God’s people. (Within a New Testament worldview, the possibility for future conversion complicates things somewhat, but if you knew that someone would never embrace the Lord, then you’d be wrong to help that person at the expense of your fellow Christians.)

And so it’s perfectly reasonable that people who vote for the Republican Party support policies that I abhor. I wouldn’t want to be married to those people … but, by virtue of the social contract that we were born into, we are constitutionally bound together. And we’re bickering. Endlessly, maliciously, in ways that are damaging our children.

Worse, kids at school are subject to the constant fear that they’ll be murdered at their desks. Horrific stories are routinely broadcast on the national news … and, as I’ve realized from my spouse’s teaching career, the stories we’ve all heard about are only a fraction of the terrifying incidents that students live in dread of.

Student protest at the White House to protest gun laws. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

It’s not the fault of The Matrix. But this film sculpted the initial style for school shootings. The Matrix was released on March 31^st, 1999. Twenty days later, on the day celebrated both by potheads (based on the police code for marijuana) and white nationalists (because it’s Hitler’s birthday), a pair of students murdered many classmates at Colombine High School.

In The Matrix, a character named Morpheus explains:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemies.

The murderers saw their classmates as enemies.

You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Within the world of the film, this mutability is made explicit: any character who has not joined the heavily-armed heroes could blur and become an Agent. The beautiful woman in red, an unhoused alcoholic man bundled in blankets – either might suddenly mutate into a threat.

And so Neo kills. He and Trinity acquire military-grade weaponry; they stroll into a government building and murder everyone inside.

Anyone willing to complacently work there is, after all, the enemy.

I teach poetry classes inside a jail. Through Pages to Prisoners, I send free books to people throughout the country. I think that the criminal justice system in the United States is pretty abhorrent.

But that doesn’t mean the people who work within that system as corrections officers are bad. They have families to feed. And many are surely aware that if too few people worked as corrections officers, leading the facilities to be understaffed, the people incarcerated inside would be much less safe.

Experience lets me appreciate nuance. I am an ethical vegan; good people choose to become butchers. I don’t like our criminal justice system; good people work inside.

When I was a teenager, though, I felt moral certitude. I didn’t like school. And so, if you were the sort of drone who could sit contentedly at your desk, I didn’t like you. And, yes, I too had notebooks where I’d written the sort of vitriolic short stories about leveling the place with a Golden-Eye-(the N64 game, not the movie)-style grenade launcher, an onscreen point counter tracking deaths. Yes, my friends and I made short films with BB gun props full of senseless killings.

One of my old notebooks that I must have deemed sufficiently innocuous to save.

I remember one of the films we made as being pretty good. But after Colombine, we destroyed the video tapes. I threw my notebooks away.

And I was pissed to be called so often to the principal’s office. I understand now why they were worried. Moral certainty is dangerous; it lets you consider people who disagree as the enemy.

Twenty years later, my body stiffened and my heart sank when I watched The Matrix. I loved that movie; I’m not sure I’ll ever see it again.

And, glory be, I am now blessed to live in a nation led by a president who feels nothing if not moral certainty.

On substitutes.

When I started bouldering, I had the pleasure of attending a gym run by Jess McCauley. He was an excellent climbing coach – although this was a very small gym in Mountain View, California, many of the kids he taught excelled at national competitions.

Then Jess decided to become a school teacher. He was clearly great at working with kids, and had a B.A. in history focusing on African studies, so he figured he could do more good inside a classroom than a gym. As he finished his education degree, Jess began working as a substitute teacher.

His first job was in my spouse’s high school “Biotechnology” class. The day before, she exhorted her students: “The sub tomorrow is a good friend of mine, and I’m gonna be really upset if you’re hard on him.”

Everybody knew Jess was great with kids. He’s a funny, charming, knowledgeable, muscular dude. But every time a substitute teacher steps into a classroom, the chance that something will go wrong increases dramatically.

Teachers build relationships with students over the course of a year. As you work with a group of people, you learn to read subtle social cues – you’ll know when two students need to be separated from each other, when somebody might need to take a momentary breather in the hallway. There’s a lot going on inside a high school beyond content education, and teachers develop an intuitive feel for the social dynamics inside their own rooms.

With experience, most people get better at this. I imagine my spouse’s content knowledge didn’t improve much over her first five years in the classroom, but she became a better teacher. She learned how to read and work a room.

And I know how much effort she puts into establishing a culture of trust inside her room. But there are still problems.

In the morning, she teaches AP biology to her school’s “best and brightest,” kids bound for college at top-tier universities. Many of those students would probably learn fine if you gave them all textbooks and put a straw-filled scarecrow behind the teacher’s desk. Their neurochemistry tends to mesh well with the norms of public education.

In the afternoon, she teaches “Earth and space science” to kids who actually need a good teacher. (Unfortunately, many schools pair their best teachers with the honors students and assign whomever’s left to the kids who need the most.) These are students whom administrators often expect to fail – and yet, when given appropriate challenges (like a recent assignment engineering challenge to build a functional solar still), they shine.

Still, when a substitute steps into these classrooms, there’s a major risk that something will go wrong.

Last year, when our family traveled to St. Louis for the National American Biology Teacher meeting, one of my spouse’s students punched a classmate in the head.

During another of our trips, a student flipped a desk. The year before, some students locked a sub out of the room and looped twine between the door handle and a lab table, tightening their barricade with a bar from the coat closet. Those same kids stole the fire extinguisher that day (which my spouse only knew because they gleefully hugged her and told her so at graduation – nobody expected for these kids to receive diplomas, so they were understandably elated to be there).

When my spouse plans trips, she requests that only experienced substitutes be assigned to cover her classes, but there’s only so much that somebody unfamiliar with the room can do. I imagine that if she were subbing for somebody else, the chance of something going wrong would still jump, even though she can keep her own classrooms orderly. Those are students she’s grown familiar with.

High school is a stressful environment. And putting a new face into that kind of situation can trigger trouble.

But, what’s a little worse than high school? In terms of, like, people don’t want to be there, emotions flare, you’ve got massive numbers of athletic young men crammed into a cramped little space?

Oh. Right. Prison.

One consequence of the federal hiring freeze is that many prisons have been relying on substitute guards. These subs might be trained guards who usually work other blocks – or they might be classroom instructors, medical staff, clerks. Female secretaries dressed in their office clothes (i.e. skirt, button-down blouse) might be suddenly assigned to patrol the halls of a men’s prison.

When a substitute steps into my spouse’s classroom, kids might get hurt. When a substitute enters a prison, people could die. According to a terrifying article from the New York Times,

As the shortage of correctional officers has grown chronic under President Trump – and the practice of drawing upon other workers has become routine – many prisons have been operating in a perpetual state of staffing turmoil, leaving some workers feeling ill-equipped and unsafe on the job, according to interviews and internal documents from the Bureau of Prisons.

Dozens of workers from prisons across the country said inmates had become more brazen with staff members and more violent with one another.

The traditional rules go unenforced, which emboldens people to push the limits further. When guards can’t be relied on to keep a prison orderly, gang violence often takes over as an alternate form of control.

In My Brother Moochie, journalist Issac J. Bailey describes the emotional fallout that accompanied his older brother’s violent crime. After this brother, Moochie, was sent to prison, Bailey’s family crumbled. Several of his younger brothers got involved with petty crime and have been cycling in and out of prison ever since. For instance, Bailey’s younger brother James, who is traumatized by the violence he witnesses in prison:

The man who was killed was “a little Asian dude smaller than me, so about fifteen of them ran into the room and started stabbing him,” James said. “Dude was supposed to go home the next week. What’s crazy is dude is from California and he can’t even speak his family’s original language. They stabbed him out of fear.”

A shortage of prison guards throughout the state’s correctional system meant the few on duty didn’t always manage to make the rounds through the dorms on schedule.

I teach at our local county jail. During a staffing shortage two summers ago, the jail became much less safe. According to former inmate (and excellent human being) Max Smith, “Guys learned to time things. A guard would be walking through for the count, some guys would be wailing on somebody inside a cell, they’d have somebody go up, ask the guard a question, distract him right when he got to that window. Then he’d keep walking and they’d continue beating the shit out of somebody. It was a scary place to be.”

Maybe there’s more that my spouse could be doing to establish a culture that will stay calm even when substitutes come into her classroom. But I know that she’s already trying awfully hard, and she’s one of our country’s best teachers.

I think it’s safe to assume that the average prison guard puts less energy than she does into cultivating a safe and respectful environment. When subs cover for them, bad things are going to happen.

Maybe we as a country don’t want to spend so much money on our prisons. If so, we should probably be spending a whole lot more on education, so that we won’t feel the need to lock people up – public schooling is a chance to turn people’s lives around, but it’s not like we’re pouring money into that. And there’s sentencing reform. With shorter prison sentences, we wouldn’t need so many guards.

But I can’t imagine that the best solution is to conscript secretaries, teachers, and medical staff into patrolling the halls.

On Daniel Handler’s “All the Dirty Parts”

Heartbreak smells the same in any language.

During my second year of graduate school, my advisor wanted me to do an organic synthesis using cyanide. I’ve long since forgotten what we were trying to make. All I remember is that I promptly said:

“Almonds. The official scent of unrequited love.”

“Oh, you can smell it?” my advisor asked. “That’s good. Some people can’t. You’ll be much less likely to die.”

I actually, I had no idea whether I could smell it. Still don’t, since my advisor fired me before I got around to that synthesis. I was just riffing on the opening to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (translated by Edith Grossman):

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

It doesn’t matter whether you call it heartbreak or desengano amoroso or any other name – it’s going to hurt.

Kids needs to learn about heartbreak. They will feel sorrow. Especially while they’re in high school, tugged by turbulent emotions but inept in so many ways … like conversation, like forbearance, like patience.

I know I was miserable during high school. And, yes, the wellspring of my misery was my own incompetence.

Reading more would have helped. Engaging fiction bolsters emotional maturity. When we empathize with characters in books, we might skip some of their suffering – we can’t learn without making mistakes, but fictional characters can make mistakes for us.

And so we expect high schoolers to read stories of heartbreak, things like Ethan Frome, Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby … novels in which intense emotions are described in school-appropriate language.

This is heartbreak. Learn it well, young person. You too will hurt.

Marcel Proust wrote a scene for In Search of Lost Time (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff) in which his narrator tumbles in the park with his first love, grasping after a letter she is holding.

… and we wrestled, locked together. I tried to pull her toward me; she resisted; her cheeks, inflamed by the effort, were as red and round as two cherries; she laughed as though I was tickling her; I held her gripped between my legs like a young tree that I was trying to climb; and, in the middle of my gymnastics, when I was already out of breath from the muscular exercise and the heat of the game, I felt, as it were a few drops of sweat wrung from me by the effort, my pleasure express itself in a form I could not even pause for a moment to analyze; immediately I snatched the letter from her. Whereupon Gilberte said, good-naturedly:

“You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling for a little longer.”

At that moment, Marcel, the character, was no longer interested in wrestling. He’d rubbed his pelvis against her body enough to climax in his pants. Now he “wished only to sit quietly by her side.” It would be a few hours, perhaps, before he desired her again.

He felt joy that afternoon.

But then, months later, that same joy stabs him. Their relationship has ended. Marcel fancies himself indifferent. Then, one day, he sees her walking alongside someone else – suddenly he is in pain. The memories of his own happy times with her swell unbidden:

The accident comes from the side to which one was not paying attention, from inside, the heart. Giberte’s words: “If you like, we might go on wrestling,” horrified me. I imagined her behaving like that, at home perhaps, in the linen closet, with the young man whom I had seen escorting her along the avenue des Champs-Elysees.

He loved that she loved him. He hates that she might now love another the same way.

And that, kids, is what life is like.

But … how many high schoolers will sit down and read In Search of Lost Time? I certainly didn’t. Proust’s words would help, but they don’t reach young people.

I did, however, read certain paragraphs from John Fowles’s The Magus again and again at night.

And so Daniel Handler has written All the Dirty Parts. When he was growing up and making his first forays into the “grown up” section of the library, Handler gravitated toward books with racy scenes. Which is why his heartbreak novel is full of them.

Heartbreak hurts in the chaste language of Ethan Frome … but it hurts just as much in the ribald language of All the Dirty Parts.

– You found it right away.

They always say guys can never find it, that it’s hard to find. The clitoris is not hard to find. I mean, it’s not like sometimes it’s behind her heel or in your desk drawer. Go to where you think it is and root around and you will for sure know when you’re right. And porn helps. Find a shaved girl saying “lick my clit” and where he licks, that’s the clit. It’s educational.

Or, on the same page:

I’m seventeen now, and no real girl has really told me to ejaculate on her face. Maybe it’ll never happen, I told [my friend] Alec. We’ve watched a couple blowjobs together, or not together but at the same time, me in my room and he in his, always slightly weird.

– Pornography lied to us.

– I’m writing my congressman.

– OK but let’s watch another one first.

The protagonist of Holder’s All the Dirty Parts is a pornography-obsessed high schooler who proffers graphic descriptions of his conquests. But he too has a heart. And when he meets someone more callous than he is, he is doomed.

– Officially together?

She repeats this in the tone of what’s-the-problem-officer. I already thought it might not work, to ask her.

– OK.

– Do we need a permit? Do I have to pay for the whole year up front?

– I was just asking.

– Can we just, play it as it goes along, by ear?

And, like a sock to the stomach, I get how every previous girl felt looking and asking that question, officially, at me.

They’re in high school. Their relationship won’t last forever. Which she knows.

So should he, since she is treating him the same way that he has treated everyone else.

And then, like Marcel, the protagonist of All the Dirty Parts will feel crushed remembering their embraces … knowing that now she is now sharing them with someone else. Worse, by the time he loses her, he has behaved so badly that he has no one to talk to. He sits alone in his room and ruminates:

I wasn’t just a fuck to them, any of them probably, is what I’m seeing. For every girl I thought I was uncomplicated sex, it wasn’t. Put it this way: if you can’t see the complication, you’re probably it.

And the book ends beautifully, with a pearl of wisdom, some words to live by delivered deus-ex-machina-style by an adult.

– When you are older –

That’s the only part of the advice I hear. But, Dad, I’m not.

I’m sorry, dude. It does hurt.

And, yes, I’m sorry for all the high-schoolers out there, and the kids who aren’t in high school yet but are gonna be: it will hurt. There might not be anyone you feel like you can talk to.

At least Daniel Handler wrote a book for you.

On elephants.

During springtime each year, my spouse tells a lot of people that high school prom is a blast … as long as you’re not a high schooler. Many teachers attend, nominally as chaperones, and they don’t have to worry about who they’ll leave with or what they’ll be doing afterward. (Shucking earplugs and going to sleep.)

We go to the local high school prom most years. My spouse greets her students and compliments their attire: you clean up well! The boys on the cross country and track teams shake my hand and compliment my attire: you clean up well, coach!

unnamed — The most magical night of our lives … every year.

At times, briefly, I am allowed to dance. (My only formal dance training was in preparation for the South Asian Students’ Association spring show during college – I was part of a Dandiya Raas set to “Chale Chalo” from Lagaan – and my preferred style of dancing still involves a lot of leaping.)

Each year’s prom is themed, with decorations prepared by junior members of the student council. My favorite was 2012’s “prom-apocalypse,” with fake flames and wreckage. Coincidentally, I prepared the same style of decoration for a fundraiser when I was my high school’s National Honor Society president. The kids here were inspired by the end of the Mayan calendar; our dance was held in December, 1999, when the newspapers were rife with reports of people hoarding cans or turning blue-ish from ingesting too much anti-microbial silver.

I also convinced a d.j. buddy to put together some music for the event, like a track splicing Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time” with Marilyn Manson’s “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”

Despite having hated being in high school, I love the corny tropes involved. Like, okay, film noir about drug deals gone bad? Eh, seen it. But set that same noir in high school, you get Brick, with charming lines like “She knows where I eat lunch.”

This year, though, prom is circus-themed.

“Oh, cool,” I said. “Like Cirque du Soleil?”

“No. Like, elephants in cages.”

We won’t attend. It seems an especially bizarre choice of theme now, when even Ringling Brothers, after 145 years of torturing elephants, has announced that they’ll stop. They will, of course, continue to torture other species.

As humans have learned more about animal cognition, we have steadily revised our claims as to the features of our brains that make us special. Once upon a time, we claimed that our superiority came simply from our very large brains; we contrasted ourselves to dinosaurs, whom we claimed (erroneously) had brains no bigger than walnuts.

Elephants have the largest brains of any land animal.

Later, we realized that sheer brain bulk does not equate with intelligence – actual neuron counts would be far more informative.

Elephants have three times as many neurons as humans.

We once posited that “tool use” separated humans from other animals, until we learned that chimpanzees, crows, and others use tools too.

We claimed that only humans understand death. Touting that no other species buries their dead, we claimed that only Homo sapiens have the emotional intelligence necessary to understand narrative. Other animals are trapped inside an eternal now.

This, too, is false.

In elephants, the hippocampus – the brain region implicated in processing narrative emotional memory – is enlarged relative to humans. They routinely visit sites where friends or relatives died. They caress the bones of their lost. After violent encounters with a brutal species of hairless ape, elephants can suffer post-traumatic stress disorder for years. Their children require the guidance of elders to learn behavioral norms.

Like human children, young elephant males who grow in broken communities run wild.

We humans have treated elephants abysmally, not in spite of their magnificence, but because of it. When a small, flamboyantly-dressed circus tamer can break an elephant’s will so completely that the creature will perform in the center of a jeering crowd, we receive proof just how powerful humans are.

Elena Passarello writes of our dominance over nature in her essay “Jumbo II,” which interlaces two histories: that of elephants brought to the United States, and our ability to harness electricity.

From the beginning, the elephants were tortured: placed in small zoo enclosures (Passarello: They gave “Old Chief” to the Cincinnati Zoo, which shot him by the end of the decade. Two days after, Cincinnati’s Palace Restaurant added “elephant loin” to its dinner menu.), beaten by circus trainers until they learned to do “tricks,” condemned to death for unexpectedly dangerous behavior during musth.

As our technological prowess grew, electricity was put to ever new uses. Electricity could light our streets! It could power our factories! It could execute the condemned!

The histories of elephants and electricity in America merge in 1903. In Passarello’s words:

[Electrocuting an Elephant] is a minute-long, live short of the first elephant – and the second female of any species on the planet – to be condemned to electrocution for her crimes.

In the yards around Coney Island’s Luna Park, the condemned elephant places each foot onto a copper plate. Once ignited with over 6,000 volts of alternating current, they smoke beneath her planted feet. The smoke rises around her body, her trunk goes rigid, and all five tons of her list forward.

And, from Ciaran Berry’s poem, “Electrocuting an Elephant:”

…though it changes nothing,
I want to explain how, when the elephant falls, she falls
like a cropped elm. First the shudder, then the toppling
as the surge ripples through each nerve and vein,
and she drops in silence and a fit of steam to lie there
prone, one eye opened that I wish I could close.

I could not bring myself to watch the video footage to verify this description, but I am glad her eye was open. We humans behave better when we believe we are watched. And our behavior, in the past, was not good enough.

Even now, we make mistakes. If we want a world with elephants, the money from ecotourism is not enough. Those who have been born to wealthy nations – beneficiaries of a long history of exploitation and violence – should devote funds to repairing some of the damage we’ve inherited.

On proving that elections will make you miserable.

In economics, proofs often begin with the words If we consider a ball of radius R centered at the point X in Rⁿ… I wrote those words so many times. Reading them now, they sound quite strange to me.

A math course called “real analysis” was a prerequisite for economics. Presumably real analysis would’ve taught me to write proofs, perhaps well enough that I’d understand why I wrote the words I did. But my university had recently implemented an online registration system, and its glitchiness meant I could skip pre-reqs, and that I was able to enroll in both economics and inorganic chemistry during the 10 am to 11:30 time slot. I attended economics except when there was a chemistry exam. And still don’t know for certain what “real analysis” entails.

As it happens, my wavelength was too small to actually be in both places at once … but Oncourse didn’t know that.

But I know that the word “ball,” in the world of mathematics, is a generic term for round things. You have two dots in one dimension, a circle in two, a sphere in three, then a “ball” in four or more.

The number of dimensions is what the “n” stands for in “R ⁿ.” In the world of economics proofs, you might have any number. Of course, in our day to day lives, most of us are familiar with only two or three (yes, yes, physicists claim that we should understand four, because we move along three spatial axes and time. But I can move forward and back, left and right, up and down. I’ll continue to think of my world as three-dimensional until I learn to move with equal faculty into the future and the past). But economists need more because they like to give each variable its own dimension. Instead of “up and down,” a dimension in an economics proof might be the weather, the number of factories, the number of workers in a population.

Sliding along an axis can seem incredibly grim if you momentarily forget that a proof is supposed to be abstract. It’s just an imaginary line projecting endlessly through space, but what does it mean?

A homeless man down and out in New York City. (Photo by lujoma ny)

For workers, sliding back toward zero means lives destroyed, people unemployed, hustling to pay rent, to keep the lights on, to feed their kids. Or worse. Alongside Primo Levi in the Buna concentration camp, the number of workers could be varied at will. There seemed to be endless numbers of condemned to add, and each decrease meant another murdered man.

Luckily, in class we worked quickly enough that there was no time to think of that. The professor would scrawl his solution upon the board, I’d copy it into my notes, struggling to keep up.

Or perhaps I lost you earlier. Maybe you hadn’t realized that there even were proofs in economics. I hadn’t, before I enrolled. I expected only to draw crisscrossing lines, mark where they intersected, claim that should be your greeble’s price. A “greeble” being, for some reason or other, the default name for an imaginary product for which the supply and demand can be used to determine a price.

I learned about these mythical “greebles” in high school, in an economics class that moved many-fold more slowly than the university class. In high school there was more time to sit and wonder what a greeble was. I drew pictures in my spiral notebook. Most of these pictures made the greeble look like either a strange pet or a military weapon. There were many vicious-looking weapons drawn in my high school notebooks. I hated being there. I wrote stories about blowing up the school. Not that I was a violent kid. I was already vegetarian because I hated hurting things. But I certainly drew a lot of death and destruction. Then, of course, the Columbine shootings happened and I had to stop drawing those pictures. Writing those stories. Murderous ideation was no longer safe. Even once I’d stopped, they started sending me to the principle’s office about once a month. That did not make me like school more.

fc old notebook cover009.jpg — One of my notebook covers from high school. Maybe you get the idea.

From then on, at my school, even suicidal ideation was something you had to keep to yourself. Luckily, I was a pretty happy kid. I rarely thought about that sort of thing more than once a day. Still don’t.

But, yes, in economics there are proofs. One famous proof we reproduced was “Arrow’s impossibility theorem,” which states mathematically that if a population is trying to vote, they’re doomed. There is no fair voting system that picks the most-preferred candidate out of a set of three or more. Your options are a dictatorship or else electing some schmuck whom nobody really wants.

Maybe that sounds like an argument in favor of a two-party system. But it isn’t, not really. If you’re worried that from a set of options the best one won’t be picked, the best solution isn’t to offer only two of the crummier options from that set. People still won’t get what they want. All you’ve accomplished is to blast even their illusion of a fair choice. In a two-party system people are still doomed, but they’re so clearly doomed that you don’t even need Kenneth Arrow’s fancy proof for them to know it.

As it happens, it’s election season again. It so often is, because “election season” seems to run approximately two years out of each four-year presidential term, and sometimes a year or more for even two-year congressional terms, and huge numbers of people devote eighty, ninety, hundred hour work weeks toward their efforts to get this dude or that dude or (finally!) this lady elected.

Jason Pruett's small cartoons of each of the U.S. presidents. — Art by Jason Pruett.

Whenever I feel bad about how long I’ve spent working on a project, I remember the number of person hours that are guaranteed to be wasted each election cycle. Because huge numbers of people work full-time to get their preferred candidate elected, and all but one won’t win. Maybe they console themselves by thinking at least by running, we helped change the tenor of the national debate! But, let’s be real. Even when fewer than a third of the populace votes for a dude, he’ll refer only to the (bizarre!) electoral college numbers and claim to have received a clear mandate for action.

Nobody cares about the platform the losers were running on. And most everybody is guaranteed to be a loser. Even (especially?) the voters.

My personal political inclinations include taxation to assess the fair price of business externalities, free trade, open borders, lax enforcement against possession of tools for self-harm (drugs), strict enforcement against possession of tools for other-harm (guns, automobiles), progressive income taxes such that people pay (or are reimbursed) relative to what they’d likely lose or gain if we had anarchy instead of our current government.

If I were trying to be cheeky, I’d draw a parallel between my ideas about progressive income tax and the conceptual framework behind electric potential, the idea that the energy at each point is equal to the work that would’ve been done to drag a test charge there from infinitely far away. Instead of a field-less void somewhere far off in the distance, I imagine people being launched into their current wealth or poverty from an undifferentiated state of Hobbesian anarchy.

But maybe the physics metaphor would seem too twee. So (a la Trump, I’m not going to say they’re weak. But they’re weak), I won’t subject you to it.

I’m pro-genetically modified foods, anti-pesticide. Pro-vaccination, pro-childhood nutrition, against our current quantity of medical spending. Most doctors think there needs to be a conversation about how much the government should pay for each quality-of-life-adjusted year. I think even that is not enough. We need a concurrent conversation about how long humans should live. About what we as a people consider to be the meaning of life and the best way for our spending to reflect that. Because any threshold for how much we’ll spend on each quality-of-life-adjusted year will result in untenable costs if medical advances keep allowing people to live longer.

All of which means that, yup, as ever, no politician will (or should, honestly) care about what I stand for. I’ll vote for the old hippie commie guy in the primary (if I get to vote. I probably won’t get to, though. My state’s primary is scheduled relatively late), and then throw away my vote in the general election (what with our electoral college, most people’s votes are submerged at that stage. I think there’ll be something like eight states where the vote will be close enough that all people waiting in line for their turn in the booth can delude themselves into thinking that their votes matter).

Which, again, does sound awful. Like, isn’t there a better way?

Well, yes. There is a better way. There are many better ways than the strange system our country has contrived. But at least I had the experience of jotting out the full proof to know that there is no perfect way.

(Somehow I’d deluded myself into thinking that typing this essay would make me happy. I see now that I was wrong.)

On talking to students about school, particularly high schoolers.

Oscar Fernandez (find him @EverydayCalc) recently wrote a charming little article about how to talk to your high-school-aged kids about math. Well worth the quick read, if you’re a parent, or might someday be a parent, or happen to interact with other people’s kids. He has some great tips, and provides a lucid description of why it’s so important to do this. Because math can be really fun for kids, and if you, a parent, let your squeamishness for the subject show through, you could sway someone away from enjoying it.

The only thing I’d like to add to Fernandez’s article is a quick note about that question, “What did you learn in school today?”

Which is what my parents asked me while I was growing up, (to which I’d generally mumble “nuthin” before shoving my nose back into a book and ignoring them. If I’d been less of a brat, I should have answered their question more literally, as in, what did I learn while I was in the high school building during school hours. Because, sure, in chemistry class I sat in the back and drew cartoons, in English I sat on top of a desk and chatted with the teacher, in math I sat on the floor and read books, so on most days I didn’t learn anything from the curricula, but I was still learning something most days),

and it’s what I asked members of the local cross country / track teams when I first started volunteering in town (a few of the very outgoing ones gave me reasonable answers that we could chat about, but I heard a lot of “I don’t know,” and “nothing,” and “we’re just reviewing right now”).

So I don’t ask about school that way anymore. A pretty common question I still use is “What was your best class today?”

fun-42593_640 Sometimes a runner will ask me to clarify, at which point I’ll toss out an “easiest” or “hardest” or “most fun” or “best teacher” addendum, but I’ve had a lot better luck getting real answers to “best class” than “what’d you learn?” And it’s pretty easy to follow up from there — talking to someone whose best class was geometry

(surprisingly common in town because the math teacher is an excellent human. Stopped out of high school when he was growing up, used illicit drugs, saw a few friends die, turned his life around and became a teacher. And it definitely seems like the teachers who realize how terrible school can be are often the most empathetic, which helps them be the best. My hope is that I provide some of that helpful loathing for K; she actually liked high school, primarily because her home life was crumbling so dramatically that school felt like a sanctuary. Whereas the last time I enjoyed public education was in third grade. My teacher was a compassionate, intelligent woman who made special math worksheets for me to do on the bus, especially before field trips, so that I’d get to have fun solving them instead of noticing that no one would sit with me. She later married my senior-year cross country coach, also an excellent human, a vegetarian who cooks up hearty meat stews for an Indianapolis soup kitchen, eccentric enough that he swore off shoes for several years and kept getting kicked out of coffee shops for health code violations, at which point he started boiling the soles off used Pumas and strapping them to his feet with underwear elastic),

I get to ask, “What were you working on in Geometry today?” and from there can chat about shapes, or proofs, or whatever… and, sure, some of those conversations wind up derailing since the participants are out-of-breath, oxygen-deprived me and a not-yet-practiced-with-math-but-sufficiently-in-shape-to-talk-and-think high schooler, but it seems like we usually have fun when we can make sense of each other. Either that, or there are a lot of good actors on the team.

Some other follow-up questions that I can remember coming up with non-math “best class” answers are things like, “Yeah? What’s your Spanish teacher do well?” or “What’d you make in baking?” or “What’re you reading now?” All of which have generally led to talk-about-able answers from even taciturn dudes.

"Look, N., a sphere! It's composed of all points in R3 equidistant to the center!" — “Look, N., a sphere! It’s composed of all points in R3 equidistant to the center!”

And, yes, even though my daughter is only one year old (as of yesterday, actually), I realize that high schoolers often behave differently with adults who aren’t their parents, but if you’re having trouble talking productively about school you might try switching up your question a little bit.

And in any case, a warm thank you to Fernandez for his article; hopefully enough parents see it that some kids can benefit from his piece.

(See more about my love of math here.)

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: high school