Parallels

Jerry Droege

I'm having lunch on Friday with Jerry Droege. He's an M.D. who left his practice of 22 years to pursue a math degree. He got started two and a half years ago. Right now he is working at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Lab and is part of the Phoenix Mars Mission. I don't know any details yet but look forward to learning about him.

He was an OBGYN. I'm really curious about what happened. Hopefully he'll tell me about it and allow me to share it with you.

When he answered my email asking for a visit, among other things, he said, "What a gift you can give yourself - it's all WONDERFUL!"

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Don Saari

I wrote to Professor Saari thanking him for letting me sit in on his lunch session. I was delighted that he wrote me back.

There was one young woman at that lunch who challenged some of the things she was learning. Prof. Saari gave her his email address and invited her to contact him. He wrote to me, "My deep hope is that she steps up to my challenge; if so, I will try to help her unleash the creativity that normally is suppressed in traditional school training."

That's an inspiring teacher. I wish I had that passion and generosity.

He went on to write, "In my opinion, faculty, both in mathematics and in journalism, should explore ways to do more of that 'unleashing' of creativity."

Dr. Saari then referred me to a piece he wrote in August, 1991 recounting an experience he had as a guest speaker in a fourth grade class.

He then wrote:

"I fully believe that much of what we do in the classroom is directed toward indoctrinating the students with technical approaches rather than encouraging them to think.

"By the way, (that piece) was written in 1991; since then I have carried out the same experiment in several fourth, fifth, and sixth grade classrooms usually with a similar reaction. The one exception was when a teacher jumped into the discussion (to reprimand a boy whose only crime was being "overly creative" in his answer); her action dampened the spirit of adventure as it established her as a "authority figure." From that point on, rather than exploring ideas, the kids threw out multiple answers and looked to her to select the correct one.

"Also, I have discovered that this experiment rarely works with kids who are in the seventh grade or above; by that age they have been indoctrinated about the way to vote.

"Your comment about what I said during that lunch session and how it resonated with what you do probably reflects the reality that, well, both of us are exploring how we can discover and express the truth. As a way to try to compare the two worlds, maybe we should equate those algebra problems that have a precise answer with a news article on the back page of a newspaper that reports a court listing of traffic violations where, indeed, in both cases there usually is a single correct answer.

"The more complicated issues -- both in journalism and in mathematics -- usually have many different ways of being examined. For instance, I enjoyed what you said about feature writing; it ties in quite closely with what we (mathematicians) should be trying to do with the far too many unanswered important mathematical issues that are out there. Namely, we try -- or we should try --- to understand how to relate those relevant concepts that we do understand in a manner that will help us, and others, understand what is going on.

"Just as you described for feature writing, rather than a single approach, there are many mathematical ways in which this can be done.

"I bet there are many parallels in our two worlds."

Even if I never take another math class, my exposure to Prof. Saari made this semester worth it. I intend to write him back soon, if only to ask his permission to share his correspondence with you.

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Learning math

I sorta can't believe it, but more of this stuff is coming easier.

I'm on page 375 of this nearly 800 page math textbook and I'm not drowning. That amazes me every minute.

Chapter six, is called "Rational Expressions, Equations, and Functions. (I like that they use the serial comma). The section I'm working on is called Complex Rational Expressions. They look scary, but they're not. There just more steps (lots more) to getting through them. I'll put a picture of a page on the blog sometime soon so you can see. It won't be a pretty picture.

We had a quiz on Monday and I think I did really well. I know I made at least one arithmetic error, but I knew how to do everything on the test.

And what's even more surprising for me is that I'm trying to find time to work on the problems in the book, but especially online. If the time was there, it feels like I could put in many hours a day and enjoy learning new stuff. Go figure?

I was listing with Gail all the things that I am letting slide, partly because of taking time to learn algebra. I can't believe that bicycling, photography, music, hiking, the vegetable garden, learning new multimedia software, and preparing a book proposal for Charisse are all in line behind the actual studying of what is basically high school algebra II.

In the meantime, I'm still not making sense of what this is all for, besides my own amusement.

I'm equating learning math with the acquisition of a new language. People who are lucky enough to be multilingual tell me that languages open up all kinds of new worlds, ideas, and people that you wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. I get it about spoken and written languages. I can even imagine what people are talking about when they say the same kinds of things about the language of music. But, I still am not even beginning to form a picture of how that metaphor applies to the language of mathematics.