I just finished going through my last step of graduate school, oral exams. This is when I stand up in the front as the teacher and the faculty sits as students asking me questions from all of the math I have ever taken. I enjoyed going through this gauntlet because it gave me a chance to speak about math verbally and get instant feed from the experts. Plus, since I now teach my math classes in a format such as this, it was nice being placed in the same shoes that I offer for my students. The entire session lasted an hour. I passed! Sweetness, oh yeah sweetness baby! Now I can check off graduate school on my list of life experiences. Still waiting for the time I can check off being in outer space. Oh, I will be going to commencement May 6th and thinking about having shin-dig on the 5th. More details of the celebration are sure to follow.

Today I created this phrase and it seems to fit my day pretty well, too.

Isolated events result in isolated reactions,
but every day events cause nothing to happen.

What brought this up was when I received emails about candle vigils being held and posters being made for the latest Virginia Tech event. I thought to myself,

What distinguishes an event such as this, where people’s lives are surprisingly ended, compared to an event where lives are ended daily, such as in economically and socially stressed neighborhoods?

The way I see the difference is that one is isolated and the other is every day. For me, every day events can loose their connection or become emotionless because of the repetitiveness. But if the event is once in awhile, such as birthday (September 19 ) or a graduation (May 6 ) then I can easily embrace the excitement. I think that Buddhist philosophy, from what I understand of it, brings light to this. Their idea is to be in the moment, not just for those rare special times but for all human experiences. What a feat this is, but I feel that it makes sense for my life. What I enjoy about bloging is that it allows me to venture away from the once-in-a-while-emails-about-the-highlights-of-my-life to sharing and recognizing the isolated events in my every day 24/7 life experience. Thus, I share with you that I was hired to work at Catawba Valley Community College today! Yippee! You can now call me DaddyBigBucks!

I was listening to the Skepticality Podcast yesterday on the way to school. (By the way the mountains are back to being brown due to the cold temps.  Cannot wait to watch the green to come back, again!) They had an interview with Philip Zimbardo.  He recently published a book called The Lucifer Effect that examines the idea of why good people do evil from a social psychologist perspective.  The interview was very intriguing and the website has thought provoking material as well.  The last chapter of his book is about heroism, which would be cool if he continued his next book on this topic.  Just the whole idea of we humans interacting over the past thousand of years amazes me that we are still here and that I get to blog about it.   I wonder what has more impact on good, good or evil?  Here is another way to look at this. When an “evil event” happens, does more good follow than if a good event were to happen?  I think that the shock value attracts me because events far from the norm allow me to reflect and think why they stand out.  Also, these events that are not in my normal spectrum of life challenge me to see the multiple of perspectives that are involved.  An interesting exercise would be to make a list of how my life is different than the other people.  However, the list would be very bias since the only reason I know that mine is different from others around the world is through media.  This means that I need to travel around the world and also see how much the Internet can shrink the world down, bringing connection to all humanity.  Powerful opportunities.

As time came closer and closer to 3 o’clock, which was the starting time of my talk, I became more and more nervous. The anxiety wasn’t fearful though, it was more like an overwhelming excitement. I couldn’t wait to start. The time came and as I observed who was in the audience; I only saw many familiar faces, graduate students and professors. Yet, I was disappointed at what I saw. The only professors attending where the ones I talk to frequently during the week, and the graduate students have already seen me talk. Thus, my frustration was that I would be speaking to the choir. True, there was a math conference going on campus and other professors were out of town. But the whole point of setting of my talk in a colloquium was to speak to the math faculty. A time like this, I feel that it is important to remember a sentence my uncle told me:

Purpose based, not results based.

My purpose was to express what I was doing with my faculty and get there feedback. From there I may start talking to other teachers to see what they are doing in their class. So these might not be the results YET. Even though I did not get the results I wanted this time doesn’t mean that it still cannot happen.

The other lesson I learned was to keep taking advantage of the education opportunities in my community. I started out the talk by mentioning the idea of requiring people to attend because so often I hear teachers talk about how students do not attend their classes. They continue saying “How do they expect to learn the material if they don’t attend?” (I should point out that the graduate students are required to attend colloquium but the faculty isn’t.) So, I asked the same question, “How do we as teachers expect to enhance our understanding if we do not require ourselves to attend the educational opportunities around us?” “Marinate on that” is what I said next and continued my talk.

Happy Friday the 13th The date brings terror to some, but for me I am very excited about the day. I get to be the speaker at the math and sciences colloquium at ASU. My presentation will be based on my directed research, which is about teaching math in my special inquiry way. How sweet it is to be given the opportunity to speak in front of professors and educators! The only sad part about my talk is that I only get to speak for an hour. I would love to talk about education 24/7. If there was a church service for educators, then I would love to be the one who gets to give the weekly sermons. But I guess they call those type of people Conference Speakers, and I would rather speak to my students. Why? Well, because students actually listen more than do teachers when you lecture to them. How about them apples. So, yes, I am a math nerd and an education nerd. What a sweet combo! This brings up the an interesting question,

What makes one a nerd?

I would say that the answer is simple. Freely expressing passion for what excites oneself. Therefore embrace the nerd that you are, and happiness will surely follow.

Click here to view an abstract of my talk. Abstract