There's something that's been rattling around my brain this week, something to do with situations in which leadership sees a problem, acknowledges the problem publicly, and chooses a response that everybody knows will not address the problem. Examples that come to mind:

• A doctor's office puts up a notice that masks are no longer required, and requests that patients work to prevent the spread of COVID by washing hands;
  
• A DEI committee for a mostly-White university spends years discussing practical barriers to attendance, but can only agree on updating the photos on their brochures to include some students of color;
  
• An oil company touts its efforts to prevent climate change by promoting recycling plastics.

In one specific DEI case, $LargeLocalEmployer got caught on tape stating something to the effect that the goal of their DEI workgroup was to absorb the shock of the societal reaction to George Floyd without changing anything, so that business as usual at the workplace could continue.

Is there a term for this, in activism, or in sociology?

On Wednesday there was an attempt to overthrow the federal government by force. I don't really have anything intelligent to say about this that hasn't been said elsewhere. I will probably want to remember it later, though, so I'm marking the time.

Wednesday was meant to be a largely ceremonial day celebrating the peaceful transfer of power, a day we have never marked in the past because it was always so uneventful. Trump held a rally and incited a mob to go break into the Capitol and stop the tabulation of Electoral College votes. The mob easily overpowered police, for reasons that are still emerging. Congress was evacuated. Significant damage was done to the Capitol itself. Several people died. Photo and video evidence that has emerged since the attack suggests that the assailants (or a subset thereof) were intent on kidnapping, possibly worse. There is talk of a second impeachment but it has not happened yet.

I took leave Wednesday to gape and to grieve. Thursday and Friday weren't much better on the focus front. Work seems like a farce. Meanwhile our chancellor somehow still has not released a statement about the insurrection (turns out I was wrong about this; there is a statement, but it was not emailed to campus).

And on the political nature of the violence: We told H about the events on Thursday morning. That evening her school newsletter had a blurb about how to talk with your kids about the attack. "As with any conversation that might be politically charged, it is important you don’t let your own partisan perspective color how you present facts, so take care to be as objective as possible," they advised. I'm sorry, but what? How does one convey in a nonpartisan manner that one of the two major parties is no longer committed to honor democratic elections and in fact is willing to incite insurrection to prove the point? How does one explain Wednesday while omitting this?

I keep thinking about my father, and how likely it is that this will have changed nothing in his mind.

Our experience of virtual school so far this year has been interesting. It's been a lot more work and more face-time than last year, which has required us to adapt. We've settled into it well enough now that I think I can talk a little about it publicly.

True distance education, with the flexibility it allows, can actually be a great thing for my particular high-mean, high-variance kid. You get to do the work in a time, manner, and place that suits you. Last year, for instance, we got a pile of work on Mondays, and we got to set the ground rules that made sense for our kid, and in a way that was compatible with us continuing to focus on our own needs as workers. Second grade was mostly very rough seas, and for me, this transition was a welcome balm.

What we have so far this year is ... not quite true distance education. Moreso than last year, teachers seem to be trying to pretend that the classroom is theirs and that normal classroom rules apply. No snacks, no pets; sit up, don't wiggle; cameras on, unless your internet is dire. In reality, each teacher has roughly thirty co-teachers per class, and these co-teachers are adults, who are generally not used to taking orders the way that elementary schoolers are expected to. And yet I don't think the institution has quite adapted to this reality.

I gained some clarity on this point this morning when a mass email from a teacher came our way. (The infraction: allowing our children to get the work for this class done too soon, without first watching all the videos, which are doled out one by one and not at a pace that is compatible with the blocks of protected work time she has, which are frontloaded in the week.) The message reminded me of working in a place with a shared kitchen, and the passive aggressive notes that so often come with that perk. I now realize that part of why those notes are so ineffective is that they carry with them the subtext that the behavior they're condemning is common. If someone were pooping on the kitchen counter, you wouldn't leave a passive aggressive note about that. The fact that you have to actually means I'm in pretty good company if I leave my dishes in the sink, or (heaven forfend) let my eight-year-old work ahead.

I finished the Broken Earth trilogy today. This has been an interesting and difficult time to read this series... everything resonates a bit too much.

( The Stone Sky: passages of note )

Mathematics for Human Flourishing, Francis Su

A few years back, a friend shared a link to an essay (really, a lecture) by a math professor that hit me where I lived, struggling through a program in statistics in which I wasn't sure I belonged. It's one of those pieces that have become part of my small personal collection of scripture, essentially. So I was excited to see a few weeks ago that Su now has a book out. It’s about what I expected — an argument for broadening who belongs in math — with a lot of unexpected side paths, including some puzzles, only one of which I’ve solved yet. It’s also an argument that virtue is developed by doing things for love and not for material reasons. Despite mentioning God nowhere but the acknowledgements, it manages to be a somewhat Christian book in its bones.

It’s interesting to think through what taking this philosophy seriously means from the perspective of gifted education. It’s consonant in the sense that certain virtues may only be developed in the presence of challenge; and the style of education in gifted programs, too, tends to promote the ways of thinking and playing that he advocates. But there’s obvious tension with his argument against tracking and his push to democratize mathematics... and the race imbalance in gifted programming is one of those very ugly elephants in every room. What makes this more poignant is that Su teaches at Harvey Mudd, itself a very expensive school for very smart and accomplished young people. Given the moral orientation of the book, I suspect this tension is one he lives with too, and I wonder if that’s what this stream of his writing and speaking is meant to salve.

After I finished the book this morning, the mister and I had a meandering conversation about what education is for. His opinion, which I like and am chewing on, is that it’s meant to satisfy a reproductive drive akin to sex, but for cultural transmission. We educate the children in society so that our values are preserved, and we fight to educate our own children in order to weave them as fully as possible into that society, for their own protection. By that thinking, educational attainment is I guess a sort of measure of cultural centrality. How close have you managed to get to mastery of what the dominant culture in your region sees as important to its identity? This both clarifies why educational access is a moral issue, and potentially complicates the specifics of that moral issue. I’m thinking now of the residential schools that Canada and the US had for Native children until embarrassingly recently. Giving people better access to the dominant culture at the expense of access to their own birth culture is not a clear win, ethically speaking.

But math would probably rule itself exempt to this dilemma, as a tool for thinking that transcends geography more readily than, say, philosophy or literature does. I can sort of buy this... but the subcultural issues of welcome, of who belongs and who is shut out, loom large with math, I think, compared to other disciplines. I wonder how this came to be?

Trenchant life advice courtesy of Everything's Gonna Be Okay.

I was speaking with G this morning about how one of my weaknesses is a tendency to see meaning in coincidences - like that time I impulsively joined a mailing list of total strangers across the country and found out that a half dozen people on it were already in my extended social network. "You know. Apophenia," I said. "Apowhat?" he said.

Then we started our workout to Stranger Things, and two minutes later:



This is the most meta thing that has ever happened to me.

G has a modestly annoying health thing for which he's been told that increased bean consumption might be helpful. Separately, but conveniently, he's been wanting to eat less meat. Give me your vegetarian recipes that are

1. tasty (and the seasoning directions are clear enough to ensure it)
   
2. fast (ideally <30 min for chopping/cooking)
   
3. beany (dried beans OK; I can soak if I can plan)

This insane neural-network-generated fanfic made me laugh and laugh.

Sometimes when I look at an old timestamp or dateline I am jealous of the people who lived then, because they didn't yet know that they were going to live now.

Will I still feel this way in five years? Will it be worse?