Matthew Dicks

“Striking many” and “wishing death to some” still allows time for plenty of math and science

Mathematicians and scientists are often undeservedly assigned nerdy, frail, reputations, and I fear that this perception may steer some students away from these disciplines in school.

As a teacher, it is my job to ensure that math and science are celebrated to the same degree as the arts, if not more. If we want to produce more mathematicians and scientists in this country, we must find ways of letting students know that the sciences are not reserved for quiet, studious, industrious children.  

Enter Lists of Note, one of my favorite new websites. Last week they posted a list of Isaac Newton’s sins that will serve to assure students that mathematicians and scientists come in many forms:

In 1662, at which point he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, 19-year-old Isaac Newton wrote, in his notebook, the following list of 57 sins he had recently committed — 48 before Whitsunday, and 9 since. It makes for fascinating reading.

I’ll leave you to visit the site and peruse the list yourself, but here are a few of my favorites that will convince even the most rough-and-tumble boys that discovering the secrets of the universe is not beyond their grasp.

Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them

Wishing death and hoping it to some

Striking many

Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer and denying that I did so

Punching my sister

Beating Arthur Storer.

Apparently Newton has a serious beef with the Storer family. 

I can only hope that my students were playing videogames or watching TV or playing with fire when Rick Santorum was speaking.

One of the most important lessons I try to teach my students is the importance of admitting a mistake and possessing the moral integrity to apologize and make it right. Ask any one of my students, past or present, how I feel about mistakes, and they will tell you that the first, best and most important step in getting out of trouble with me is admitting to the error, apologizing for the action, and executing a course to correct the error and avoid repeating it again.

This is so hard for some students, and it is understandable. They are ten years old. Their egos are fragile. They have much to learn.    

It is equally difficult for many adults, and this is a lot less understandable. I have watched colleagues, spouses, friends and relatives refuse to admit error and apologize, even when the person who they have so clearly wronged is someone they respect and love.

I have many, many faults.  In fact, I once listed them in a post and added an addendum a few days later. I should probably update that list soon. But an inability to admit fault and apologize is not one of them. I am an expert at admitting that I was wrong. I am the king of culpability. I admit fault and apologize even when I am not quite certain that I did anything wrong.

I do not support the requested or demanded apology, for reasons outlined here (and possibly also because of my oppositional nature), but otherwise, I am an expert at both making mistakes and apologizing for them.   

Admitting fault should not be difficult.

Apologizing should not be hard.

It is almost always the right thing, and yet for so many, it is so difficult. 

Case in point:

The idiocy of Rick Santorum, who said this in regards to apologies yesterday:

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Sunday criticized President Obama for apologizing to Afghans this week for the burning of Qurans by NATO forces at a U.S. military base. “There was nothing deliberately done wrong here. This was something that happened as a mistake. Killing Americans in uniform is not a mistake,” Santorum said during ABC’s This Week. “Say it’s unfortunate … but to apologize for something that was not an intentional act is something that the president of the United States in my opinion should not have done ... I think it shows weakness.”

I had to read this three times, because I have listened to ten year old students say almost these exact words.

“Yes, I ran into her on the playground, but it was an accident. I didn’t mean to hurt her. So why should I say I’m sorry?”

Seriously. These are the kinds of things that my students say. Sadly, they are also the kinds of things less enlightened adults who wish to become leaders of the free world say.

I didn’t mean it.

I didn’t do it intentionally.

It was an accident.

It’s not as bad as what she did.

I shouldn’t have to apologize for an honest mistake.

These are the comments of a person with a weak mind.

I cannot believe that I live in a world in which politicians criticize leaders for apologizing for mistakes. I cannot believe I live in a world in which the willingness to apologize is considered a weakness to some.

I can only hope that my students were not listening to this nonsense. I can only hope they they were playing videogames or watching cartoons or playing with fire when Santorum was being stupid, because even videogames and cartoons and pyromania would be better than listening to this lunacy. 

Every day I try to instill a foundation of moral integrity and a strong sense of self in my students. I try to teach them that the easiest way to forgiveness is through truth and sincerity. I try to make them understand that apologizing does not make you look weak. It demonstrates your strength of character.

Then an idiot like Rick Santorum comes along and tries to undo everything that I have tried so hard to teach my kids. 

Someone please tell that man to shut the hell up.

Jesus Christ and these capital letters do not belong

This card has become the source of amusement for many because of Rick Santorum’s decision to quote Jesus Christ and the New Testament on a Hanukkah message designed for Jews. 

Then again, only about 0.3 percent of the South Carolinian population is Jewish, so maybe he was hoping that no one would notice. 

Yes, this was a strange and fairly stupid decision.

And yes, I acknowledge that it is highly unlikely that Santorum played a hands-on role in the design of the actual card. But gaffs like this serve as an indication as to the quality of the organization that the candidate has built and is leading.

But I think an even more egregious error exists in the message at the bottom of the card:

May Your Hanukkah be bright.
Peace to you this Holiday Season

Nothing annoys me more than random and improper capitalization.

While the words May, Hanukkah and Peace should be capitalized for obvious reasons, there is no reason to capitalize You, Holiday and Season.  These words are seemingly capitalized at random, with no identifiable reason or purpose. 

Furthermore, the first sentence ends with a period but the second does not.

More inconsistency.  

Yes, it’s true that the use of a quote by Jesus Christ on a card directed to Jews makes no sense and is especially stupid in light of the Christian tone that Santorum strikes in his campaign, but the absence of basic copyediting demonstrates, at least to me, a lack of attention to detail that I find even more disturbing.

Then again, I am an author and not very religious, so perhaps I am sensitive in ways different than most. 

Delaying what is inevitable and right

When my daughter is my age, she will find it inconceivable that she was born into a country that did not allow for gay marriage, much the same way people from my generation wonder how separate but equal was ever thought to be a reasonable compromise to institutional racism.

I take great comfort in this thought in a time when bigotry has masked itself as a plank on a political campaign.      

Are these Republican candidates incapable of seeing that it is only a matter of time before this country allows any two people to marry, regardless of sex?  They remind me of the little boy who sticks his finger in the dike, hoping to hold back the oncoming flood.

Their institutional bigotry is coming to an end.  Can’t they see that?

They stand against the inevitable. 

They stand against righteousness.

They stand against my daughter’s future.

And I just wish they would get the hell out of the way so we can usher in the future a little sooner.  

Lowering the bar for husbands everywhere

It’s always refreshing to see a husband be so inexplicably unsupportive of his wife as Marcus Bachmann apparently was during his wife’s final day of campaigning in Iowa. 

As she and their daughters were visiting businesses up and down Main Street, campaigning for votes in the Iowa caucuses, he was busy buying doggie sunglasses. 

Doggie sunglasses.  You can’t make this stuff up. 

And before you tell me that his unusual shopping excursion was probably part of the campaign, watch his reaction when Michele Bachmann reveals this bit of news. 

That is not the reaction of an innocent man.

He looks like a five-year old who just got caught stealing cookies from the cookie jar.  Literally. 

But that’s okay.  When men are tragically unsupportive of their wives in a time of need and on such a grand stage, it makes it a little easier for us moderately supportive husbands to look pretty damn impressive for folding the laundry or scraping the frost of the wife’s car in the morning.   

Both of which I did today.

White people choose Presidential candidates

Iowa and New Hampshire, with their early caucuses and primaries, often play enormous roles in determining our Presidential candidates (as you probably know).  Many a Presidential hopeful has resigned after failing to perform well in one of these two states. 

The demographics of the two states, according to the 2010 census, are thus:

Iowa is 92% white, 3% black and 5% Hispanic.

New Hampshire is 94% white, 1% black and 2% Hispanic.

Nationally, the United States is about 72 % white, 13% black and 16% Hispanic.

The next Republican primary state is Wyoming.  It’s demographics are 90% white, less than 1% black and 8% Hispanic. 

Food for thought in terms of the representative nature of these critical states in the primary process.

His position on same sex marriage is abhorrent, but credit him for his civility and willing to engage

This is a fascinating exchange.

As much as I think Mitt Romney’s position on same sex marriage is ludicrous and reprehensible, he handles a potentially volatile situation rather well.

He unknowingly steps into a potential lion’s den and emerges relatively unscathed. 

And the Vietnam veteran who challenges Romney on same sex marriage also conducts himself exceptionally well.  While he finds Romney’s position on same sex marriage equally reprehensible, he credits the GOP candidate for engaging honestly in the discussion.

It’s not often that you see two men with completely divergent thoughts engage in civil, reasoned discourse in front of the cameras during a political campaign. 

It was refreshing. 

2011

Worth watching.

You just lost a customer, Lowes

Check it out. I’m exceedingly pleased, and perhaps even proud, of one of Connecticut’s US congressmen. 

With Congress’ approval rating close to single digits, that doesn’t happen often.

And thought I’ve never been a Home Depot loyalist, it turns out that I am now.

I don’t trust fifty.

I don’t trust even numbers. 

I assume that every Top 10 list either contains one too many entries or is missing one or two deserving entries that were axed in order to keep the list at a conventionally round number.  

I have never liked the emphasis placed on round numbers in sports, such as the prestige attached to 100 yards of rushing in an NFL game. Is 100 yards of rushing really any more representative of excellence than 95 or 98 yards?

I don’t think so. 

Yet just this week, I heard an NFL analyst say that a team is struggling to run the ball based upon the fact that no player on the team had rushed for 100 yards since week 5. 

I was left wondering how the team had performed in terms of rushing the football since week 5. 

Was the team using a running-back-by-committee approach, in which the ball is shared by several players in order to avoid wearing out any one player?

Or was there a player on the team consistently rushing for 80-90 yards per game, and if so, is this really an indicator that the team can’t effectively run the ball?

I don’t think so.  

Yet this round number has come to symbolize effectiveness in terms of rushing the football, even though it is often statistically irrelevant. 

With this in mind, I am fascinated that after 235 years of nationhood, the United States ended up with the conveniently round number of fifty states. 

Fifty. 

Not forty or sixty.  The delightfully satisfying round number of fifty. 

It makes me wonder if Puerto Rico might have already become a state had Hawaii been our 49th state instead of our 50th state. 

Or if the District of Columbia might have been granted statehood in order to achieve the round number. 

I also wonder if perhaps our round number of states has helped prevent Puerto Rico from becoming a state?

After all, who wants fifty-one states when we can have a number like fifty?

See what I mean?  Fifty seems too convenient.  Too round. 

And history is a messy piece of business. There are too many people with too many motivating factors involved in decision making over too long a period of time to believe that we carved up enormous portions of the North American continent into separate political entities over a period of more than 150 years, then tacked on two non-contiguous territories and just happened to arrive at the number fifty.

Fifty.  It’s too damn round for me.

I don’t trust it.