Mama PhD

For obvious reasons, it is not possible to rehearse an improv show. However, my class had the equivalent of the dress rehearsal for our 4-show musical improv run last night, racing through three back-to-back 25-minute improvised musical comedies.

One man leaves New York going West at 100 mph. Another leaves Chicago going East at 120 mph. Where do they meet? The answer is, of course, jail, since they are both driving much too fast. This joke occasionally shows up as a “free” problem on my math exams, and typically draws groans when the students learn the answer. However, it also reminds me of some very fond memories of times spent with my mother working either algebra or geometry problems during the years I was in school.

The film world was busy this week mourning the loss of two “mountains”—documentary filmmaker Les Blank and film critic Roger Ebert. They will both be remembered for highlighting work about women, blacks, Cajuns, “crackers,” Mexicans, Yugoslavs—subjects and filmmakers who are too often ignored and forgotten by mainstream media. Both men have inspired me in my own filmmaking and teaching.

As recorded here last week, my extended family recently traveled to Ireland. The trip, especially the Belfast portion, was deeply moving, disturbing and important to us all, given our family's history of disowning and abandoning members because of religious differences. And being in Ireland over Easter weekend — a pivotal time in the history of Irish Republicanism — reinforced our feeling that our family's history was a valid part of a much larger story.

One would think that an economist who teaches math, including one math class that teaches the statistical program SPSS, would be very knowledgeable about how computers work. Alas, that is not actually the case. While I use computer programs to do my research, and write SAS and Fortran programs to do so, the actual workings of the computers that I depend on are still quite a mystery to me. My father was an electrical engineer, and therefore had more of a sense of how these mysterious boxes turned what are basically “on” and “off” switches into the tools that make my life possible. I, however, went to college in the final years before the personal computer became a fixture in our homes, and had very little education as to how they work. Much of my early research was done on mainframes (either locally or remotely), and I still find myself with a sense of ignorance about personal computers.

As I was cleaning out the refrigerator the other day, I was reminded of Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift, which describes the extra burden of work that falls to women once they are at home. Then, it occurred to me that, because I was cleaning out the office refrigerator (who leaves vanilla frosting and a stick of margarine in a communal refrigerator anyway?), this work was a part of my first shift, even though it appears nowhere in my job description. This made me wonder whether women face not only extra work at home but also hidden tasks throughout their workday.

Every once in a while I have the chance to put together a new lecture on a topic I find...

The last few weeks of the semester have a feeling of both desperation and joy about them. Joy comes for me at the approach of spring—the cherry tree outside my office window just bloomed, so I know it’s really here now. But there’s desperation at the amount of work that remains to be done. My students are tired. Some are sick—I have received emails from the hospital emergency room, the doctor’s office, the dorm room, requesting extra time for papers due to illness or explaining an absence from class. Some are just experiencing the normal stresses of the end of the semester—the realization that, yes, all those papers really are due all at once, and the reading really does need to be done before class.