Mama PhD

I have been feeling fragmented lately, and I’ve generated a hypothesis for why I feel this way that maybe others out there can relate to. Let me start at the beginning. Lo those many years ago my PhD was officially conferred, and I had a baby soon after. At the time I decided to step away from the traditional academic route, since with a husband six years further along in an academic career I just didn’t have the desire to balance a second academic career track with our new family.

This week, as I was starting to feel myself again after an intense bout of the flu, Ben came down with it. I had a comparatively light work week, so even when he wasn't that sick I was able to spend time with him, watching TV, talking when he felt up to it, and making tea, the closest thing to food he could tolerate for a few days.

When I teach Economics, I often find myself teaching about the effects of a tax on the supply and demand curves for a product. While a tax can be levied on a producer or a consumer, it is generally the case that the producer and consumer will each pay a portion of that tax in the end, once the equilibrium price changes in response to the tax. Indeed, the degree to which a consumer and producer share the cost of a tax depends on how willing those agents are to change their behavior in response to a change in price. In economic language, we say that who actually pays a tax “depends on the elasticities.”

This is going to be my last post for Mama PhD. Contributing to the initial book and then to this blog has been an incredibly rich and rewarding experience. It has allowed me a public place to examine and articulate the intersections between my personal and professional lives, to push the boundaries between the private and the public, and to become part of a community. Writing this blog has also coincided with a decision on my part to be more authentic, less afraid of revealing myself, of speaking the truth. But it’s time to bow out and let other voices be heard -- in particular, I think we need to hear from adjunct Mama PhDs!

I spent this past Sunday afternoon watching 11-year-old boys punch, kick, and yell at one another. No, it wasn’t a play date gone bad, or a hockey brawl. With clenched fists, my heart in my stomach, and held breath I watched my son spar in a karate tournament.

Last week a document circulated among some of my far-flung colleagues — maybe some of you saw it? Titled “Learning Outcomes are Corrosive,” by Frank Furedi, it was linked approvingly by folks in the humanities, many of them friends of mine. Its final sentence may be the one I most resonate with, as it expresses the kind of optimistic idealism about humanistic education that I think many of us share: “students should be treated as grown-ups who can be allowed to embark on a journey of discovery instead of directed to a predetermined destination.”

I was going to write about this article, but Jill at Feministe beat me to it, providing a much more articulate and witty takedown than I would have managed. My only quibble is her reference to this article, which she and other writers cite as evidence that having children is detrimental to emotional health and well being.

When we think about a continuous variable, that is, one that can take on any value along the number line, we note that the chance that it will take on any pre-determined value is equal to zero. For example, if we want to know whether the variable takes on a value of two, would we be willing to accept a value of 1.9 instead? How about 1.99? Or 1.999? Or 1.999 with a sequence of 9s going on into the next county but, presumably, never actually equaling two? Since it is clear that one can get infinitesimally close to any arbitrary value without actually equaling that value, we say that the probability of a continuous variable actually equaling some predetermined value is zero.