Mama PhD

Our Brooklyn neighborhood fared relatively well this week. We lost a lot of trees, phone and Internet signals were sporadic, and we didn't have subway service for several days, but we were basically okay. Several of our friends were not so lucky; they spent days without electricity, heat or hot water — some without running water at all — and started to worry about extended hunger, thirst and sewage problems. For some, the issues are ongoing.

There is a concept in geometry known as the “centroid” of a triangle. This is the point at which the...

I’m not sure if this blog has ever acknowledged how close the emotions attached to raising a pet are to raising children, even though I would venture a guess that there are just as many academics with pets as kids. Universities do, in fact, offer insurance for animals (even before domestic partner benefits), and a $7.6 million donation was recently made in a cat’s name to UC Davis’s School of Veterinary Medicine, but it doesn’t seem politically correct for pet owners to insist that their animals are loved and return affection every bit as much as human dependents. As someone who has raised both, though, I think I can safely say that my cat seems to love me with more dependability than my teenagers.

This is not the first hurricane we’ve weathered here in Richmond. It’s not even the first hurricane that’s disrupted classes, or that I’ve blogged about. Last year our power was out for four days with Irene; Isabel, in 2003, closed my campus for a week. Gaston, which was only a tropical storm by the time it got here in 2004, flooded downtown Richmond and all the roads between my home and campus; it took me two hours to get home from campus on the first day of classes that year as I sought an unflooded route (and, failing to find one, simply drove through the least-flooded street I could find).

I read this New York Times article, on non-wealthy and minority children who attend elite schools, and this IHE series, on dealing with racism on campus, with interest. It seems that isolation of students who are "different" is a widespread and tenacious problem that can begin as early as elementary school.

When I was a child, a new way of teaching math was introduced and soon became popular. Often called the “new math”, this approach to math included an attempt to build up all of math from the concepts of “set theory.” Indeed, in those days, every math class began with a chapter on “sets.”

I’m just back from my last “family weekend” ever at my daughter’s college. I can’t recall my parents ever attending one of these weekends while I was in college — nor can I remember wanting them to — but my husband and I have alternated trips up to my daughter’s campus every year. Part of the reason is that we simply like Boston; part of it is that she’s in an a cappella group that always performs that weekend; part of it is of course our pleasure in seeing her in her other context.

As someone who is pursuing a deferred dream later in life, I got a kick out of this piece about Heidi Hansen, a 42-year-old nursing student at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, who is a finalist for the school's Homecoming Queen.