Mama PhD

In statistics, we often talk of "outliers," observations that appear so far from the average that they teach us something about the underlying data and how they came to be. This is a concept that has gained attention recently as the month of March has so far distinguished itself as a true outlier in this part of the country.

If you pay attention to YouTube or the media, then you are aware of Kony 2012. If you’ve been on a college campus that contains any sense of activism in the last few years, then you have probably heard of “Invisible Children” or their “National Sleepout” event. Students at my university consistently sleep outside on the quad in order to commemorate the living conditions, abuses and relative danger of the lives of central African child soldiers. If a university wants to teach history, global politics and civic engagement, then what better way to do so but by including a student-driven non-profit’s advocacy events?

I’ve written a few times about math. It’s an important subject and especially lately it seems to make a big impact on our family’s life.

I walked into class last Wednesday and my students looked spent. They’d only been back from break two days, but it might as well have been two weeks. They were working on a paper for me, and it showed. They were exhausted, and in their exhaustion, losing focus.

I was deeply disturbed by Jonathan Zimmerman's recent Christian Science Monitor article on the reaction of Columbia students to President Obama's decision to deliver the commencement address at Barnard:

I often laugh at the politics of taking coffee from a shared coffee maker. The person who takes the last cup needs to make a new pot, so no one wants to be the person to take that last serving. To avoid this, people often take only half of a cup, leaving a half of a cup for the next (and presumably last) person. This can go on for a while, and could, in theory, go on indefinitely, as dividing by two with each thirsty but lazy person will never actually result in an empty coffee maker.

Yesterday, after spending 10 hours in the Magic Kingdom, I became convinced Disney World is the biggest marketing scam in...

An ongoing labor dispute between teachers and the government in my province of British Colombia came to a head last week with a teacher strike. Although teachers were only out of the classroom for three days (after giving a few days’ strike notice), parents were sent scrambling to juggle schedules, arrange for childcare, and keep their kids occupied.