Here you go, Adrian….a new blog post:
Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway!), lots has happened since I last made the time to post anything of consequence here. After just shy of one year, my nephews are living with my sister again. The transition from three kids to one has been almost as surreal as the transition from one to three was last January. Our living room no longer looks like an ICU/nursery, we haven’t bought diapers in three months, and we can include dairy products in our meals without worrying about spending an evening in the emergency room. We miss the boys like crazy, but are glad that the situation seems to be resolving itself well. We’ll always be grateful for the time we had with them. As difficult as it was at times, I know that all of us are better off for having been through it.
School has been going exceptionally well this semester. I got my nomination for the national math honor society (Pi Mu Epsilon), and my grades didn’t suffer too much from the added stress of the past year. My course load is quite a bit lighter than it was in the fall, so there’s been more downtime to fill with all sorts of activities. I’m not very good at down-time, so I have a tendency to overextend myself to compensate. I’m taking flute and voice lessons this semester, playing flute in the AU symphonic band, oboe in the Hornell Area Wind Ensemble, filling in on woodwinds in the AU orchestra, singing in the Orpheus Chorale, and I have a part in the “adult” comedy musical being put on by the Hornell Community Theatre. When I’m not in rehearsal, I’m working my way through an online Topology class, and also prepping some more for my origami independent study. I was really excited to find Erik Demaine’s Fall 2010 MIT origami course online and snagged the textbook through inter-library loan so that I could explore some things outside of what I’ve been working on in Robert Lang’s Origami Design Secrets. Next semester will be a little different than I had initially planned, since the Graph Theory/Combinatorics topics class conflicts with the only section of Differential Equations. Looks like Diff. Eq. will have to wait until my last semester when the only other class I will need is Advanced Calculus (Real Analysis). There’s also a possibility that there will be room for me in a small Modern Algebra II class this fall with a couple of my cohorts, which would be excellent.
I was thrilled to the point of near-speechlessness to be accepted to an REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) for this summer. I’ll be spending eight weeks with seven other students at UNC Asheville, knee-deep in graph theory, group theory, and metric geometry. While my overwhelming emotional response to this is excitement, there’s a little bit of anxiety (not much) thrown in. We’ll be covering a lot of ground, and a tiny little voice in my head wonders if I can hold on for the ride.I recently came to the realization that I’m now at the point where the math in my notebooks and on the chalkboards in my classrooms looks like “movie math”…the crazy equations and symbols they use in a movie to imply that whatever mathematics the people on screen are discussing is far too complex for anyone in the audience to understand. I just need to remind myself sometimes that the sigmas and matrices and continued fractions aren’t beyond me any more and that as long as I apply myself, I’ll do fine and have fun. It will be really interesting to meet students from other schools so that we all have new sounding boards for our ideas and techniques.
My own "movie math" work in progress...and this isn't even terribly complicated. (Unfortunately, I am cursed with chalkboard handwriting that is far too legible to hide my mistakes behind bad penmanship.)
I also have a strong indication from another summer program director that I will have a position next summer as well. The professor in charge of the program contacted me after their rejection letters went out saying that I had one of the strongest applications but still had two years of eligibility for their program, and they had to give preference to students who were graduating sooner. In the long run, I think this is really for the best, as the UNC Asheville program is geared towards addressing some of my more immediate mathematical goals. The other program, while very prestigious, is not research/publication oriented, so I don’t feel so bad about waiting a year to take part. Hopefully the skills I pick up in North Carolina this summer will allow me to dig deeper in my independent study next semester and come up with useful results of my own, instead of just surveying the topic. Mathematical origami is a relatively young area of study with lots of accessible open questions, so strong research and writing skills will put me in a much better position to make meaningful contributions to the field.
Now that I am working my way through the math course offerings and starting to think about grad school, I’m finding myself reassessing my goals. I still absolutely want to teach; I just want to be sure I am doing it in the way that will have the most potential impact. When I graduate, I will be certified for general elementary education, along with secondary certification in mathematics. Something I hadn’t really considered until recently is the possibility of going beyond a Master’s degree and teaching at the college level. A very big part of me wants to do my graduate work in pure math. At this point I feel like I’m just peeking through the keyhole into an ever-expanding room full of treasure. I’m starting to understand some of the deeper concepts and connections, and that really piques my appetite for more knowledge. Then there’s the part of me that feels selfish for wanting to keep “living the academia dream” when I should be in a classroom inspiring future mathematicians. I could be so much more impactful in a grade school classroom simply being excited about math, instead of petrified of it like so many elementary educators are. What kind of difference would it have made for you at an early to have experienced math as exciting, powerful, and mysterious instead of frustrating, repetitive, and tedious? Even in the high school classroom I could be a role model to girls who, like I did at their age, never imagine that math is an option for them. Nobody ever told me women couldn’t do math, but I never had direct contact with any who did it and were enthusiastic about it. Knowing what I do now, don’t I have a moral obligation to fill that role? I could sign on with Math for America and have a Master’s in math education and be in a classroom by the fall of 2014. I’d get 4 years of classroom experience for my resume and would then be in a much more competitive position to get into the DoDDS system than I would fresh out of grad school. Or I can spend another five years working on a PhD and ultimately teach at the college level while continuing research work in whatever amazing field of math I wind up claiming for my own. Good thing I still have a couple of years to figure that out. I have a feeling my experience this summer, both with research and in interacting with passionate educators, will have more than a little impact on my ultimate decision.
Well…time to get some homework done before Geometry. I have a busy night full of obligations ahead, and would rather sleep afterward than stay up doing linear algebra WebWork.
