Small big rewards

The pleasures of teaching (1): At the end of quantum today, having babbled on about state kets, transformations, bases rotations, and what not for an hour, trying to fill in the holes in my students’ understanding, or perhaps more appropriately trying to hold their hand as they construct their understandings, I said: ‘Have a great weekend, thank you’. And one of them looked at me and said, ‘no, thank you‘. Possibly ironic? Probably not.

The pleasures of teaching (2): I sat down a few minutes ago to tinkery things like HW solutions and then this blog, winding down towards the weekend. A student from my Revolutions class walks in, trying very hard to articulate something she’s been struggling with. It’s nothing to do with the homework, nothing to do with anything I’ve asked them to think about. She was walking home, and then turned around to come find me. She wanted to understand something about forces and Newtonian physics and what not. ‘You’ve gotten into my head, I’ve been obsessing about physics and driving my room-mates nuts … I’ve tried to think about these things before but now it makes so much more sense.’ This is my target audience, this student — from the humanities side of campus, about to graduate college, and getting to obsess about Newtonian Third Law pairs. Nice end to a tiring first week.

Watching the sausages being made

I am on the Education and Curriculum Committee at Carleton, and today’s meeting had a single agenda item: The proposal for the creation of an <elided> major. (Full disclosure: This committee has its minutes freely available to the Carleton community, but it’s not clear to me that everything is open for consumption outside the campus, so I will be somewhat discreet). ECC has proved a real learning experience, seeing how the ’sausages are made’ — how rules and systems that we take for granted are created at a place like Carleton. Most of the day-to-day stuff can be a grind and detail focused, but through it all is always running the thread of what it means to educate, to educate within the liberal arts tradition, to educate at Carleton, and, well, given that I got elected onto this committee, I figured that I might as well enjoy thinking about these things.

This is a difficult time to be creating new majors at Carleton, because we are in a transition to a 5-course teaching load. While there are some new hires scheduled, which will ameliorate some of the impact of the reduced number of courses, there will still be fewer courses available for students. The extra workload for a new major (such as the senior integrative exercise within the major required of all students at Carleton) is therefore going to be doubly hard to pull off. But this particular major is going to go through, for sure, it’s something the college has made a commitment to in its previous actions, and it’s a ‘hot’ field.

As with quite a few other such proposals that I’ve seen, the faculty involved are responding pretty creatively to the constraints. There are going to be a lot of cross-listed courses that will count, for example. This lead to a somewhat philosophical issue being brought up, the standard one of conception of disciplines. Physics stands out as a somewhat extreme major, if you think about it: In my quantum class sits the entire junior class who, to an excellent approximation are guaranteed to have taken all the required Math courses through Linear Algebra, and to have taken mechanics, and ‘electricity and magnetism’, and ‘atomic and nuclear’. That is, the major is conceived of as very hierarchical and there’s a common ‘content’ that we can’t really imagine not teaching the kids. At the other end, is this new major, which resembles, say, History, where there are multiple paths through the major, and barely any common experiences except perhaps for a research methods course. This conception allows for tremendously flexibility and freedom of coverage, but at the moment, if physicists tried to implement it, we would land up with what we would think of as a very shallow major. Is this an absolute issue? Can physics be re-imagined? I’ve thought about this on and off for years, mostly because it really bothers me that as a discipline we acquire knowledge (content) ridiculously fast, and so in some sense a content based education will lead to longer and longer ‘basic training’ periods, and more and more distance from the cutting edge. I wish I had an answer to this. But thinking about it has proved useful in the past in deciding what to teach and what not to teach.

One particular approach I have been pondering is to use Tom Moore’s Six Ideas perspective as the starting point, do ‘methods’ as the next layer (where that would include mathematical methods as well as experimental methods) and then have some ‘applied’ courses such as materials science or cold-atoms or equivalent as the finishing layer. Doing less with more is imperative and will be even more so soon — would this help us get there? The odds of Carleton changing its curriculum radically are small, unfortunately, so I’ll probably never find out.

Getting going

The term has gotten going, and while there has been nothing major to report, in the spirit of this being a journal, time to record. Everything’s ticking along pretty much as usual, though it’s proved to be a more … um, inertia-filled term to start than usual, for some reason. But, worth remarking:

(1) Quantum mechanics started with a sudden immersion into Hilbert space. A sentence guaranteed to lose all the non-physicists bothering to read this, and some of the physicists as well. Irrespective: I teach quantum from John Townsend’s quantum book, which I have described to colleagues as ‘baby Sakurai’ (where Sakurai is a classic graduate textbook).

It plunges into what’s startling about quantum mechanics immediately with the description of some thought experiments about the spin of atoms, and the response of this spin to magnetic fields. Using this approach, within a single lecture, we had established that it was impossible to describe this spin with the standard or ‘classical’ prescriptions (the way we describe position, speed, etc) and that it was impossible to know the spin in the two different directions simultaneously. Then we set up the mathematical machinery required to start describing everything, and there we were, off on the journey into Hilbert space.

The true structure of Hilbert space is something that’s still being explored in the research world — the ‘explosion’ of research in quantum computing starting in the late ’90s, 70 years after quantum mechanics was discovered/invented shows that we’ve barely begun to figure out the structure of quantum mechanics. My own research is about how Hilbert space turns into real space for sufficiently large or sufficiently warm objects, and why nonlinearity affects this transition, and it is so so wonderfully easy to get lost in there. I do so get a kick out of introducing smart and eager students to this machinery, and the amazing Dirac notation.

(2) I had one of my advisees ask to meet me for lunch. This is an international student who is going through some blues, some of which I can recognize, and some are unique to his life, of course. But here’s this smart, sweet 18-year-old struggling with big issues of identity and of feeling neither at home at Carleton or in his own country, trying to figure out how to reconcile his ‘liberal arts’ choice for major with the notion of being a success, and trying hard in his head to justify the cost — both the true economic cost as well as the emotional ones — of being so far away from family and friends.

And while this is a difficult difficult conversation to have sensibly over lunch in a crowded student eatery, what I want to say to him is what I say to myself all the time: You’ve got to find what makes you happy, hard as that is to do. Because success, money, fame, all that is about happiness. So understand that everything you do is a choice you make about finding your happiness. And you’ve got to understand that decisions about happiness are made in the face of the fact that these are amorphous, morphing, fluid issues, almost guaranteed to later generate a sense of compromise, of loss, of regret. But isn’t it amazing that we belong to a generation, to an economic group that can focus on this issue of happiness, instead merely of survival?

Hah. My student looked puzzled but intrigued to see himself as engaged in an essential struggle, not just a heavy one. And that’s all I had for him at the moment.

(3) And a friend forwarded an obituary for our mutual teacher and hero, Dr. Bhargava.

Diversity in the Sciences

The term (quarter) is about to begin at Carleton, and I’m trying to set up my end of the one big ‘event’ I am involved with this term. This is related to Freeman Hrabowksi’s visit to Carleton at the end of January where he’s doing a bunch of gigs, meeting with students, faculty, and a couple of public events.

A child-leader in the Civil Rights Movement, Freeman Hrabowski was prominently featured in Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary, “Four Little Girls,” on the racially motivated bombing in 1963 of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Hrabowski has served as President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County since 1992 and is an authority on minority participation and performance in science and math education. He has co-authored two books, “Beating the Odds” and “Overcoming the Odds,” focusing on parenting and high-achieving African American males and females in science.

He’s supposed to be an amazingly inspirational speaker, and I am looking forward to his visit, both for what I expect to learn from him myself, but also to see the impact on others on campus. I am particularly concerned with a panel discussion entitled ‘Diversity in the Sciences: Creating Climates of Success’ with panel members Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, president, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Sam Moore, project director, NSF LSAMP-North Star STEM Alliance, and director, Academic Programs for Excellence in Engineering and Science, University of Minnesota.

This is related to part of my slowly developing — well, let’s say portfolio, in the British political system sense of that word — as the co-director of CISMI, the Carleton Interdisciplinary Science and Math Initiative. I expect to be helping coordinate campus efforts that are paying attention to the issue of diversity and equal opportunity access to science education on the Carleton campus. It’s one of the most interesting and human challenges that I have encountered yet in my career but one that feels a natural fit at the moment. Stay tuned for more, I guess!