Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
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Letting go 1

The office clean up has begun. We are supposed to be moving at the end of January and my new office is going to be quite a bit smaller than my current one. This means that some stuff has to go. Some things are going to be easy to throw away (such as the 100+ reviews of articles I have written over the years); others are a little harder.

Tucked up on one of the top shelves (quite neatly, I might add, unlike large parts of the rest of the office) was a set of spiral bound notebooks dating back to my undergraduate days. Contained within their pages were notes from all the undergraduate maths classes I ever took (and a few I attended as a graduate student as well).

There is evidence in their pages of the rush to finish covering first year calculus because the lecturer from the first two terms had had a rather leisurely stroll through some of the obscurer aspects (I don’t think he really wanted to be teaching the subject) and had thus raised the ire of the third term lecturer who suddenly had to cover what seemed like all the significant bits.

I tried to find evidence of occasions where I fell asleep and my writing drifted off down the page but despite glancing through a few likely candidate notebooks there was no sign of it. I can remember having attacks of the Zzzzs on several occasions (I’m a dozer from way back), and thought it might have been in DF-S’s class on a Tuesday afternoon when the sun would stream through the window of Room A … which made nodding off partly my responsibility for being silly enough to sit in the sun.

There is evidence of the evolution of my handwriting. In first year the handwriting is beautifully neat. One could be forgiven for being unconvinced it’s mine. In fact, although I do not remember actually doing so, I used to take notes in class and then write them up again afterwards. The reason I am certain of this is because I know that I started teaching myself to write left-handed in first year calculus (during the aforementioned leisurely bits), and yet there is no evidence of my southpaw scrawl in the notebooks. By the time I reached my honours year I was nowhere near so obsessively conscientious about neatness, and the rot was setting in. The transformation to semi-illegibility was exacerbated by my DipEd year (not shown here) where the lecturers weren’t so kind as to write everything on the board. With my limited discernment for what was worth noting, I tried to transcribe almost every utterance. The net effect of this—and the advent of computers—wrought havoc on my penmanship.

However I did manage to train myself to a moderate degree of ambidexterity, in that I now write equally badly with each hand! The photo on the left below was from some notes taken during my PhD years, and I managed to maintain the left-handedness for pages at a time. It’s turned out to be a handy skill to have (that pun made its own appearance; sometimes they know I need them and just wander in all by themselves); at the very least it impresses students when I change hands while writing on the whiteboard.

As for the photo on the right, I’d like to believe that there was a time when I knew what it meant.

Nah … there wasn’t.

There are the odd one or two or many doodles on the pages: faces, landscapes, mathematical shapes, silly comments, and the like as evidence of a peripatetic mind. In some cases, the faces do vaguely resemble real people; the one on the right below is meant to be — and is not totally unlike — the DF-S of somnolent sunny window fame (he’s also “famous” for returning an assignment to me nine years after I submitted it!).

In my second year my penchant for puns and doodling combined and bore fruit in a series of silly cartoons that illustrated certain mathematical concepts. The front cover of my “Algebra and Analysis” notes was festooned with these (although it hasn’t photographed all that well), and I later reproduced them in more polished form and gave copies to a couple of my lecturers (including BJG, whose capacity for punning far exceeds my own). I’m hoping I haven’t lost my own copies of the two sets of cartoons that resulted by the end of my undergraduate days, but I’m a bit bothered by the fact that I can’t find them just yet.

I’d better not have lost them, because they are not on my “letting go” list. The set of notebooks above, however, are now languishing in a recycling bin.

See, I can let some things go …

… even if I have hung onto some bits via photos and a blog entry!

(This one is among my favourites of the cartoon collection.)

2 comments to Letting go 1

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