Teams

I have not watched a lot of college basketball this year (and I did not do any March Madness bracket), but did take in the two games this past weekend for K-State and Baylor. College students more and more get involved in team projects or are part of teams in other sports -- and sometimes rue having to try and manage the difficult team dynamics or uneven individual efforts. Yet, these games show how potent good teams are.

In both games where a spot in the final four was on the line, K-State and Baylor fell short because they played better teams. In both cases the Big 12 teams had equal if not superior talent but their play often turned too individualistic where one player tried to do it himself (it may have also been due to an offensive strategy that limited other options). The winning teams also had "stars" but they didn't try to take over on their own -- which means they didn't take as many bad shots.

Too bad for the Big 12 -- they had great opportunities to get into the final four. Hats off, however, to teamwork.

Student Paper -- Part IV

Here is the ending of the student memoir I have been posting this week (See prior posts for the first parts of this paper. Enjoy . . .

A few days ago I asked a fellow student what his major was. When he said Biochemistry, I asked, “Pre-med?”
“Pre-dent,” he said. “You?”
“I’m pre-med, but I’m not a science major.” I hesitated. “I’m actually majoring in English.”
I waited for the usual response: the startled look, the assurance that I must be insane. It’s the same reaction I get from English majors when I tell them I’m pre-med. But he just sort of shrugged, as if this were not such a big deal.
“I like to read and write,” he told me. “By the end of the week I’m tired of using the analytical side of my brain, so I write crazy poetry.”
As I walked away, I wondered what had happened to all the well-rounded people in America. It may be one of the greatest flaws in our education system. For some reason we grow up thinking that we need only appreciate one subject, understand one thing. The two poles are usually the humanities at one end and math and science at the other. Why the separation? They’re all just as much the same as they are different. Each discipline needs another. If everyone were to recognize this, I think they would find learning more enjoyable. It’s part of the rediscovery process. The less we appreciate, the more we lose.
I’m not sure how much of our second sight we can get back. I keep searching for it, only to find that most of the time, I’ve struck it unawares, glimpsing that other world for a priceless fragment of a second. But I’ve made progress. Sometimes, now, there are days I can look at the undulating peaks and valleys of the sine function and see in it the same spark of life I perceived, at age five, in a paperclip.

Student Memoir Part III

Students do a lot of writing in their college career. Here is part 3 of one student memoir you might find interesting (Parts 1 and 2 are in the preceding posts):

I can identify the turning point. It was when we were modeling data with linear functions. Lines were not so bad; I could remember rise over run, y-intercept, the equation y = mx + b. But then we moved on to the application portion, where you had to somehow relate it to real life. By this point I was pretty savvy at making graphs. Despite the complaints of my classmates, I had come to enjoy Mathematica, the computer algebra system we used. I could plot data points and enter functions with relative ease. I could tell the computer to do calculations for me. It wasn’t a bad setup, really.
The previous class we had collected measurements of the wrist and neck sizes of ourselves and several other classmates. We’d made a scatter plot of the measurements, neck size against wrist size, and the next step was creating a linear function to capture the trend. I remember feeling vaguely surprised that I had all the skills to do so; I didn’t struggle with the assignment. And I was not used to not struggling with math.
I came up with my function. On Mathematica it soared upward through the scatter plot, a line stretching to infinity at either end.
It didn’t strike me at first, the enormity of what I had just done. Mostly I was just glad to have it over with, one more math assignment to put behind me. But as I thought about it later, about that single, perfect line rising through disorder, I came to feel an unfamiliar sense of awe. To find a pattern in randomness like that had to count for something. It was almost poetic. I felt I had glimpsed beyond the veil to a new, vast world. It was the same world I had lost after those first few years of life, that second sight every child forfeits for the sake of growing up. In that one, solitary line I had regained a bit of this world. Perhaps in learning we acquire nothing new; we are merely rediscovering what we have forgotten.
I’m taking Calculus II this semester. While math will never be my best subject, I’ve fallen in love with the way it makes me look at the world. Math is our hope for surety, for clarity, for order. Two plus two is four. But it also pleases our need for the abstract, our desire to study something that transcends the human intellect. It’s gloriously mind-boggling to think about the Koch snowflake and how it can have an infinite perimeter but a finite area. I like the idea of asymptotes, too, where a curve can keep reaching for a limit but never actually get there. Isn’t this a metaphor for life, happiness, love? All this time writers have painstakingly described that age-old thing in the distance, the thing that’s never quite tangible, when all they needed was a single word. For me, asymptote sums up everything we strive for. I think I’ve been waiting for that word most of my life . . .

The conclusion comes on Friday.

Memoir Part II

In the last post I started a student memoir from a Rockhurst English class taught by Dr. Martin. Here is part two of the memoir (see March 11th post for beginning). Enjoy.

. . . My first impulse was to get the dreaded class out of the way. I knew I would hate it to the end, and the only chance I saw for getting a good grade was selling my soul to the devil. Such a Faustian outlook managed to convince the more rational part of myself that math was too torturous for my first semester, and so that fall of my freshman year was delightfully math-free. College had a strange effect on me. I found I relished the stress, the difficulty—the blur of papers and exams and procrastinated assignments. Having been homeschooled throughout grade school and high school, I had never really felt the pressure to achieve good grades. To do well, certainly, but not for a grade. As the weeks dragged by and I immersed myself in history, psychology, composition, and philosophy, my aspirations began a series of quantum leaps. When I was much younger, before I’d realized what I figured then to be the unfortunate union of math and science, I had wanted to be a doctor. Perhaps my sudden proximity to others who were actually pursuing this ambition reawakened this dormant notion. All at once it seemed possible. Even so, the two semesters of math required by most medical schools made me anxious.
“I want to be pre-med,” I confided to one of my professors. “But I’m afraid it’ll be too hard.”
He regarded me sympathetically, as if he’d glimpsed in my words the awful fear of failure that had so often paralyzed me in the past. “. . . the only thing I would be worried about is it being too easy.”
The words emboldened me. I was registered for Precalculus the next semester, and I decided I would get an A in that class. In the meantime I began a sort of mental conditioning program. Math couldn’t be as bad as I remembered. It was all perspective. I had learned to hate it, had learned to fear it, and if I could somehow teach myself to look at each equation and graph with a smile and an open mind, I could be good at math.
The early weeks of that first college math course passed in a blur. It was not bad, but not exactly good, either—I think I saw it as a distasteful, but bearable, undertaking. Then something changed. . .

A student memoir

College should be a place for students to explore and reflect on ideas that they might not otherwise. I am always impressed by the neat things our students can do (and the way our faculty can get them to do it). Had a chance to read a student memoir -- assigned by Dr. Dan Martin. It seems like a very simple exercise and not a long paper, but professor Martin gets much more than you might expect.

For example, here is how the memoir I got to read (printed here with permission) starts:

When I was five I could breathe life into a paperclip. I could make it sentient; I believed it spoke to me. In a variety of ordinary objects I glimpsed a potential playmate. Children have the ability to gaze at the framework of everyday life and see through to the world beyond—great and frightening and spectacular. As teenagers we lose this ability, and by the time we are adults we have forgotten it. Some of us search for it and regain bits and pieces, but the innocence and immediate acceptance of the extraordinary is never recovered. Our second sight is, at best, intentional.
The oddest things trigger rediscovery of this bygone experience. In my case, it was college mathematics.
For as long as I can remember, from my earliest experiences with the standard operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—I’ve hated math. First the numbers held no beauty for me, no principles of organization. They confused me. I never could remember multiplication tables, and I never really cared to until I needed to call them to mind for a timed test. Then, in algebra, I developed an instant terror at the sight of x and y. What was this odd language before me, these sentences of numerals and variables? Half the symbols were frustrating, punctuation marks like plus and minus that tended to get lost in translation, while others were near blasphemous. I hated seeing things I loved, parentheses and periods-turned-decimal-points, in the midst of what I abhorred and feared. It occurred to me as I grew older that the problem was mine, not that of the discipline. So many others could read these expressions in the same way I read a sentence, glorying in the nuances of each detail. I grew to believe that this was a world only some people could inhabit. I would content myself to drown in words and leave the numbers to those who embraced them.
Throughout high school, I didn’t want to go to college. I had decided that once I graduated I would become a novelist, and for years I fostered the delusion that by the time I was seventeen I would be a published writer. In many ways I think this fantasy helped me. For those years I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I became a better writer because, in my mind, I had already decided I would succeed. Upon waking up from this dream in my last year of high school, when all my friends started applying to various colleges, I began to form more concrete plans. Higher education is a cultural expectation these days. And with the vast, unknown territory of university education sprawled before me, I had to come to grips with one of my greatest fears: taking one, final mathematics class . . .

To be continued in my next post.

USA Hockey 30 Years Later

I wrote about the 1980 miracle on ice last week. The U.S. team almost got gold again and they did in a somewhat familiar way -- chose a team rather a group of all-stars. In other words they did not fill the roster with the best individual players, but put a team together that could get more out of the whole than the sum of the parts. Read here from ESPN.com . . . it worked as they greatly outperformed expectations and came within a goal of taking the gold.

Often we hate working in teams, but here is an example of how they can work spectacularly when done right.