The reason this was to be avoided is that it's important in the program to know people as people first, not as job titles. I found it interesting how much my first reflex was to want to ask "What do you do?" as I was meeting people. Over time, I learned to adjust that to ask about family and hobbies (though even that one risked stepping into gray areas). This is even harder for me, as many of personal interests are tied back into my job. I made the decision as I was preparing that I would be willing to talk about my non-math interests, even if they overlapped with my work. Here are some of the things I treated as fair game:
- Oaxaca Science Center: My involvement in this as a "coordinator" for this can be seen as volunteer work with Adventures in Life Ministry, even though the bulk of my work is working with the faculty to develop curriculum and determine the equipment list. And it would be theoretically possible to do that even while not working at a college.
- Film Projects: The pyrotechnics work I was invited to do for the student video project could theoretically have happened while I was a student or even as some sort of outside consultant. I don't remember the exact wording I used, but I think I might have just called it a "film project."
- Robotics/3D printing: Even though I've taught a robotics and a 3D printing course, it's not what most people might associate with a math professor, and just having an interest in these things isn't necessarily a sign of anything. It didn't come up, but a great red herring would have been to talk about the fact that I helped someone launch a 3D printing business.
I got a sense from some people that they were quite confused about me and really didn't have much of a clue of what I did. The information clearly showed I have some sort of technical/science interests. I thought that maybe people would end up thinking I was some sort of tech entrepreneur. Not talking about work became really hard when we were meeting in what amounts to a small group and we were supposed to share about our personal/professional story. For example, in my notes receiving tenure was written as "received a job title change." I also have taken a very straight path into what I do, moving straight from undergrad to grad school to professor. So it's not like there's a lot of wandering in the middle that can be emphasized.
But in the end, that part mattered very little. It's hard not to get to know things about people when you're forced into interacting intensely with them for three straight days. After a morning session at the Cannery, where we did some ice-breaker games and activities, we loaded up onto buses to head to Nellis Air Force Base. We got to take a tour of some of the parts of the base, including checking out the explosive ordinance disposal unit (and got to get up close to look a remote bomb disposal robot), getting a pretty close look at a $90 million fighter jet, and playing around in the "petting zoo" (an area where they had old tanks, planes, and other war vehicles that you could climb around in). In the evening, they gave us some social time to hang out where I ended up playing some table shuffleboard with folks.
The next day was pretty much an all-day society simulation. There's so much I can say about it, but so much that I probably shouldn't say about it. One of the problems with saying too much is that it ruins the game. The game is less about "winning" as much as it is a discovery experience that exposes different types of biases and blind spots that people have. And so to go into great detail ruins the game if anyone were to ever try to play it. That being said, the practical reality of this is that normally only a couple dozen people read these things, and most of them are family and close friends who are extremely unlikely to encounter this in their lives. There may be extra people from all the new friends from the program that I've gained, but since they've already gone through it, it doesn't hurt them at all.
So I'm going to try to do this in a manner that obfuscates the details while still being understandable. First, it turns out that life is easy when you've got your own subsistence taken care of right away, and when you are one of the few people who receive envelopes of cash. In the game, I ended up being a "Santa Claus" figure, or perhaps an eccentric billionaire philanthropist. I literally kept getting money and my primary goal for most of the game was to give it away. I don't know if there's really a lesson to be learned directly from the game in this experience, but it was fun.
An actual lesson was that what you see is probably not the full picture. The physical spaces we were given were intentionally chosen to set up our expectations in a very specific manner. There are lots of parallels about the role of privilege that are easy to make with education. I've been exposed to these ideas quite thoroughly because we have a focus on this at NSC. We understand that the structures of family support/expectations greatly impacts success at college. Everything is impacted, from the transition into college (children whose parents have been to college have a better understanding of what the college experience is and can help prime their children for it both intentionally and unintentionally) as well as persistence through the completion of college (parents that have gone to college tend to encourage their children to persevere when classes are tough while parents that have not gone to college show love and support by reminding their children that they are welcome to come home and won't be seen as a failure if they do so).
Another lesson is the importance of listening to those in need rather than imposing support structures on them. A lot of the ways that red was treated could be seen as insulting and patronizing, despite the best of intentions. I found it to be an interesting parallel to the Oaxaca Science center, as we're only doing it because we were asked to do it, not because we had some brilliant idea that we sold them on. We would have had almost no chance of success if we were coming to the table as the ones who knew how to help them improve their educational system. Instead, we're finding that we have a very high level of support from and cooperation with the town leadership, including their own willingness to fund the renovation of the building to suit what we've got planned for them.
On the last day, we were put into small groups to get much more personal about our lives. I'm amazed at the level of honesty that came through during that time, and the stories that the people in my group shared. I ran into that place again where the stories of the people around me were just so different from mine. Everyone else in my group have had some very difficult struggles in their life that they have overcome or were in the process of overcoming, and I sit pretty comfortably in my own personal and professional life. I remember having a similar type of experience when I was graduating from UCSB. Towards the end of the year, the small group Bible study I was doing some closure activities and talking about the future. Everyone else in the group was feeling nervous about the future. Some of them didn't have a job lined up yet and were thinking about their student loan debt, while others were just feeling the tension of stepping out of the shelter of school and into the unknown. However, I already knew I was accepted into graduate school at UCSD and had a financial aid package lined up that was going to pay for the whole thing. But at that time, I think I wasn't nearly as comfortable with myself, and I felt awkward and a little bad about my success.
I mentioned the eccentric billionaire philanthropist role in the simulation game earlier, and I think there's an interesting parallel in the perspective I've developed from my experiences with this sort of thing. One of the things that was prayed for me in that small group was that whatever success I was having and would have in the future would help to stabilize others. (Maybe not in those exact words, but something like it.) The idea was simply to remember that my own success was not to be the lasting outcome, but that in whatever ways I could that I should take my successes and try to turn it outwards to bring others to a place of success. And that's something I've tried to do, and will continue to try to do.
My schedule is going to fill up a lot more than I had anticipated with LLV events. I suspect that I'm going to have much less free time in the coming year than I thought, and my work may end up shuffling around to start to include going in on Saturday or Sunday sometimes to get stuff done (because I'm really bad at working at home). But I think I'm okay with that as long as I still find the times and places to rest and reflect.
I've now got to transition out of the "Summer Camp" feeling and prepare myself for something that resembles real life. I've got a pile of grading that I had intended to do this evening (I got through some, but not as much as I had wanted) and a whole batch of emails to get caught up on. I went to the Greek Food Festival this afternoon and hung out with a couple different batches of friends, which left me a little more tired than I was expecting to be, which also didn't help me get through the work. So I might have a late work night tomorrow.
For my Thursday classes, I gave my students a couple online assignments, including reading and responding to Francis Su's "The Lesson of Grace in Teaching." I'm quite pleased with the responses from the students, and might try to make this a regular feature in my classes. I'm surprised at the diverse collection of things that resonated with them. Some appreciate how he did not let his faculty advisor hold him back, while others feel the more abstract idea of separating their worth from their grades.
My CS 135 course is going well. There's one student that's really struggling, but the others are coming along pretty well. I suspect that my speed is slightly faster than where it "should" be, but they're having fun programming and that's the thing that counts for now. I still need to come up with some more project-based learning for them to do.
I'm supposed to hang out with the new worship leader from church later this week. He's just starting and wants to begin the process of building up the relationships between himself and those he's leading, and I'm happy to oblige. I'm going to be falling into an every-other-week schedule pretty soon, which is another thing I've got to watch on my schedule.
I should really stop here. I'm sure there's some other stuff that's happened in the last couple weeks, but the big thing has definitely been LLV. I'm really excited to see how this is going to play out.
