Polymathematics

Some Scattered Thoughts

I know I haven't posted in a while.  I haven't had much interesting to post about.  But there have been enough little things that I guess I'll post them now.

1. For one, shame on the math-blog-o-sphere for not rushing to my aid over my pi problem from my previous post.  I'm still looking for any convincing arguement one way or the other.  The future of pi is at stake here, folks, I expect a little bit more thought.  Which is my way of saying...I'm not smart enough to figure out the answer myself.
2. A guy came to speak at my school about politics in my state.  He wasn't the greatest or most coherent speaker, but he made some good points.  One of them was the distinction between 'technical' and 'adaptive' as adjectives to describe problems and solutions.  I don't remember the source he cited as the origin of these terms.  In the medical world, a technical problem is something like "you have a bacterial infection", and it requires a technical solution like "take these antibiotics".  An adaptive problem is more like "you're in very bad shape", and it requires an adaptive solution like "change your outlook on food and exercise".  In politics, he says, legislatures are very good at coming up with technical solutions to technical problems.  People are dying from car accidents?  Require seat belts and air bags.  That works, demonstrably.  But they also offer technical solutions to adaptive problems like race relations or energy consumption.  These require solutions like "learn to see structural racism instead of merely individual racism" and "give up your idea of the ideal house so you can live closer to work".  He cited Lyndon Johnson's approach to the civil rights movement (don't act impulsively, let the country internalize how awful the status quo is via watching Black people get beaten up for sitting at a lunch counter) as a good example of an adaptive solution.  We have to find a way to make the entire country have more of a stake in racism.  This is essentially what Ampersand says in this blog post (on a blog I've been spending rather a lot of time reading).
3. I'm not looking forward to grading for hours this weekend, but I do suspect that these tests went well.  I've found myself thinking more and more that it's good to trade speed for depth of understanding in my classes.  That is, I'd rather go slow and have the top kids understand the very minute subtleties and the middle kids really get the basics.  I find it makes things much easier when we get to more advanced topics, although it means we may not get to as many.  Maybe I'm just getting soft in my old (hah!) age.
4. It now looks like it will be a good 6 months longer than we thought before we can go to China to pick up the baby we have been in the process of adopting for about a year now.  October or November of next year seems most probably.  My wife is not good at waiting.  I tend to take life one day at a time more than she does, so the wait doesn't seem as daunting for me.  But I've been regretting my undauntedness because it makes me seem callous to my wife's difficulty with the wait.  I don't doubt that my reaction appears cool and uncaring to her, even when I'm caring for her.  I guess this is exactly the kind of manner in which life stresses cause marital stresses.  Our marriage is thankfully strong enough to handle this, but I could easily see how poorer communication in a relationship could cause it to be torn apart for much smaller reasons.
5. Oh, and being sick really sucks.  Could someone please get rid of this cough for me?

A Different World

"A Different World" was the spin-off of "The Cosby Show" where one of the Cosby kids went to college.  The Different World in question was, I guess, two-fold:  living on his own, and being a Black man in the world instead of a Black kid in a familiar neighborhood.  But even that world is not as different as the world of Black kids in urban neighborhoods.

Yesterday and today (and several other times in the past few weeks), I took part in a program that my martial arts school is involved with.  We hold a weekly class for teenagers who have been convicted of drug-related offenses, but not violent offenses.  These kids are free in the sense that they are not confined, but their daily lives are scheduled to the minute, and there are always people keeping track of where they are.  And a few of them take our martial arts class for an hour a week.  For the most part, these are teenagers that are about 2 or 3 lucky breaks away from just being normal, trying-to-make-a-decent-life teenagers.  But because kids in those neighborhoods rarely get breaks, they were caught and sentenced to this program.  It's a triage principle, I guess.  The worst gang-bangers are just locked up.  The law abiding kids are left to fend for themselves.  These kids in the middle get a lot of attention so they won't end up in the first group.  All of the boys in the program are Black.  The girls are of several races*.

Only 5 of the boys stuck with the program for long enough to get to their first promotion test, which was today.  I've been helping teach them for a few weeks (since I have so much more time in the summer).  We practiced with them one last time yesterday.  While I was changing into my uniform in a different room, a large group of these kids was left alone for a while.  By the time I got back, it had degenerated into mass chaos.  They were immensely loud, and 2 pairs of kids were fighting;  they weren't angry, just playing--but the swings were real and could have seriously hurt someone if they had been good enough to actually connect.  I compare this to the Commons at my school where kids are regularly left alone.  Sure, they can get rowdy and there can be some play wrestling.  But nothing like the chaos I saw when I got back.  Society pushes all kids into non-kid behavior...that's the purpose of society, of course.  But a White-dominated society pushes these Black kids so hard that when they let loose, the outbreak is much more extreme.  It was not hard to see how, in a prison, this could turn into a riot.

Of course the 5 boys who tested did very well.  One of them, I'll call him Greg, is a big kid...maybe 5'11" and 260 lbs.  But he learned quickly that brute force doesn't work as well in martial arts as good technique, and when I thanked him for helping put away our mats, he said "no, thank you for coming out here."  None of the other kids had the guts and decency to thank us.  I will go to help out with that program whenever I can this summer, and Greg will probably still be in it by September.  I'll probably never find out what happens to him in the long run.  He's a really sweet guy, and I hope his guts and decency will bring him back from the brink.

Teaching those kids martial arts (even just an hour a week) is so drastically different from the teaching I do every day.  I don't think I could teach them math knowing the kind of apathy that's so prevalent in the classrooms in the city.  I like math, and I can overcome kids' math anxiety, but I have much more trouble with apathy.

Yeah, it's a different world.  But really, of course, it's not a different world.  I can drive there in less than half an hour.  So many White people live in fear of individual Black people they meet, and so many Black people live in fear of the overwhelming mass of White people who don't understand their frustrations.  We're both afraid of each other, and yet it's so easy to find a place (the martial arts mats, for instance) where race really just makes no difference at all.  At a recent weekend seminar for our martial art (drawing about 70 people from around the country--even a few from Japan and Israel--who study our branch of it) I was almost finished with it before I realized that this was really one place where nobody cared at all about race.  My roommate was Black, the instructors were Chinese-American, Japanese-American, White, Filipino, Latino.  I don't think this is just me failing to see racism because I don't want it;  I've been trained to see racism.  All it took was to take the focus off of race and put it onto something we all had in common.  It seems so easy.  But it's not easy.

Sad and encouraging at the same time.  A different world, yet not a different world.  Doesn't exactly follow the logic of math.

*I use the word "race" in its socially defined sense.  Genetically, there is more variability within a "race" than there is between "races".  So the word doesn't really describe any biological reality.  But it certainly describes a social reality.

Another part of Poly

So, the reason I named my site "Polymathematics" is that the things I do (my life, my hobbies, my politics) are so varied that I wanted to see all (or most of) the parts of it in one place.  I'm still not sure if it will work.  But here's another part of my polylife...a big one.

In about April or May of next year, my wife and I will be adopting a baby from China.  Let's get some common questions out of the way first:

1. So you're at the end of your fertility treatment options?  No, actually, we haven't tried conceiving;  adoption is our first choice.  Neither my wife nor I have any serious emotional attachment to passing our actual DNA to a new generation--my life is my loves, views, desires, interests, etc.  I can pass those on sans DNA.
2. Do you know if it will be a boy or a girl?  Due to the political situation in China, our baby will almost surely be a girl.  Chinese culture and law are asymmetrical in how they treat boy and girl children--girls are fine, but boys (supposedly) take care of you when you're old.  If the Chinese government says you can only have one (or two if you live in a rural area and your first one is a girl), you might have to give up a girl so you can have a boy for your old age.  Sad, but true.
3. Do you know how old she'll be?  Probably 9-12 months, no younger than 6 months, possibly as old as 2.
4. Why aren't you adopting an American kid who needs a home?  (Smart-ass answer for a lot of people:  Why aren't you?)  Real answer:  We (mostly my wife, to be honest) did the research, and this choice works for us.  And we kinda resent the implied rebuke in the question.  So please just accept our decision.

We're currently awaiting our final document from the U.S. government, which could arrive any day now.  We will "be DTC" (Dossier To China) by mid-August.

Amazingly, in the middle of writing that very sentence, my wife informed me that the document came in the mail!!!

So in addition to all the normal preparing-for-a-baby stuff (which we're doing a bunch of over the summer because it's less busy than during the school year), we've been talking a lot about where we want to live when she starts school, since the school systems around here are enormously varied.  Which brings up one of the central issues of this adoption:  Our child will be of a different race than us.  We are Caucasian, she will be Asian.

What's it like growing up Asian in America?  Well, I have Asian students and acquaintances and friends (although not especially close friends).  I've done some reading about growing up as an Asian adoptee.  I've spent time learning about how racism works.  I can't know for sure what it's like, but here's what I know:  Asian-Americans experience race very differently from African-Americans.  The stereotypes are not as blatantly negative, but they are at least as strong.

• Asian kids do well at school.
• Asian kids work really hard.
• Asians are non-confrontational.
• Asian families are male-dominated.
• Asian culture is "exotic".
• Asian women are highly sexualized, but submissive.
• Asian straight men are asexual.
• Asian gay men are very sexual.
• Chinese people are sneaky, inscrutable.

There are lots of them.  And they hurt.  Teachers might be less likely to help a struggling Asian student if they think it can't be a serious problem.  Standing up for beliefs might be more likely to be punished if it is viewed as unnatural.  Will our daughter ever be sure that romantic interest in her isn't a fetish?  And since many of these stereotypes contribute to the "model minority" image, the pressure on kids to conform to the stereotypes is huge (if you could be pretty sure that certain non-academic behaviors would cause people to look at you as brilliant and hard-working, wouldn't you behave that way?).

So....what does that mean for our daughter?  Should we find a school that has enough Asian kids to make her feel more at ease?  If many of the non-Asians are Black, would that help her learn to cope better with racism?  What about the reported anti-Asian sentiment in the Black communtity.  Is that a stereotype, too?  What if it's not?

I know, I know.  All you Asians and African-Americans and Latino/as reading this are thinking "welcome to my world, Mr. Oblivious White Guy."  Having been a teacher for a while now, I hope I'm more sensitive to the insidious effects of racism than most Oblivious White Guys.  And I'm painfully (and guiltily) aware of my White privilege--in particular, the fact that Whiteness is basically neutral in American culture.  My wife said it well when she pointed out that having an instant interracial family will force us to shed this racial neutrality.  Of course it would be good for a lot of people to be forced to do this.  Probably good for me, too.

I don't have answers.  You know how some people think that math is hard?  I'm sure it is for some people who's minds don't think of it in the right way.  But I think race is hard.  That's because America doesn't think of it in the right way.

Welcome to America, daughter.  We love you.  I'm afraid that won't always be enough.