Peers

One of the things that's most interesting about grad school is all the people who are in it. It's like taking the one or two really motivated high achieving students in each class and putting them all together. Pretty much everyone has something pertinent to add to the conversation and most people understand the readings quite well. However, I find myself thinking that some of them don't belong there, that some just aren't as competent as the others. Of course, that must be the case, but then I started thinking about who it was that I felt wasn't as competent. It seems like it's mostly the other MACSME students, and more specifically the math ones. Admittedly, those are the ones I spend the most time with, so I'd have more opportunity to see flaws. I don't see too much of the science MACSMEs, but I get that vibe from some of them too. Maybe I'd get it more if I had to see more of them.

Now maybe it just looks like the MACSMEs bs more because I'm comparing them to PhD candidates, but I'm starting to wonder if it might be because of my competitive streak. It's never quite manifested like this before, but I shouldn't rule it out. I just don't respect some of them, sometimes to the point of active dislike. For instance, there's one person, Patrick, who never has anything of note to say. I find myself wondering how he got into the program. He's ridiculously boring. It's impossible to get anything remotely interesting out of him when he speaks. I drove in the same car with him for over an hour when we went to the retreat, and we didn't get past small talk. It was really boring small talk at that. When he talks about important things, he just doesn't have anything interesting to say. As we were leaving the retreat, he asked me what I thought and we started discussing what to do in a situation Dan mentioned where one black student says to another black student "Quit acting white" when he answered a question correctly. He didn't know what he would do. I said I'd stop the whole class and discuss it right then and there. In a worst case scenario, I'd gain a little more understanding of the situation and wouldn't stop the class like that again, but that's a situation I don't understand as well as my students might, so I'd just stop all math instruction and start talking about it. I'd butt in whenever I thought I could add in my two cents about how wrong it is to associate success with whiteness. I said that taking 10 or 15 minutes to talk about that was more important than covering my entire lesson plan for the day. From reading his journal, last week he experienced a situation where one of the kids said "that's gay" and it bothered him. Here's a direct quote "I would have told the student not to make those types of comments in my classroom because they were homophobic in nature. If the student questioned the context behind why I banned such language I don’t believe I would have a problem holding a five or ten minute discussion about how hate surfaces in a variety of ways, including our daily language. I know that I would probably fall behind in terms of my agenda, but I prioritize the safety of my classroom over the material that I’m going to cover that day."

It's a less effective, more pretentious version of what I said. Is the imitation flattering me, or just pissing me off? You guess.

What a waste of space. He says nothing interesting in discussion. He just sits there most of the time. He barely even shows emotion. It wouldn't be so bad if it just looked like he felt something. He just looks bored most of the time, but in truth, he mostly just bores me. How am I in the same program as this guy? What sort of an application did he have to have to hide his inherent dullness?

So that's one of the math MACSMEs. Another one (Michael) seems like a pretty nice guy. He's interesting and I have decent conversations with him, but he seems kinda slow. I suppose no one in the program is really slow, but things just seems to take him a while. He mentioned how hard a recent paper was for him and how he hadn't written anything since high school. That's a little weird that he never needed to write anything in college, but I suppose it could happen. So you'd think from that statement that he'd be really good at math, right? I mean, if he wasn't writing and he's in the math program, he was probably doing math. But he's not that good at math. Maybe he's just forgotten a lot, but he doesn't know that many really simple things. For instance, he forgot that a problem could be easily solved by knowing that the ratios of sides on similar triangles are preserved. He forgot about similar triangles in general. He also forgot how to make a perpendicular bisector of a line. Honestly, it understandable that you might forget that. I forgot it too. But I derived it in less than a minute. The concept isn't that hard. He's doing his research project on sudoku, and he bought this book that goes into the math behind sudoku. He was talking about how it applies group theory and such to the solutions of a sudoku. Ok. It's lovely that some mathematician got really excited about sudoku and decided to apply it to his life, but that's bullshit. I can't say for sure since I haven't read it, but I can't imagine how that would be helpful. Sudoku is trial and error. There are a few instances here and there where you need a little bit of logic, but overall, sudokus are pretty mindless. You can have some heuristics that guide where you search and make it a little less random, but overall it's a horribly tedious game. He was practically in awe of this book without even stopping to analyze it and he was doing research on sudoku without really understanding sudoku. He bought this book of really bad sudoku puzzles that will likely bias his data (or at least make the collection difficult) and he doesn't even realize it. The book has easy, medium, and hard rated sudokus that are supposedly better than your average sudoku because they were made by hand instead of by a computer (that way it is challenging throughout, instead of getting past one tricky part and it being smooth sailing from there). The easy problem he gave our research group was way harder than your average easy sudoku. I'd give it a 3 out of 5 in terms of difficulty. We did a hard one together the next day. Or really, he started it, got stuck, and I finished it. But anyway, the hard one was of almost comparable difficulty to me anyway. Let's just say I don't buy the hype of that little book.
In general, I find myself wondering about this guy's critical skills. Does he just accept everything without questioning it? He's a grad student now- he shouldn't be accepting everything at face value. Also, he should really learn his math inside and out if he wants to be a teacher. If you've forgotten a few of the basics, I guess that's ok. He could relearn them quickly enough, and there are plenty of teachers worse off than he is, so he's good by comparison at least. I guess I'm just a little surprised since I expected more of someone going to grad school at Berkeley. He seems often flustered. He tells me things he just discovered that I already realized weeks ago like they're super enlightening (ie "I started out by reading everything and that was very time consuming. Now I just skim." Yeah, dumbass. Thanks for the advice). The other day, he was talking about converting binary numbers to base 10. I don't remember the exact words, but the conversation went something like this: (he's talking to me and John, this ridiculously smart math undergrad that I took a ling class with a few years ago):
Him: Here's something really cool- changing the base of numbers really quickly. Do you know how to do that?
Me: Yeah.
Him: Oh. Really?
Me: Well, I know how to change the base of numbers? I guess I don't know how to do it quickly. (For once I was thinking he might have something valuable to contribute)
Him: (takes binary number) You take each digit and multiply it by 2 to a power.
Me: Yeah... (expectantly)
Him: And that's it.
Me: But that's true in any base, including base 10. It's just your ones plus your tens plus your hundreds, etc.
Then I started talking to John about how you would go from base 2 to base 5 without switching to base 10 in the middle. That's about where we lost Michael.

I don't mean to sound too harsh, but I just don't respect his intellect. I omitted a lot of him being really impressed with his change of base formula, which honestly just follows from a real, rich understanding of what a number is. It probably doesn't follow for someone who wasn't a math major, but it ought to have been relatively obvious upon a few moments thought for him. I think I learned the simple formula back in high school. It's not terribly fast as he was implying. Nor is it something to bring out to show off to other mathematicians (or mathematically minded folk). It's something you show off to someone who's never seen the stuff before, like high school kids, but it really wasn't the time for it. He probably saw a bunch of people excited about math and wanted to contribute, but he just isn't equipped to do so. He was excited by the math, so that will be really good when he's a teacher, but I feel like he's a few steps behind the rest of us all the time.

I should really cut him some slack though. I mean, he remembers things almost as soon as I tell him (or at least he says he does). And admittedly, I am really bratty sometimes, especially with respect to math. I guess it's just that in the math classes I took over the summer (specifically the upper div math class), I realized how brilliant some of the math majors at Cal are. I struggled to keep up with some of them, and I have no small opinion of my own intellect (arrogant, but not ill-deserved). I just can't imagine Michael staying afloat in that situation. He must have done his undergrad someplace less rigorous than Cal. There are some real geniuses here in our math department. I wonder how far he would have gone with math if he realized how middle of the pack he is. Though in all fairness, he's probably in like the 98th percentile. I'm just snobby because I've seen how good that 99th percentile is.

Sigh. I really need to get over myself and not be so mean to him just because I don't respect his intelligence. I don't hold most other people to that standard of math. I guess I just have a ridiculously high standard for people within my program. Some of the people meet it. Just not really the first years. Well, the other math first year seems pretty intelligent. Just not these two.

Oh well. I'd love to keep soliloquizing, but I'm starting to get really tired. The energy for further ranting is fading. I have to wake up in like 5 and a half hours. Wah.

Oh but before I go, I want to briefly revisit my initial concern. Why am I being so harsh on my peers? Does it make me feel like I'm in a less prestigious program than I thought MACSME was because the people in it are not super brilliant mathematicians? Is it me being threatened and thus getting defensive and competitive in an attempt to continue to stand out in an environment where the expectations are a lot higher? Or are they really just not that impressive? Are people applying to a masters program in general not the smartest tier of people (self selecting)? Sigh. I don't know. But I do know these people were supposed to be experts and they just aren't, at least not compared to some of the other people I've seen.