Author: Matthew

philosopher, iconoclast, technoboy, musician, conjuration battle-mage, dean

LA AMP planning framework

This Friday, we meet for a wide-ranging discussion of our vision of our future as an AoS, which we want to capture in our Academic Master Plan. I propose this framework as a resource for facilitating and organizing our discussion around four major areas, drawn from the student “life-cycle.” Students engage in education, not in a vacuum, but with areas of strength and needs, with unique contexts and histories, and with aptitudes and interests. The come with ideas about what they want to learn and why, which means there is an inherent intentionality to their pathway, whether or not they can articulate what that trajectory is or what it involves. Each of these areas suggests possibilities for enhancement, ways we can prepare ourselves to serve them on that trajectory — including helping them develop self-reflection on the pathway itself.

This discussion framework identifies three foundational factors in the student experience plus the student’s  aspirations for the future — which is each student’s purpose for coming to ACC in the first place.

  • The term liberal arts is inherently aspiration-focused, as these studies were originally conceived as equipping people for lives of autonomy,  community engagement, and self-determination. It’s appropriate, then, to talk about the liberal arts as foundational for thriving in a genuinely pluralistic society.
  • The tetrahedron represents the pathway from present realities to student aspirations. It’s four vertices represent four main areas for self-reflection and goals for enhancement; in short, these are four major areas for organizing our AMP discussion and visioning. The four areas are:
    • Support: leveraging student assets and addressing needs
    • Study: the “content” of the student’s path toward mastery
    • Situation: the context that forms the student’s support network
    • Aspirations: the ends-in-view of the student’s engagement in education
  • Obviously, the division of these four areas is arbitrary, as they are actually inextricably bound together in the student experience. (To give an obvious example, a student’s situation in terms of culture, family, faith, etc., has a direct effect on their formation and understanding of their own aspirations. To serve them, we must respect their autonomy, even as we help them in the transformative process of education.)
  • For each of these four, I have taken a stab at some prompts for generating discussion, leading to specific goals, indicated in the slides.

Join the discussion of the future of the liberal arts at ACC! Talk to your colleagues and send your ideas. You are welcome to comment here, email your department chair, or be in touch with me.

Free opera tickets!

First, in case you haven’t heard about Excursions, let me catch you up. Each semester the LA Gateway hosts events that are the opposite of extracurricular: These are events designed to move students from the study of liberal arts in their classes into a larger world where liberal arts forms the foundation for intellectual and creative work.
This spring, the theme for our Excursions series is “Art and Adaptation,” using James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw, as a case study. Here’s the announcement on our Gateway site:
We’re encouraging Gateway faculty and students to read James’s novella and experience two additional works of art inspired by that “original,” a film and an opera. Our first Excursion experience is coming soon, at the end of February. The opera workshop of the Butler School of Music is performing Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera, The Turn of the Screw, and I have 20 free tickets, courtesy of the Butler School of Music, for our Gateway students, for the performance Thursday, February 27, 7:30 to 9:45 PM. The performance will be in the McCullough Theater on the UT Campus. (There are two other performances; see the Butler School of Music announcement for details.)
I will be holding a drawing for these 20 free tickets on Monday, February 17. If you have students who are interested in one of the free tickets, please have them email excursion@gateway.acclahc.org on their ACC student email account and include the following information:
Subject heading: Britten Opera Excursion
Student’s name
LA Gateway course
Phone number
Entries must be received no later than Monday, February 17 at 12:00 noon.
I will notify students of the ticket winners the evening of Monday, Feb 17. Students must confirm with me within 48 hours that they are able to attend the performance. I will continue to draw names from the entries if students do not confirm, until there are no more tickets.
Thank you for supporting the LA Gateway!

Announcing: Spring 2020 Excursion

Collier’s Weekly, illustration by John La Farge – Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

Join us for an exploration of the ways in which a work of art in one genre can inspire a work of art in another genre. In this spring’s series of LA Gateway events, Henry James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw serves as a case study, as we examine the relationship between the “original” and its “adaptation” into two “new” works of art, the 1961 film, The Innocents, and Benjamin Britten’s 1954 chamber opera, The Turn of the Screw. Are these “new” works of art imitations? Adaptations? Or might it be appropriate to call them translations? Join the discussion!

We invite you to read James’s novella, which is easily available (here at Gutenerg, for instance) and join one of our discussion panels. We also encourage you to see Britten’s opera, which will be in production by the Butler School of Music opera workshop Feb 27 through Mar 1 at UT’s McCullough Theater. And stay tuned for the movie, which we will show in April — followed by a discussion led by a film historian.

Dates and places to follow!

Prime Celebration

Today is 1/27, one of my favorite days of the year. In the number theory game I’ve been playing with dates since my junior high school days, today is the only Mersenne prime day of the year.

First, my game.

  • Step 1: Generate a number by writing the digits of the month and day as “mmdd.” Today, for instance, is 0127 or 127.
  • Step 2: Investigate the properties of the number you got from step 1 and celebrate. For instance, 127 is a prime number. Sometimes you get other interesting characteristics — as I recently pointed out about my birthday, 108.

Now, what is there to celebrate about 127?

Let’s start with Mersenne’s prime theorem. If a prime number can be represented as a Mersenne number, then the power of 2 that generates that number must be prime. Mersenne numbers have the form

2^p - 1

For instance, 15 is a Mersenne number because it can be expressed as

2^4 - 1 = 15

Obviously, 15 is not prime (among other things, it’s divisible by 3, as my birthday post revealed), but many Mersenne numbers are — like 7:

2^3 - 1 = 7

Now here’s the theorem: if a Mersenne number is prime, then the power to which 2 is raised must be prime. Since we’re looking at 7, notice that the power, 3, is also prime. Very cool.

(And it’s convenient, too, because we can use this theorem to narrow the field of prime candidates. I like looking for primes among large Mersenne numbers, with a little help from Python. In fact, I’m slowly compiling triple-Mersenne primes. These are Mersenne primes whose power is a Mersenne prime whose power is also a Mersenne prime. You can’t get entertainment like that on TV.)

That brings us to 127, which is

2^7 -1 = 127

127 is prime, and 7 is prime. But 127 is the only Mersenne prime that corresponds to a day in the year, according to my game. Why?

The next lower candidate for a Mersenne prime would use the power 5 (Why?), so we have

2^5 - 1 = 31

31 is not a well-formed day-number according to the rules of my game. (I’m fine with dropping leading 0s, but not interspersing 0s willy-nilly to get an arbitrary result—that offends my basic sense of order and fair play). All the smaller Mersenne primes, therefore, won’t qualify for my game.

What about larger Mersenne primes? The next candidate uses 11 (Why?), but let’s see:

2^11 - 1 = 2047

Two problems: 2047 is not prime. (It’s 23 * 89, in fact.) And even so, there’s no 20th month. (By the way, this also shows that not all primes are Mersenne primes — not even close!)

Yes, 127 is the only Mersenne prime day of the year — but there’s more!

127’s power is 7, which is a Mersenne prime, as we say above. But 7’s power is 3, which is also a Mersenne prime!

2^2 - 1 = 3

So, 127 is a triple-Mersenne prime. See if you can parse this lovely relation:

 2^(2^(2^2 - 1) - 1) - 1

The expression in the innermost parentheses generates 3, the expression in the next pair generates 7, and the whole expression makes 127.

There you have it. 127 is not just the only Mersenne prime day of the year, it’s also a triple-Mersenne prime.

That’s cause for prime celebration.

Bats to Bevos!

Hey, Riverbats! How about becoming a Bevo? UT’s College of Education may be just the magic you need!

Join us Thursday, January 30, 4:00 to 8:00 PM, for a recruitment fair at the Highland Campus, building 4000 Courtyard. Meet department reps, hear from UT Ed students, get admission info, find out how to transfer seamlessly to the C of Ed—everything you need to know about becoming a Bevo!

Spread the word. Tell your friends and fellow Riverbats!

Planning to come? Let us know on Facebook.

What is the Liberal Arts Gateway?

Now that LA Gateway-designated courses are appearing in the course schedule, people are asking: What is the LA Gateway? Here’s the philosophical framework, distilled.

The Liberal Arts Gateway

Aspiration

The Liberal Arts can save civilization by equipping students to thrive in a pluralistic society through deep engagement in our disciplines.

Guiding Values

  • Student centered course designs
  • Equity and inclusion build into all facets of the course, from recruitment to materials and assignments and beyond
  • Responsiveness to downpath stakeholders: What needs will our students face in next course, the degree plan, transfer institution/employer, career, family, community, and ultimately, The Good Life? Have those needs in mind when you build your course.


Five P’s of Intellectual Character 

Build opportunities to practice these verbs into your course, talk about them explicitly, and model them every class period.

  • Persevere: Don’t give up — in this assignment, in this course, in a conversation, in a line of inquiry, in the pursuit of truth, or in the work of saving civilization.
  • Progress: Learn how to gauge progress for yourself — benchmarks, indicators, self-reflection, honesty (with yourself, above all). We stand on the shoulders of giants, but give yourself credit for climbing up there to have a look.
  • Produce meaningful intellectual work — and challenge yourself to do better work every next time.
  • Promote the fruits of your work to others — both as a courageous attempt to say something true and as an invitation to hear others critique your work.
  • Perpetuate these traits, deepen them into habits of mind, and expand them to encompass more and more of your intellectual life.

A few course design suggestions

  • Talk to your colleagues! This philosophical framework keeps us focused on student needs and the student experience, but saving civilization requires encountering the disciplinarity of our disciplines.
  • Organize your course around a theme and meaningful questions
  • Explicitly talk about a toolkit for your discipline
  • Use (real) case studies
  • Include at least one self-reflective assignment (a moment for students to step back and take stock of the transformative experience in your course)

 

Three’s Company

The Apostrophe is English’s most duplicitous punctuation. Does this title mean “three is company” or the company three keeps?

I can look at just about any number and tell you, almost immediately, if it’s divisible by three. How do I do it? It’s not superior brute-force calculation. It’s a number theory trick.

Just add all the digits of the number. If the result is divisible by three, then the number you started with is, too. For instance, the forbidding number 67,392 is divisible by three, because 6 + 7 + 3 + 9 + 2 is 27, which is divisible by three. My ACC office telephone number, 512.223.2630, considered as a number, is not. (But my number without the area code is. Try it for yourself.)

Now we come to the curiosities aspect of this post: Why does this work? Or more importantly, why doesn’t it work for any other number, like 7? It’s easy to show that it doesn’t work for 7: Consider 49, or 63. Both divisible by 7, but the sum of their digits isn’t, so it doesn’t

Here’s one way to explain the magic of 3. Think about any number in base 10. It’s laid out like this: a,bcd, which means:

(a * 1000) + (b * 100) + (c * 10) + d

This is the cornerstone of the decimal system, in which “places” represent powers of 10. But you can also write the number above like this:

a * (999 + 1) + b * (99 +1) + c * (9 + 1) + d

which amounts to this:

(999a + a) + (99b + b) + (9c + c) + d

Now think about this. If 999 is divisible by 3, then 999 times a is too. Same with 99b and 9c. The sum of numbers divisible by 3 is divisible by three (Why?), so 999a + 99b + 9c is divisible by 3. What’s left of our original number? Just this:

a + b + c + d

So if this sum is divisible by 3, then the whole number we started with is divisible by 3. That worked for the number a,bcd, but with a little mathematical induction, we can make it work for every number.

And I’m actually even lazier than summing. When I’m looking for divisibility by 3, I ignore all the digits that are divisible by three, and sum the rest. Consider my phone number again: 512.223.2630: Ignore the 3’s and 6’s and add up the rest: 14. Not.

This consummate laziness is brought to us by number theory: The sum of numbers divisible by 3 is also divisible by 3, so we actually don’t need to know exactly what that sum is to know whether it’s divisible by 3. But I don’t like to think of this as laziness. I call it the Principle of Least Effort, and accomplishing things with the least effort was Nature’s intent when she gave us this big brain.

All of which is to say that any number is divisible by 3 if and only if the sum of its digits is divisible by 3. QED.

While we’re here, what does QED mean? We use it to indicate that a proof or argument ended successfully. It’s an acronym based on the Latin phrase, quod erat demonstrandum, which means “what was to be demonstrated.” This phrase caught on just at the end of the Renaissance and was popularized by people like Galileo and Spinoza.

But this all started with Greek mathematicians and philosophers like Euclid and Archimedes, who were studied by people who wrote in Latin a lot. They wrote the Greek phrase ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι at the end of a chain of reasoning. There’s a slight difference in meaning, though, because a reasonable (but stilted) translation of the Greek phrase is “the thing it was needed to prove.”

QED. Or if you prefer, ΟΕΔ.

Birthday greetings

Today is January 8, my birthday. While it’s customary to receive birthday greetings, this year I’m sending you a greeting. Indulge me.

Those of you who know that I’m a closet number theorist won’t be surprised at the observation that the number 108, the month and day of my birth, is the product of the first two primes each raised to the power of itself:

108 = 2^2*3^3

The fact that the fifth-grade me was enchanted by this discovery should tell you something about me. I’m still enchanted by the secret lives of numbers, by the way.

A birthday can be a moment of reflection, a sort of “state of life” self-assessment. I’m not one to waste heartbeats on regrets — there’s far too much to be done! — but I don’t mind investing a few heartbeats in gratitude.

I’m grateful for the many, many people who have made my life richer by sharing their excellences with me, and I’m grateful for all the people I don’t know who nevertheless enrich our lives through their work and inspiration and dreams. And failures. In my best moments, I cherish failure as a trusted friend — the kind who loves you enough not to lie.

I’m especially grateful for all the people who disagreed with me in matters large and small. I’ve grown far more with you in my life than I would have without you. You encouraged me to take a larger view and helped me see the smallness in my own perspective. Idolatry isn’t pretty, no matter where you find it (or how comfortable it may seem).

Nature distributes her gifts unevenly, and I am grateful for the gift of a temperament that is too naive to be afraid to try new things. As an early teen, Heinlein introduced me to Lazarus Long, who taught me that specialization is for insects — a sentiment that would make me an appropriate epitaph. Lazarus also taught me that one lifetime is not nearly enough. Later, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra would teach me that if one lifetime is enough, then there’s no one to blame but myself.

I’m grateful for the privilege of serving ACC as a philosopher, trouble-maker, department chair, dean of humanities and communications, and defender of the liberal arts. I’m grateful for the meandering path that led me to this point — even when I felt lost, and especially when I was lost. I feel a little like Odysseus — but not nearly as sad about being far from home.

Collaborate and Celebrate

Today is a day to celebrate for our Communication Studies department! As a result of efforts to integrate SPCH1315 with workforce program requirements, we have a “combined” course so students can take either SPCH1315 or COMG1009.

Even better, we just registered our very first workforce student!

This is a great example of the way we can serve student pathways when we think outside the academic box.

Thanks to Theresa and the CommS gang!