Beauty

It's Wednesday morning, and usually I would be spending the day with Jessica and the kids. Today, I'm on campus to attend a discussion group in the psychology department. I met a professor there and he's invited me to participate in their monthly discussion groups. This month I'm interested in attending since the paper to be discussed is on prevention research and how it gets used in the field. I'm hoping to get some ideas from the discussion on how I can think about the Summer Institute as well as my proposed research guidebook for mentoring professionals. I''ll stay home tomorrow, to be able to go see Celia at her soccer lesson in the morning and then take some phone calls from home.

I've really been enjoying my statistics class lately, and have even started to look forward to doing homework problems. I'm also trying to use the homework as a way to teach myself R, an open-source statistics program. All this statistics has brought back many of the fond feelings I had for math growing up. I was a bit of a math-head in my primary school years. At first, I loved the sense of accomplishment from solving a math problem. Having a final answer to a problem brought happiness and relief. Maybe it was an illusion, but I liked the promise certainty that working math problems held. Later, as I continued in math in high school, I began to love the beauty of math. I found logical proofs stunning in their completeness and geometry beautiful in its clarity. Surely the world is a complicated place, but math has a way of boiling it down to a more perfect whole.

I started to regain this sense of beauty as I learned about the central limit theorem. When we first starting discussing the normal distribution in statistics, it was a pretty picture, but I really didn't believe that anything in the world fell into the classical "bell curve" type picture. But then we learned that when you take a random sample of a population, and your sample is big enough, you always have a normal distribution of the sample mean. Wow. Suddenly this beautiful curve had real meaning. Suddenly the randomness of the world could be tamed with this elegant mound. Now that's something to be excited about. Maybe it's the very complexity of the world that makes such elegance appealing. Maybe that's what we are all looking for in this world - something we can hold onto that's fixed, immutable, predicable, real.

It feels good to get back to my mathematical roots. It kind of feels like finding an old self. I was well on my way to majoring in Math in college when suddenly I stopped enjoying it during my freshman year. My Differential Equations II class seemed to be all about weeding out the weak. I wanted to find beauty and instead I found competition and the desire to succeed in math to advance in the world. So I dropped Math and went to find beauty in English and History. And I really haven't used my math skills ever since. Who knows what finding this old lost self will bring to my life.

I've also continued to read whatever I can, and have lately picked up an introductory manual to qualitative research, by Corbin and Strauss, The Basics of Qualitative Research. I'm hoping this will give me enough of a background to start looking at the qualitative data gathered under the Summer Institute.

Last night I also finished Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. I highly recommend it, especially to my friends in teaching and academics. I'm not sure I believe all of Gladwell's arguments, but he provides some interesting food for thought to think about how success happens in this world. I especially liked the way he ended the book with a call to action. The world doesn't have to be this way, and maybe with a few changes, we can open up a lot of opportunity to more children around the world.

Lastly, on the food scene, I've discovered that many of Portland's good restaurants do a happy hour with reasonable priced small plates. So I stumbled into Ten-01 last night before my evening class and had some delectable cauliflower gratin and a chorizo burger with pickled shallots, provolone, and spicy red sauce. I've also found a decent coffee place near my office, called Katie's Cafe. The use Illy coffee, which always seems to make for a quality cup. And now that there's some evidence that coffee prevents dementia, I have even more justification for my caffeinated quest for excellence.