Rebecca Goldin

This is the best move for fighting crime. People won’t work with law enforcement to keep their neighborhoods safe if the consequence is they or someone they love might be deported.

Disability office: allowing students to do problem sets 3 days late w no penalty is a matter of *access*.
Me: if they come to class without doing hw, they will struggle more to learn new material. You’re harming students by suggesting it doesn’t harm them.
[1 hour 15 min of discussion]
DO: Oooooh

Isn’t there something deeply wrong with “immigration enforcement” that takes good people who have families and lives in this country and forces them out? The violence of current tactics includes ripping apart families. Even if it were done without bullets and without masks

Millions of Americans who get their news from FoxNews. They hear: armed thugs are stealing jewelry/stoking fear, far-leftists put Pretti in a risky spot w ICE to make him a martyr, and “outside” sources are paying protestors in Minneapolis to incite violence. Plus, Mamdani is making things more $$$

The dismantling of education as a public good allows for failure and abuse to be covered up, and narrow views to be the only views. No need for any negotiation or discussion on shared values. No basis for shared government. No basis for shared country.

Local journalism matters.

Oops- I meant “Glad my university is ensuring an equal education”

I now have students whose disability accommodation is that they can miss class “without penalty”. Glad my university is helping students ensure an equal education.

U.S.

If admissions to an engineering school were based only on the SAT math score, for example, and as a result far fewer women than men were accepted, then the school would be subject to scrutiny, especially if SATs PLUS grades were equally as predictive of success

My university’s new policy for what to do (if possible) when a student cheats: take a picture or video… then send it to yourself by email and remove it from your personal device. So we pay for the devices the univ wants us to use-and then erase evidence of having used- for university business.

Memo from HR today regarding expected storm tomorrow: in the case of inclement weather, you are required to carry out your work duties through telework, even if no telework agreement is in place.

… By the way, the hiring info session scheduled for tomorrow is canceled due to inclement weather.

Public universities don’t get much in tuition dollars, so there goes model 1 as well

To be clear: cutting #nsf funding by 2/3 will kill most PhD programs in science. What happens to American competitiveness when there are no new US-minted PhDs?

Police just arrested a freshman on GMU’s campus who called for the “death of Jewish people” & plotted to bomb the Israeli consulate in NYC, which he called “a goldmine of targets”. This follows last month’s home raid that uncovered automatic weapons and signs “death to Jews”.

I worked plenty hard for not-great grades and had several As for courses I didn’t work hard in (ie everyone just got an A). I think that when I worked hard I got a better grade than had I not, but there was possibly an anti-correlation (in math/physics courses). Not true in other subjects!

The only real justice is to fight for human dignity, which very obviously includes disabled people.

My kids shared that they would all clamor for Cool Math Games (online games with… minimal… math content) because the teachers totally believed the games were “educational”. lol they sure pulled one over on the teachers!

Math is most beautiful when something hard is obtained through a different, easier path. Today I showed students how to find a minimal polynomial with a specified root, without using Galois Theory. I got a bunch of “oh cool!”s which made my heart flutter.

That is a tough hill to climb! Maybe just shift by about 3-4 lectures to teach them, and cover less in your course? (Heck, if your goal is just to ensure they have “seen” them, one lecture is enough!) Lol there’s a lot to be said for mathematicians who can’t make it past Ch 2 of Hartshorne….

What’s the verbification of making a post on @bsky.app ? I used to love to tweet until the whole business was X’ed by that pasty guy. But blue skies are as pretty as birds, so what is the verb for what blue skies do?

Architectural*

Hello world! (1st post)

At a rest stop during long Thanksgiving drive, I waited in long line to use the bathroom- men’s room had no line. Men’s room could handle 4 pee-ers at a time while only 2 could go in the women’s. Why isn’t there an architecture standard of toilet equity if not time-equity?