I’m terrible at math. And by terrible, I mean that Albert Einstein could totally out-math me, and he’s been dead for fifty-five years*.

Several weeks ago, I was planning a dinner for myself, Leigh, and my mother. I wanted to make three 1/3 lb. burgers, and I found myself flummoxed at how to calculate the amount of ground beef I needed. I texted my friend Tank, and he replied with a single line of text: “Is this a trick?”

Last week, a student corrected me on my math in the middle of a lecture. I had asked the students to complete an exercise wherein they needed to find argumentative claims in a particular set of readings. I asked them to find three definitional claims, three causal claims, three resemblance claims, and three evaluation claims. As I was finishing up my lecture, I told them, “After you’ve found your nine claims,” and as soon as I said that, a student yelled out “Twelve. Three and three and three and three make twelve.”

I doubt I could identify a causal chain of events that would explain why I’m an utter math failure. It’s more realistic to say that there were probably many different variables in the equation that equals me being a math-dummy. Granted, I have had some truly atrocious math teachers. My first math class in high school was taught by a coach, and he obviously wished to be anywhere but in a room with a group of degenerates teaching math. He let us completely run wild. We would cheat on tests right in front of him, and he never said a word. Our classroom was on the second floor, and one day, while our “teacher” was in the room, we wrote “BITCH” in big, bold letters on a sheet of notebook paper, and then we tied that piece of notebook paper to a long string. We then lowered it down to the window of the classroom below us, so that the much reviled Spanish teacher would know exactly what we thought of her.

With the benefit of hindsight, combined with my experience of actually teaching, I feel pretty confident that my former teachers weren’t the whole problem. No, my biggest problem was that in grammar school, I was smart enough that I didn’t really need to work to make good grades. I got straight “A”s without ever having to open a book. Thus, I never actually learned the basics of mathematics because I never had to learn them.

And now I find myself asking for help on problems as simple as 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3.

As a young student, nothing bugged me quite as much as having a teacher tell me to “show your work.” I heard that all the time. Show your work. Show your work. I hated hearing that because I didn’t understand why I needed to go through the trouble of writing out every step in a long division problem if I already knew the answer. I always felt that “show your work” was just a way to keep the students busy or a way to combat against cheating.

This is a small digression, but one that I think is important. As an undergraduate at Baylor, I became highly active with the karate club, and my participation in the karate club remains one of the few fond memories I have of Baylor. It probably helps that I met my wife in the there, but also, the experiences I had with the club are still informing my outlook on life.

One of the many things that James Melton, my late karate instructor, taught me was that a student doesn’t ever truly understand a particular thing until he or she is able to teach that thing to another student. I might be able execute a particular move well, but until I can explain how I execute that move I probably don’t understand it as well as I could.

I ran up against this little pedagogical peccadillo when I began teaching writing. I found that while I knew what a grammatical sentence looked like, I didn’t know how to explain why it was grammatical. This is why that many ESL students perform quite well in grammar classes and why native speaking students will oftentimes perform poorly in them. An ESL student has probably learned English by memorizing grammatical/mechanical constructions and verb conjugation, while the native speaker just speaks without actually understanding how his or her language actually works.

Now, as a math student, I either wasn’t taught why I needed to show my work, or I never understood the principle. Students don’t need to show their work to prove they haven’t been cheating, although that is certainly a valid, if not Big Brothery, reason. No, the students need to be able to show their work so that they understand the material. A student will never truly know something until they’re able to successfully teach that thing to another person, and having students show their work provides them with a way to “teach” the material without having to actually talk to another person.

*In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m willing to admit that I had to use the calculator to subtract 1955 from 2010.

Teaching is an interesting profession. Some days are really boring. After so many years, I’ve pretty much memorized my lectures, so much so that I’ve even got all my dumb jokes memorized. All I need to do is glance at my syllabus to see what day it is, and I can ramble on for over fifty minutes on auto-pilot. I’ll be lecturing over classic argument structure or comma splices, or something to do with writing, but in my head I’m actually thinking about Mass Effect or hamburgers or old Richard Pryor bits.

But other days can be quite interesting. Those are the days that make teaching fun. Exhausting, but fun.

Take yesterday, for example.

Yesterday we were reading the beginning chapter of Carl Sagan’s book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It’s the book Sagan finished right before he died, and it’s all about skepticism and the dangers of anti-intellectualism and pseudoscience. Today I had two extreme reactions to the reading.

In my classes, I have students keep a reading journal. For each reading we have, I ask them to write a journal entry over the reading as a way to develop their thoughts. I really don’t care what they write, just as long as they write about the reading. It’s simply a completion grade, and I don’t really even read them.

Today a young man brought me his journal, and I almost began crying as I was reading it. He had written nearly two pages, and the gist of his entry was that he came from a highly religious, fundamentalist family and, he felt ashamed and embarrassed that he no longer believed the religion of his upbringing. He spent the entire entry writing about how much it meant to him to discover that there were other people out there, brilliant people no less, that had the same problems with religion as he did. He kept writing how glad he was to have been in the class and how much better he felt about his life.

It was extremely moving, and I felt privileged that he had felt comfortable enough in my class to share that with me. I’m serious when I say I had to consciously keep myself from tearing up.

That was in the morning.

In the afternoon, I managed to completely enrage about ten people, all in different classes, almost to the point of violence. If we had been in a bar, I would have been in a fist-fight. As I wrote earlier, we were reading Sagan’s book about skepticism, and during the discussion we addressed pseudoscience. I asked the students what they thought about the Thomas Gray quote “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise,” in regards to things like homeopathy and acupuncture.

I had no idea so many people were taken in with nonsense-bullshit like homeopathy and acupuncture. Good lord. I spent the majority of three classes–I’ll repeat that: THREE CLASSES–trying to understand how these students could buy into something that’s been proven time and again to be utter flim-flam.

One student said, “My parents spend about $300 dollars a month on homeopathic medicine. Are you calling them stupid?”

Calm down–I didn’t say “yes.” I didn’t tell him that I thought his parents were dumber than dirt. I thought it. But I didn’t say it.

Yesterday was fun, but the emotional wave and trough of the day was exhausting, and after work I felt like I had ran a marathon. Hopefully on Wednesday I can turn the auto-pilot back on.

As an instructor, I’m going to go ahead and admit something that a lot of folks in the education system don’t have the courage to come out and say:

Not everyone needs to go to college.

There. I said it.

For some reason we, the American society, have venerated collegiate life and devalued more traditional vocations to such an extent that all high school students think they are a failure unless they get accepted into a prestigious college. Consequently, there are far too many students enrolled in college that have no business being there. Trust me–I see these people everyday.

They don’t want to be here. They perform poorly and then they feel guilty about their poor performance. But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being unfit for collegiate life. That simply means that the student is probably fit for something else. Like what?

How about an apprenticeship with a tradesman? How about a vocational school? How about an honest-to-goodness job and not a damn “career.”

Let me say this about “careers:” They totally suck. Career is a euphemism for “job that defines your life.” You have to buy special clothes for a career. You have to have a special degree for a career. You have to act a certain way all the time for a career.

But a job? Well, jobs are different.

If you have a job you have a quitting time. You go home and you leave job-things at the job. You can be yourself. You might not like your job, but that’s okay, because you know it’s just a job to make money, which in turn lets you do what you really want to do. Pay your bills and live like a civilized person. Visit your family. Play with your kids. Spend time with your buddies. Play Xbox (maybe that’s just me).

And to be quite honest, there are far too many 18-year old high school graduates that simply aren’t mature enough for college. They should get a McJob, find their path in this world, and then decide what to do. There’s nothing wrong with waiting until 21 or 22 years old to start undergrad work.

I’m sick of students who treat classes as if I am forcing them to be there. I’m not. In fact, if they don’t like my class, or they don’t want to be in college in general, then I’m completely in favor of them dropping out. Maybe they’ll discover something they’re actually good at and find their place in this culture of ours.

Also, there isn’t a damn thing wrong with being a plumber. Or a carpenter. Or an electrician. Or any other job that requires physical exertion or manual labor. We need more manual laborers out there. The fucking country is literally falling apart, and yet we discourage our children from learning a trade that might actually produce something.

A nation of consumers that disdains work is a nation on the precipice of the fail-cliff. We need to start producing things again or we’re in for a tumble.

Last night, the GOP presented its new star, Sarah Palin, to the world at the RNC. She delivered her speech with zeal and confidence, and I’m quite sure the McCain folks feel pretty damn good about her performance. I’m also pretty sure that after watching Palin, the “always-vote-Jesus” crowd might actually do something unthinkable come this November–vote McCain.

Towards the middle of the semester in my “Writing Arguments” class, I introduce students to fallacies and flaws that unintentionally, and many times intentionally, creep into arguments. These are fallacies with which most of us are familiar, if not by their name then by their usage, and ones that the media uses frequently and judiciously. Informal fallacies are common, rhetorical tools of politicians and pundits, but they are the fundamental and foundational basis of argument for conspiracy theorists. Read through that wiki list of fallacies and then think about arguments proposed from the likes of Holocaust deniers, 9/11 Truthers, Creationists, NWO believers, etc.

Fallacies are akin to what James Frazer termed “magical thinking.” Magical thinking allows an ignorant mind to make sense of the world in non-scientific terms. Arthur C. Clarke famously stated that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Indeed, we encourage this type of thinking in children whether we mean to or not. Every time a child asks “What was that noise in the sky,” and we reply “God bowling” instead of explaining thunder–every time we tell a child “Don’t say that because it might come true,”–every time we encourage a child to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy, we encourage them towards magical thinking as a valid, problem-solving mindset.

Fallacious logic and magical thinking bring out the worst in humanity. Willful ignorance only spawns more willful ignorance, and once the feedback loop begins it’s difficult to end.

Now, I do my best to steer students away from this type of thinking in my classes, but I’m only one person, and I can only do so much. Also, I’m only human, and therefore I’m not immune to fallacies and magical thinking.

But while I do my best to eschew this type of thinking in myself and my students, I have to admit, I’m a little hesitant to do so. I’m terrified that by pushing away fallacies and magical thinking that I’ll also be pushing away imaginative sympathies and my ability to daydream. Some of the most beautiful pieces of art and literature the world has ever known were born out of magical thinking, and I’m not no so sure that silencing that aspect of my brain, or my students’ brains, is necessarily a good thing. Can evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology explain the existence of systems of morals and values as adaptive and selective mechanisms? Absolutely. Sadly, those explanations are scientifically dense and dry, and they are no where near as magical, nor nearly as beautiful, as the story of the Garden of Eden.

Fortunately, people like Isaac Asimov, Mark Twain, Terry Pratchett, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Orwell have shown us that magical thinking doesn’t have to squash rationalism and logic.

The inherent problem is that apparently you actually have to be someone like Isaac Asimov, Mark Twain, Terry Pratchett, Kurt Vonnegut, or George Orwell to keep those two disparate mindsets in check. No small task, that.

Last night (actually, two nights ago, after the edits) while talking to my friend Tank (what up, Spaceman), our conversation swerved into religion, as it is wont to do, and he told me that he intentionally dislikes discussing religion at all, even if the other person brings it up. I told him I intentionally try to press people about their views, especially if they bring up the subject. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not out to attack anyone or anything like that, but it seems to me that an unexamined belief system is really no belief system at all. In John Milton’s Aeropagitica, Milton states (please don’t skip this):

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness. Which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.

Milton claims that a person can’t really know good unless they know and consciously deny evil as well. Milton was a big believer in free speech in a time when free speech wasn’t exactly seen as an inalienable right.

In 2005, the Atheist Agenda at UTSA began the “Smut for Smut” campaign. If a person brought in a Bible, the Atheist Agenda organization would gladly exchange the Bible for a free porno mag. Unsurprisingly, this made national news. The sad part about the whole deal was that I was so dense I didn’t even realize it was happening, on the campus in which I work, no less, until I read about it on Fark . For someone who takes a great deal of pride in cultural awareness, this was quite embarrassing. Here’s the post I wrote when I found out I’d missed the whole damn thing.

Anyhow, the Atheist Agenda has been doing this since 2005, but so far they haven’t received as much attention as that first year. I guess people do get desensitized to porn.

This year I discovered that one of my students was manning (womanning?) the Smut for Smut booth. That’s Chelsea Lura on the right. Hi Chelsea.

So, after three years of thinking about this, here are my random thoughts on Smut for Smut:

1) I’m glad I work at a state school where shit like this can happen. At Baylor, where I got my undergrad degree, these people would have been beaten bloody with King James Bibles.

2) This is an ineffective mode of argumentation. Understand that when I use the word “argument” I don’t meet a debate. I’m using the Aristotelian definition of the term, which stress the possibility of not only reconciliation between the arguing parties, but also of intellectual advancement and ultimately a movement toward finding Truth. One of the most crucial aspects of any argument is a clear understanding of the orator or writer’s audience. Only by identifying the audience can the author determine the best tools to employ during the argument. I suppose it’s all about mission statement, but if the Atheist Agenda wants to meaningfully argue with religious people, and presumably cause them to question their faith, then they need to redefine their argumentative techniques.

I would think that the Atheist Agenda would need to have as logical an argument as possible with religious people, simply because logic is where religiosity falls apart. Again, I’m not attacking religion, it’s just that faith, by it’s very definition, is a belief in something in spite of all logic and reason. Contrastingly, religion is all about passion and emotion, so it would be best to avoid overly passionate and emotive techniques when arguing with the religious because doing so puts them in familiar territory; it’s a place where they can rally and counter-argue with their own passionate rhetoric. Then the argument has devolved into a shouting match.

All Smut for Smut does is take something that religious people passionately feel is morally wrong–porn–and juxtapose it against something that they passionately feel is morally right–the Bible. This places the two arguing figures in antagonistic roles, and even more unproductively, it forces people who might have otherwise been persuaded into hearing the Atheist Agenda’s side into choosing the side of passion with which they feel more familiar. Odds are good that will be the side of the religious. As a consequence, the Smut for Smut campaign will only further divide believers and non-believers, and it will strengthen the ideological foundation of the religious because it will serve as confirmation that their assumptions of Atheists are correct.

However, if the Atheist Agenda wishes to simply rally their base and cause some commotion, then Mission Accomplished.

3. When walking to and from my office, I need to pay better attention to the booths outside the HSS building.

One of the other things my friend Tank said during our conversation was that he categorizes people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins similarly to folks like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. They don’t add anything meaningful to public discourse, and in fact, they do their level best to create an environment of antagonism and division.

I don’t like antagonism and division.

I don’t like exclusion and insularity.

But I do appreciate the porn. So kudos to you, Atheist Agenda.

Currently, I’m teaching four classes–two of comp I and two of comp II. At UTSA, comp I is “informative writing” and comp II is “argument.” In the comp I classes my students work on using research as a means to inform their readers. There are several things the students need to keep in my when writing their papers in comp I: summarizing and paraphrasing correctly, using MLA parenthetical citations appropriately, learning to structure an essay competently, etc.

One of the most foreign concepts to the students is the notion of audience. The majority of the students don’t truly realize that at its most basic element, writing is simply a form of communicating with other people. Too often, the students turn in their papers without ever considering the fact that someone might actually read what they wrote. They only think of writing as a means to fulfill an assignment, but I find that if I can break through that intellectual wall and help the students recognize an audience, their writing generally improves exponentially.

Last week the students had to turn in a process analysis paper (fancy term for “how-to” paper). As an author, one of the biggest challenges of this paper is deciding when technical terms need to be defined for the readers. I tell my students to err on the cautious side, and if they have any doubts whether or not a term needs to be defined, they should probably go right ahead and define it.

One of my students turned in a paper where he mentioned the second law of thermodynamics in passing and where he stated, and I’m paraphrasing, that everyone knows that the majority of the electricity we use in our home comes from burned coal.

I kinda know the definition of the second law of thermodynamics, something about entropy increasing in closed systems, but I had no idea about coal and electricity. Just for a moment, I wondered if I was too big of a moron to be reading his paper.

So to make myself feel better I told him that a normal audience would probably need those terms defined.

It remains to be seen if I’m a moron.

One of the things I dislike most about teaching is the grading. Sure, I love standing in front of a group of impressionable minds, spouting off nonsense for fifty minutes as if I know what the hell I’m talking about. That’s a pure blast.

But at the end of the semester, when all the papers have piled up and my brain feels like doo-doo flavored Play-Doh, the very last thing I feel like doing is sitting down with a buncha student papers. First off, not many students actually improve in their writing through the course of the semester. Oh some of them do, but for the most part I can predict a grade just by looking at the student’s name, which is why I consciously avoid looking at the heading of each paper lest I am too easily biased. Also, by the end of the semester I’ve seen the same mistakes over and over again, and I can get pretty cranky. Truthfully, it’s the little shit that just send me into a right tizzy.

WE’VE COVERED COMMA SPLICES OVER AND OVER! FOR FUCK’S SAKE GET IT RIGHT!

I think next semester I’m going to strap on a katana before each class starts. Whenever someone screws up I’ll whip out the blade and smash it down on their desk, slicing their books and papers in twain in the process, while screaming “DEATH AWAITS YOUR NEXT GRAMMATICAL MISTAKE!”

Until then, I think I deserve a beer. Domo arigato gozaimashta, Mr. Bar-man.

At the end of my day I have two classes back to back. Back to back classes aren’t necessarily a bad thing, as the two hours just zip by, but when my adrenaline’s faded at the end of those two classes I feel exhausted. It may not sound like a lot of work, but standing up in front of a group of twenty-five students teaching for nearly two hours is actually quite draining.

The walk from my office to the parking lot is my time to sorta decompress. I walk slowly. I drink in the afternoon and savor the sunlight. I bring an extra granola bar to work specifically so I can enjoy it as I leave.

Today, as I was leisurely strolling and enjoying my chocolate chip granola bar…a bird shit on my left shoulder. Just shit right on me.

I might think that the universe was tying to tell me something, if I believed in such things.

After I got into the Jeep and turned on the radio, Clutch’s song “Electric Worry,” began to play. I really like this song. Not enough to make me forget about my shitty shoulder, but I still like it. Listening to this song makes me want to drink a warm, cheap beer and play pool on a marred up pool table with a wobbly pool cue. It might not be Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, but it’s still a semi-blues tune, and after receiving a turd on the shoulder hearing it calmed me down.