Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Announcing: How Chance Changes the World

Hello everyone! It's been a long time and I have a lot to update you all on.

Firstly, I graduated! It wasn't something I expected to do this year, but at the last minute (literally mid-October, after some really tough heart-to-hearts) my advisor urged me to apply for jobs. In retrospect, I really wish that I had been blogging in that time because it was truly a revolting experience to be on the market™. After some really important application advice from Jen Taback, I decided to really own my history as an anti-racist union organizer and how this has guided my trajectory as an academic and an educator. That definitely scared a lot of places away, not to mention that fundamentally applying for academic jobs is truly a morbid (and racist, and sexist, and transphobic, and in many other ways violently exclusionary) game of chance that has nothing to do with what we as people and mathematicians deserve. At the end of the day, I am very lucky to be able to accept a year-long postdoc/VAP at the University of California, Irvine, where I will work with Jesse Wolfson and Nathan Kaplan. In the next two weeks, I will leave Chicago (my home of six years) to live in Albuquerque (my hometown) and from there to Irvine (pandemic permitting).

There is literally so much more to talk about (truly I can't believe it's been a whole year, yet at the same time it feels like a decade) but I'd like to get to the point of this post. The Collegiate Scholars Program at the University of Chicago has asked me to teach one final summer class, and this time I'd like to start blogging before we've begun (rather than trying to remember how things went). Because of COVID, the class will be done entirely via Zoom; we also have been given half the usual instruction time, with three hours per week over four weeks (instead of four hours per week over six weeks). I'll be co-teaching with Chloe Avery, a fellow graduate worker at the University of Chicago and also a Benson Farb student (she's also an incredible organizer if anyone's curious). We decided to teach a class on probability: How Chance Changes the World.

I've been hunting for the perfect textbook for a while and (as you'll see if you keep reading) at this point I feel pretty hopeless. Yesterday I chatted with Chloe about writing our own course notes and we decided to create a shared TeX file to start on the project. Last night I sat down to start working on said notes but found myself unable to focus. My thoughts kept drifting to the world outside, to all the suffering and violence and resistance and reimagining, and how all that connects to our classrooms. So, instead, I found myself writing a preface to the notes, trying to express exactly why the way we teach math now is inadequate and the struggles that I'm having with reimagining it. I can't imagine sharing what I've written with students in this current state—if for no other reason than it's all about me and my feelings, falling for the classic trap where education is somehow centered about the teacher rather than the students—so maybe it's more of a postface or something else entirely. Regardless, I'd like to share it here, for those who are interested:

Content warning: pandemic, sexual violence, lynching, racialized trans murder.
Preface (postface? something else?) to course notes

I'm hoping to do a good job of blogging about this course, sharing what Chloe and the students and I come up with during the pursuit of making probability class into a liberatory endeavor. Of course, we are also supported by so many other incredibly talented pedagogues. Hopefully, you all will be excited to join us on the journey of How Chance Changes the World.

Announcing: How Chance Changes the World

Hello everyone! It's been a long time and I have a lot to update you all on. Firstly, I graduated! It wasn't something I expected ...