"Wait, when did you make this tetrahedron 5-compound?"

Wow!
Originally uploaded by chowmaylay

Waaay back a few months ago when I was making all sorts of polyhedra for my classroom, I printed out the templates from korthalsaltes.com. This one was seriously awesome. :D

Tomorrow was two weeks ago.

And thus concluded the tenure at my school. It is unfortunate that the speech was not recorded. I mean fortunate. So here I present to you the text version of my keynote speech, which according to my colleagues was pretty good. I think it could have been shorter.

My fellow teachers, the administrative team, Mr Tokulah, and the parents, siblings, relatives of, most of all, my dear students.

I am most honored by the (fairly exceptional) request by Dr. Bohez, who asked me to speak many inspiring words to you. It’s not like me, actually. I’m not a person of many words. Unless I’m teaching. Or supposed to be teaching.

But I can understand why Dr. Bohez asked me to speak to you. Who better to be up here than the teacher, who witnessed your progression as students – from the point of you being newly enrolled CIC students entering through those front doors (or hitting the doorbell to enter), up to the point you became newly admitted university students about to leave our doors? Who better to speak to you?

Yes, of course, the math teacher. The dry, unexciting, critical math teacher.

So as the dry, unexciting, critical math teacher, I’ll start all over from the basics. But this time I won’t take two hours, I promise.

When you enter school, you’re not certain of the notion that is mathematics. "It’s a scary subject to be feared because it’s hard!" You have no concept of fractions. You have no idea what to do with exponents. You don’t know what the difference is between a derivative and a determinant. All these math-y words are terrifying you as I speak, aren’t they?

You know what? It doesn’t matter. Here, it's not the point. Mathematics is not "something that is practiced until it is done perfectly right." It’s not exercises, textbooks, quizzes, tests and projects. It’s not something done. Just like English is not a subject to be done. Or sciences. Or business, history, art, music... or any subject.

You enter school because you want to experience. Not just do. Or have done to you. It’s because you haven’t come across certain experiences before, so you made the decision, for most of you from far, far, far away, to enter this school. And then you came across us: Ms. Chow, the staff at CIC, and Mr. Tokulah.

Mathematics, English, Sciences, Business, Social Sciences, and so on, are not done, they’re discovered and experienced. They are not ends in themselves - they are just means to a deep understanding, means to reach a higher level of knowledge.

You’ve now experienced Ms. Chow’s math classes.

To you, families and relatives, my dear students will tell you that my classes are hard. It’s not because I find some terrible pleasure in your disappointments, or that I do not personally like you.

It is the complete opposite. I have the utmost respect for my students. You are my lifeblood and I would do anything to guide you towards your academic success. [For some inexplicable reason my kids all applauded right here.] You make me shed in anxiety. And judging by the pile of hair around my desk, it’s a lot of anxiety.

I let you experience one thing in particular in my class, which makes it so much harder than what you had to do before; you have the potential to reason the world around you, but it has been abstracted into almost meaningless symbols like plusses, minuses, division signs, integrals, and so on. You were doing those things to bits, without any real meaning to them. Then suddenly, Ms. Chow doesn’t ask you to give her the answer to 2 + 2, she asks you to explain it. (Oh, how philosophical!)

Mathematics is not the process of doing – it is how humans reason the world. The world holds many mysteries and such beauty. It is easy to superficially appreciate the world. But it is much more rewarding to discover anew different ways to contemplate its nature.

For instance, [Here I held up a tetrahedron 5-compound figure] this is indeed quite interesting. At a quick glance, I can appreciate it visually. I’m sure you can as well. It took a long time for me to make. I hope you appreciate it.

But if I told you it is a composition of five of these [Here I held up a tetrahedron], and has a particular rotational symmetry, and each point matches up with the faces of a dodecahedron (What’s that? It’s another figure I made.) and all sorts of other things mathematical, then you have just learned to appreciate it, mathematically.

If I told you that M.C. Escher, (the man who drew all sorts of amazing mathematical pictures) made wood carvings of this shape to explore it, you just learned to appreciate it deeper artistically. If I told you that these kinds of figures were studied to no end by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, you have learned to appreciate it historically.

So now you have just experienced, in a nutshell, this figure. You’ve now experienced (again) Ms. Chow’s math class. That wasn’t scary was it? (It only gets better...!)

The world is full of these experiences. You have the choice to get by this life superficially, without considering any of the meaning behind it, or to really try to live it, experience it, and make it make sense to you.

You are about to leave our school having experienced, not having done. And you are about to enter the "real world," now having learned to experience.

It has been an honour to be speaking to you, as I will also be leaving CIC – I hate long goodbyes, but I am choosing now to announce to you that with great reluctance, I will be moving to Ottawa this summer. So I will also be taking another step forward into the unknown with you.

Regardless of where you go, you have your own way to experience the world. Here at CIC, my colleagues and I showed you some of these ways to experience. We want you to go out there and experience. And we are most hopeful that your experiences will be the most meaningful to you.

To be truthful, some experiences will be difficult, and scary, and some will be painful; but I (and everyone here gathered today) hope that the majority of these will be exciting, fulfilling, fun, beautiful, numerous and wonderful.

And that, my dears, is what I hope to have taught you – in the words of Louis Armstrong in his famous song – that it is indeed, a Wonderful World.

[Ms. Chow jams.]

If you need to ask what I played at the end, it means you didn't read the last paragraph. YOU FAIL.

OH YEAH!!! :D:D:D:D

I finally finished marking everything in the gigantic backlog, and it only took ... uh... more time than it should have. But it's done!!!

Jorghnassen's coming back from Ottawa tomorrow evening. He's been on the search for a condo/house, and it seems there are a few choices he's about to make his grand decision upon. :o OK, not yet, because I haven't seen any of them. Personally, I have no idea what to look for except I don't want to be pressured into overpaying for something that isn't worth it. I mean it's not like a mediocre meal at a restaurant - I can't just grin and bear it while people are sucking the money from your wallet (and weird things are happening to your intestine). Anyway we'll see. It's a bit too early to say there's any decision there yet.

I'll have more to say tomorrow after giving the KEYNOTE SPEECH at the graduation tomorrow that nobody told me I was going to be giving until last Friday. Well, you'll have to wait and see if I manage to get anyone to film it. Then we'll all point and laugh at my mediocre speaking skills. Point and laugh. Point. And. Laugh.

Home Stretch

Here are my new tomatoes for this summer. Unfortunately, they will probably peak after we leave here, but I still can't resist!


Also, I decided only to have one plant this summer instead of two, because they take so long to harvest. Instead, what I decided one day on a whim was to toss a potato eye (from one of the potatoes in the sack that went awry) and let it grow. And boy has it grown - it literally grew three inches over a day!

Will there be potatoes? I doubt it.

Counting this day, I have only 9 days of work left. (For those of you who keep count of "work days" as M-F, in the teaching world it's M-Sun.) It's the home stretch! After the graduation ceremony on the 30th, I plan to jet (train) off to Quebec City for a week, after 6 months of not having visited. It's going to be the BIG BIRTHDAY BASH on the 3rd. I don't know what the celebrations have been like so far this year in QC, but I hope they'll be FREE.

So if anyone wants to come with me (which Jorghnassen can't do because he has to stay here and teach), I'd be so happy. :D:D:D

Then I have to return to Waterloo to get preparations going. And give two workshops for the summer camp at the school. >_<

So lonely :(

HAI POE-PLE!1!

If you have time to travel and would like to see... uh... a lot of horse farms and Mennonites... come visit us! The VIA Rail 59$ sale is on, between Montreal and Toronto, and Ottawa and Toronto. It's another 20 bucks or so to get to Waterloo from Toronto, and that can be done by train or bus probably just as easily.

Come tour the region famous for Blackberries that can't be eaten, pyjama and sweat pants, and a lot of sourdough blobs of flour. Marvel at hordes of altogether six cars during rush hour, farmer's markets with fresh crops from Mexico and South America, and Exciting Quilts!!!!!!

And come see Guelph. Yeah, THAT Guelph.

Wow, what am I going to do in Ottawa?

Finally, I think it is safe to announce, and it's about time. (I waited to let Jorghnassen announce it but he seems to not have wanted to do the official announcement.)

Jorghnassen has secured his tenure-track position with U.Ottawa, and we are going to be headed to Ottawa by the end of August. Exciting!

This means I will have to bid farewell my current students, and the school where I helped develop one of the most gut-wrenchingly depressing mathematics programs in all of Southwestern Ontario. (Depressing... for them, mwa ha ha ha...) Seriously, if they don't give me a good reference then I'm quitting teaching forever. :(

I will also have to go out there once again and find a job where I will not become blacklisted for being maddeningly under-trained by everyone in charge of such work that I have ever encountered. I've definitely had a butt-load of self realization, development, and reflection happen over the course of the last several years. As for becoming a better teacher? I have yet to understand if/how that can be achieved.

I spent the last weekend with Jorgh in Ottawa, but I had to come back today to work tomorrow. Jorgh has a stats conference in Ottawa that he is attempting to attend, but I suppose I'll let him talk about it.

What am I going to do in Ottawa? Well, that will have to wait. In the meantime I will probably blanket some CVs but one thing's for sure: I ain't workin' this summer.

Some :( and :) but more :(

Some time last week, my mum told me that the water spout leading to the outside of our apartment in Quebec exploded and flooded my room. Fortunately only the floor was flooded, but unfortunately it destroyed all the stuff that was paper and lying on the floor. Which was everything under the bed. She had to throw out all the things that were soaked. This soggy wet pile included artwork from high school, school notes, some other books, and other mementos from the 199X's.

However, I have come to a reluctant acceptance of how these things were by no means something I would miss terribly. They were items that did have some significant meaning at the time, and that is why I kept them. But if they had been of more meaning I would have probably put them somewhere not under the bed. (Kind of like the Clean Sweep philosophy.)

This holiday weekend has been rather unexciting. I have a pile of midterms yet to finish, but that is my own fault for being a procrastinator.

Next weekend however, we're heading to Ottawa to hang out with Donnah. :D Jorghnassen has a conference, and I'm going to be taking Monday off so I can stay a bit longer.

Yes, big news looms ahead...!

In the meantime, I have more work to look forward to. The kids want cookies...