This Matter

I’m getting more comfortable with being more free less gotta-be-perfect the first time, and concentrating more on light.

This was going to be a practice round but I got lucky and my nose seems right. I have the worst time painting noses. What I also love about this practice round is that Dexter and Linus were chasing each other, back and forth and back and forth, slamming into the walls, my leg, and…. … acrylic paint. Black got mixed with some turquoise and I got some on my brush. I can see where the turquoise got on the canvas. But kind of in the right spot.

Like my day yesterday after experiencing glitches on the giant communication tool between instructors and students, reading email after email of students predicting future events that will not happen or have not happened yet, followed by a long discussion with a student accusing me of teaching physics and not mathematics and he is going to look into what he kept calling “this matter” (which secretly had me giggling because we were talking in class about how matter is something that has inertia and occupies physical space, but then I pointed out how matter didn’t matter in the math we had to do, so don’t bother with the matter with the mass; only the math matters).

All they had to do was pull an obvious expression out of an equation, recognize something about it, reason and replace it with an approximation, and derive a classical formula they’ve all seen, or will see, in a physics class.

I was teaching them how to read a couple of pages in a physics book, something new I’ve been trying this past term: how to read books about a mathematical science, focusing on a passage where the math they learn from me can be used, and making a connection. I thought about that for weeks after hearing someone in science complain that students can’t read physics books the right way… So I made this face in my office.

But then I thought it was funny picturing myself in front of a committee of people ready to judge me for a crime I have been accused of committing, and I pick up a physics book and show them how to read and work the mathematics in it.

I am most definitely flying an airplane while building it.