Maurer/Stier 2007 Annual Letter
smaurer1@swarthmore.edu http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/smaurer1/
franstier@comcast.net http://home.comcast.net/~franstier/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html
lnmaurer@comcast.net http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Elmaurer/
ajmaurer@comcast.net
206 Benjamin West Ave
Swarthmore PA 19081-1421
December 31, 2007 (postdated!)
Steve writes. Apologies for the lateness of this annual. I returned from 3 months in
Germany on Dec 23 and it has taken a while to settle in, given the usual holiday
activities.
I’ll mostly write about that visit, but first other things, briefly.
Last school year, my 3rd as math/stat chair, was especially busy. In addition to the usual, I
was now chair of one of the book series of the math association, I was teaching an
advanced analysis seminar I had not taught in 14 years, I had to lead a sudden job search
when one of my colleagues was tapped to be Dean of Students, and I led a big push to
develop a new department brochure for Swarthmore applicants. In the increasing
competition for good students, brochures and websites have become quite important. The
previous brochure, at least 10 years old, was very factual with no pictures. Today
brochures have to be people oriented, with catchy photos and graphics. Even I found the
old brochure boring, and I think I wrote most of it. Anyway, drafting the new text,
orchestrating the photo shoot, negotiating back and forth with the (non-mathematical)
design and copyeditor people, was lengthy. Maybe I am poised for a new career in
advertising.
Anyway, I was quite exhausted come last June, and glad to be getting a year’s leave. June
itself was especially busy. In a major press I finally finished up the linear algebra chapter
for the EDC high school series, prepared for MathPath and put chair business in shape to
hand over. My only qualm was that I was leaving Don Shimamoto, as acting chair, an
even busier year – but just for a year; I agreed to be chair for 3 more years upon my
return.
MathPath in July in Colorado Springs went quite well. I’ve been the key writer of the
application test for several years, but this was the first year I read all the submissions and
made most of the admission decisions. Some smart middle school kids are very obscure
math writers, and sometimes it took a while to decide how much talent was there.
Colorado College has a beautiful location, with Pikes Peak and the Front Range looming
over it.
Aaron. His college quest turned out better than I expected, as he duly noted at the time.
But I don’t have to say more, because much to our surprise, he decided at the last
moment to write a section for our letter. Below he describes his decision process and how
he feels it has worked out.
Leon. He’s applying to grad school in physics, in hopes of becoming a professor, and
being quite methodical and self-directed about it. We’re proud of how grown up he has
become. My main concern is whether he is good enough at physics to eventually get a job
he likes. (I’m glad I became a professor, but the profession has gotten less attractive.
You are expected to do even more things well, it’s harder and takes longer to get through
grad school and pre-tenure stages, especially in sciences, and there are fewer places
where you don’t feel like a cog in a machine.) I did get him to speak to his professors to
get some idea of his prospects, and he has dug up some sobering information online, so
he’s going ahead with his eyes open.
Germany. I explained in last year’s annual the opportunity that arose, with kids off at
college and me on leave, to make a symbolic return of my family to Berlin by teaching at
ECLA, the English language European College of Liberal Arts. The plan a year ago was
to go there in Spring 08, but it turned out to cause fewer conflicts to go in the Fall (with
Fran and my 25th anniversary trip to Italy postponed to Spring 08). My plan was to work
much less hard than usual (only one course) and do a lot of sightseeing and train travel.
When my brother Ed heard this, he asked, was this a delayed junior year abroad? I
laughed, but that’s about right.
I’ve always been interested in history, especially of wars and dictatorships. As a Jew I’ve
had a horrific fascination with the Third Reich. So for me, going to live in Berlin was
quite consciously a decision to go live in the heart of the former beast.
I was not disappointed. Sometimes I sought out the beast, as on the day I set out to visit
both Gestapo Headquarters and Stasi Headquarters. (A cheery plan, you may say, but this
is just the sort of thing that appeals to me.) The Gestapo building was badly bombed
during the war and later leveled by West Berlin, but today there is an excellent open-air
museum on the site (Topographie des Terrors). I spent most of the day there and only
really got through about half of it. Among other things, it brought home more forcefully
than I remembered how radically and brutally the Nazis transformed Germany and took
all power in just a few months after Hitler became chancellor. Stasi headquarters, a
massive building in a massive complex, is as it was then, also with an excellent museum.
I got there another day, and again only got through part. One floor housed the billboard
displays that the Stasi’s own publicity staff prepared on the occasion of the 25th birthday
of the DDR (East Germany), highlighting all their great deeds saving the nation. I was
particularly struck by their poster about Amnesty International, a western so-called
human rights organization whose goal was to slander the DDR. But not to worry, the
Stasi had shut down their East German contacts.
But even when I wasn’t looking for it, memories of the beast were all around. There are
Gedenktafel (plaques) on buildings all over Germany. One day, walking down the
residential street in the Pankow district where my office was, but a block beyond where I
usually go, I saw a plaque on a building and got up closer to read it. It said, this house
belonged to the Jewish factory owner Georg Hermann. In 1942 he, his family, and 11
other Jews who were forced to live here were deported to various extermination camps.
Then each person was listed, with death year and location. (I’ve translated the plaque for
you, but all such plaques were in German, or sometimes German and English.)
Or, on another occasion I was admiring from the outside the nicely fixed up town library
in the center of Pankow, when I looked up and saw written on the top, “former orphanage
of the Jewish Community of Berlin”. Then I found a sign saying, in remembrance of the
November Progrom (Kristallnacht) there will be a free tour of the orphanage at 10am on
Saturday Nov 10. The tour turned out to include many other Jewish buildings and
plaques in Pankow. It was led by a sweet old lady who seemed to know just about
everything about the former Jews of Pankow. (Most of the Jews of prewar Berlin,
including my murdered relatives, lived farther south, in Mitte or Prenzlauerberg, then
shabby inner city areas but since reunification quite trendy.) Except for me and a
Romanian ECLA student, all the 20 or so tourees were Germans, mostly old but not
exclusively so.
Perhaps the reminder that most touched me was a gravestone-like marker that I happened
upon in a flower bed near the center of the city Jena. It read, “In Spring 1945 the center
of Jena was destroyed by bombing. And so the war that went out from Germany came
back here. We remember the victims.”
Many of the museums, especially those called government Documentation Centers,
emphasize pictures, maps, copies of newspaper pages, etc., and make a point of critiquing
any belief that anything good came of the Nazi period. I visited the documentation center
at Prora, the beach area on the Baltic Sea island of Rügen where the Nazis proposed to
build a resort for 20000 workers at a time. It was never finished, but the immense
monolithic buildings are still there, mostly empty, with little else around. So, at least the
Nazis wanted the average German to enjoy vacations. No, says the documentation
center, it was all a plan to look good and regiment the workers. Well, at least Hitler built
the autobahns and put people back to work by doing it. Not really, says the
documentation center. The autobahns were started under the Weimar Republic, and
employment building them was only a marginal factor in the reduction of unemployment.
It’s not just recent history for which there is this honest accounting. I went to the
outstanding Luther Museum in Wittenberg. (After passing by train several times through
Lutherstadt-Wittenberg on the way to cities farther south, it dawned on me that this place
wouldn’t be called Luther City for nothing. Indeed, it is the Wittenberg where he posted
his 95 theses on the church door.) Late in his life Luther became very dyspeptic and
published several vicious rants against Jews. Original copies were all there, with sample
scurrilous passages quoted. To be fair to Luther, he was anti-Judaism, not anti-Semitic.
He was angry that Jews had not converted to his improved Christianity and welcomed
them when they did. However, his prescriptions for what to do with the Jewish infidels
was not much different from later Nazi prescriptions for those with Jewish blood, a point
duly noted in the formal apology in the 1980s of the Lutheran Church, also quoted in the
museum. Also, Luther wrote equally vicious attacks on the Pope and on Turks, with
original copies also on display. Indeed, there was a whole room devoted to “propaganda”,
and how this religious war was the first conflict largely carried out through the relatively
new media of the printing press.
I don’t know any country that confronts the evils in its past so openly. Fran remarks that
Japan certainly has not. The president of ECLA (a professor of Spanish) says that Spain
has not. What about Russia? Anyone know?
It’s not just about the past. I also don’t know any country with so many public service
billboards. Immigration is an issue in Germany. Well, I saw billboards saying,
“immigration, our future”. And many billboards urging Germans to be a Pate (patron,
godfather) to poor kids in Africa or elsewhere. As well as many signs to recyle.
But, is this all show? What do Germans really think of Jews and immigrants? Or, do they
think “the Nazis did all this, not us”? Well, like in the US, it’s a big country and opinions
vary. There were occasional reports in the papers of attacks on foreigners and epithets at
soccer games against Jews or foreigners. I experienced nothing personally, but 3 ECLA
students (an American, a Brit, and a Palestinian Israeli) reported that once, when they
were on a tram together, they were yelled at by some skin heads for not speaking
German. Fortunately, other Germans on the tram scolded the skin heads, deflecting their
interest. (This reminds me. The German teacher at ECLA, an East German, told me that
one time in the DDR he complained to the police because skins heads came through his
street at night yelling fascist slogans and threatening his black Venezuelan neighbor. The
police refused to make a report, because this couldn’t have happened; “all the fascists are
in West Germany”.)
A few years ago, the NYT correspondent in Germany referred to the country as “modern,
earnest Germany, always trying to do the right thing”. I agree. I don’t think it’s show.
Maybe the government is out ahead of the people, but not I think by a whole lot. If it was
way ahead of the people, I would worry that its education efforts would backfire, as with
Leon and Aaron, who are sort of anti politically correct, because being politically correct
was emphasized so much in public school. Maybe the German schools are the same. But
on the street, while the observant person can’t fail to notice the messages about history,
they are not in your face. This strikes me as the best way to keep the memory alive.
Whatever else Germans think, most of them, East or West, hold to nie wieder Krieg –
never again war. So their history has worn off on them at least to this extent. We
Americans might work harder to develop the same attitude. That German teacher at
ECLA visited the US for the first time last summer. One of his reactions: it’s like Russia,
lots of military monuments. In Germany, though there are lots of reminders of war, there
are very few memorial depictions of soldiers or weapons (except for those built by the
Russians).
Trains. Riding trains was a major purpose for this trip, and I was not disappointed. You
can get almost anywhere in Germany by train, and I did. There are so many lines that you
can often get between the same pair of cities by several different routes. Around main
cities not only are there many lines going out like spokes, but there are other lines going
between the spokes. And all of this is very well documented online. Even when I didn’t
take a trip, I had great fun typing in the end cities and times and seeing all the routes,
connections, prices, and types of trains.
But mostly I did take trips. With fast and frequent trains, about a third of Germany was
easily accessible from Berlin by day trips on the DB (Deutsche Bahn, German Rail). A
few other places I went to on overnights. I got myself a BahnCard 50 – for someone over
age 60 this cost 104 euros, and then every ticket is halfprice, for a year, with none of the
restrictions of most special deals, like having to take a particular train. My one regret is
that I had to do much of this late in the year, when there is little daylight (only from about
8am to 4pm), so that my pleasure at sightseeing out the window was limited, because I
needed to leave before daylight and return after dark. But just sitting on the train is fun
for me.
The situation in Berlin was even better. A regular one-trip transit-authority ticket gives
you 2 hours on any combination of busses, trams, S-bahn (city trains, mostly on or above
ground), U-bahn (mostly subways) and DB regional rail (red trains, as opposed to the fast
long-distance white trains). Just to get downtown from my apartment there were 5 good
routes. And every stop has detailed information about local routes and times, and even
more information is available online, including an excellent interactive map of Berlin.
Most routes run every 10 or 20 minutes, even on weekends or into the night.
It’s hard for me to express to non train fanatics how much fun I had. My first full day in
Berlin I used a day ticket to visit all the magnificent long-distance train stations in Berlin
and many regional and local stations, for instance, by riding all the way around on the Sbahn inner loop. What a pleasure, throughout my travels, to see so many stations with so
many tracks (often going under and over each other just outside the stations), and with so
many of those tracks having trains on them at the same time. Many of the train stations
are classical sheds. Almost all of the stations had interesting architecture, even the
occasional abandoned station. The new main station in Berlin had to grow on me, but it
did. It is 5 stories, with N-S trains at the bottom and E-W trains at the top, and all in
glass with open lines of vision to all 5 stories at once. Transparency is a major theme in
today’s Germany.
I bought a digital camera for this trip, and if any of you are train fans, I have lots of
pictures I can share. (If you think this is peculiar, rest assured that I am not alone. There
are tons of other people’s train pictures already on the web. My favorite: when I was
studying up on Prague transportation, I discovered a U-Tube movie of an entire trip of a
Prague subway train as seen by the driver.) I also have photos of non train stuff.
Recommendations. When I discuss travels in annuals, I usually include a list of favorite
things that are not standard in guidebooks. Here are some. (The standard things were
great too.)
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The Leipzig main train station. Second biggest in the world (after Tokyo).
Mutiple sheds housing 26 tracks. And a main hall that looks a bit like 30th St here
in Philly (also a great station), but much longer.
Jena, a very pretty city, and the home of Zeiss optics. Don’t miss the classic giant
Zeiss planetarium projector on display in the Goethe shopping mall.
The ultra-modern Dresden synagogue, in a downtown that is otherwise
reconstructed as it used to look before it was fire bombed.
Templehof airport in Berlin. Massive fascist architecture. Little used today, but
famous for the Berlin airlift, or Luftbrucke (Air Bridge).
The 1936 Olympic Stadium and grounds. More fascist architecture.
Peenemunde, the WWII rocket testing/production site. An excellent museum,
where no one escapes criticism (Werner von Braun, the German Army, the
American army, etc.)
Quedlinburg, where we saw the precious Bible that was stolen at the end of the
war by an American soldier and which my Father helped return to Germany.
Hiking in the Harz mountains, near Thale and Goslar.
What did I miss most in Germany? American breakfasts! For all the porridge in German
fairy tales (think Goldilocks), you can’t find any hot cereals in the stores. For breakfast
Germans eat cold cereals (including American ones), cold cuts, and yogurt. After some
effort, I found, in the natural foods section of a larger store, Vollkorngreis (wheat ground
to the grits level) and Kleine Haferflocken (small oat flakes), which allowed me to make
a sort of slow cooking cream of wheat and oatmeal. I once asked the German chef in the
ECLA cafeteria why Brei (porridge, hot cereal) has died out in Germany. Because we
hate it, he harrumphed, somewhat offended that I might be asking him to make it.
ECLA. This is certainly the smallest academic institution I’ve been associated with – this
year about 40 students and 20 faculty and staff(!). It’s view of liberal arts is a bit different
from mine. I think of liberal arts as a frame of mind – method of inquiry more important
than topic of inquiry, applying different modes of thought to a question, not limiting
one’s study to topics one thinks will help in a career, asking why instead of what, open
ended questions. ECLA’s view differs on the first two two categories. It’s somewhat of a
great books program, and thinks that everyone needs to study philosophy, morality,
literature and art. Right now it runs a one-year program, that students come to at
whatever point they find it appropriate, some right after high school, some after a few
years of university, some after an undergraduate degree, some after a masters degree,
some after working for a few years. They are planning an expansion to a 4-year program.
You can learn more at http://www.ecla.de.
I think I showed them that math can fit with their current program; it will certainly fit
with their expanded program. I had fun being a student as well as a teacher. I attended the
core course (on classical Greece) and even gave a guest lecture on Greek ideas of
mathematics. I participated when the Kant elective discussed mathematics. I took an
advanced German course and occasionally attended screenings in the film course. It took
me a while to settle on a topic for my own course, but eventually I narrowed in on
symbolic logic and some philosophy of mathematics.
The greatest thing about ECLA for me was the students. ECLA provided me with free
meals at the dining hall, so mostly I ate there. This way I got to know the students, and to
a lesser extent the faculty, who tended to eat there at lunch and sometimes dinner. The
students were really sort of amazing, in that they were so internationally oriented. Take
for example the 1 male and 3 females from Kyrgyzstan. They all spoke excellent English,
as well as Russian, Kyrgyz, and some German. They had all been to the US as exchange
students in high school. They had all gotten undergraduate degrees at the American
University of Central Asia, typically in something like economics. Now they wanted a
humanities year, before deciding the next place they might go. One of them was of
Korean ancestry. What was she doing in central Asia? Stalin had moved the Koreans
living in the far east of the USSR, just as he had moved many other groups. It was an
education to hear their views of their home country, of Germany, of the US, and to learn
of their expectations of themselves, and their parents’ expectations. (For the girls, the
parental expectations were a mix of internationalism and doing the dishes.) Same for
talking to the Ukrainians, the Romanians, the Bulgarians, the Turks, the Germans, and so
on. It was also fun to get to know the 4 students in my math seminar, from Estonia,
Moldova, Germany and Mexico. As I said in an earlier annual (when describing some
amazing Swarthmore international students) I think these kids who have learned to move
between cultures will take over the world.
ECLA, and the apartment they provided me, are located in the Pankow district, northeast
of the city center. Many of the leaders and nomenklatura of East Germany lived there.
Today Pankow has a bimodal population: young families, with lots of kids on bikes or
babies in strollers, and retired communists (many also on bikes). Pankow is actually quite
pretty, and quiet, and I very much enjoyed walking around it. It wasn’t badly damaged
during the Battle of Berlin – the Russians were already eyeing it for their administration –
but neither was it fixed up much during DDR days. Since reunification, one building after
another has been renovated or replaced. You can tell when a building has been renovated,
because it changes color from the dull stucco brown that was once almost universal in
Germany to Mediterranean colors – beige, yellow, orange, pink. I have some photos of
buildings split down the middle by this color change.
Indeed, several sections of east Berlin are nicer today than west Berlin, because some
have only been renovated recently, with considerable attention to individuality. Pankow
is especially nice, as most buildings had been individual homes or small apartment
buildings.
Oddly, the ECLA buildings are among the ugliest left in Pankow. East Germany had a
standard concrete block design for embassies. There were 1-story, 2-story, and 3-story
versions, and ECLA bought up some of each cheap, scattered around over several blocks.
Anyway, they are functional, and ECLA has fixed them up inside. Each faculty office,
for instance, has a seminar table.
Berlin as a whole is a spacious city. It has more land area than New York but under half
the population. (Back in the 1920s, Berlin absorbed all its suburbs, including Pankow.)
The up side to this space is that there are many big parks, and rents are low – hence
Berlin has become a chic city with many artists moving in. The down side is that
abandoned real estate is just left standing; the space isn’t needed. You can be walking
through a very nice section where suddenly there is an abandoned building – an old DDR
government office, a house that hasn’t been fixed up, or an empty lot. Other east German
cities have abandoned factories, but not all this abandoned space within residential and
business areas.
Enough. For all sorts of reasons my visit in Berlin was fascinating and educational.
Fran’s part – Executive summary: Youngest leaves for college, husband has
brief fling with German and trains, middle aged Mom finds solace in granite
countertops, trips to Brazil, and 4 idyllic days in Prague.
Aaron: Once Aaron’s applications were submitted last January, I worried and
worried. Most kids apply to at least one rolling-admission safety school early in
the fall, but Aaron had waited and waited – in February he found he’d been
waitlisted for non-honors Penn State, Univ Park.
A still hasn’t talked to Ms. W (his guidance counsellor) abt Penn St. I
fret considerably. Mom said – don’t nag him; what good will it do? I
said, you nag Sid. She said, that’s different (she’s right, isn’t she);
he can do something abt it. A agreed. Wise woman, your Mom, quoth he.
...all I want to know is that he’s been admitted to one of the 8 or so
schools outstanding. I keep thinking – the probability of being rejected
at them all is around .75 to the 8th power (i.e. each accepts around 25%
of applicants), so maybe 10% maybe more? ulp.
My cohort of mommies talked of little but college admissions & apps.
Fortunately, he heard he’d gotten into Bowdoin in mid-March. I cried, kissed
him, read the letter, and then repeated the whole process several times. Steve
harumphed. I resolved to stop nagging. Word spread fast – by the time Steve
emailed his brother Ed, Ed already knew because (Ed’s son) Jeff’s fiancee, Helen
had already noticed on Facebook that Aaron had joined the group Bowdoin 2011.
A has been admitted to Hamilton & Colgate (in addition to Bowdoin &
Carleton and U VT), wait listed by Cornell & Penn State, rejected by
Amherst (didn’t bother him a whit). I knocked on his door one eve... He
was out on the roof burning his rejection & wait list letters. How
different from the wondergirls of Newton North. I was reading the (NY
Times) paragraph where the boyfriend of one describes how the girl likes
Kirkegaard & Descartes (Aaron didn’t know who either was & it didn’t faze
him). L reminded A that there was a dog named Kirkegaard in Thanks for
the Fish. But, asked A, do these wonderwomen know what an eigenvector
is?...
I’m of course basking in the reflected glory. I tried basking in front
of Louise at lunch, and she gave me a look & pointed out that I’d spent
months moaning “Oh, who will want my child”, and wringing my hands over
how slow he was to do his apps, and being waitlisted at Penn State.
all of a sudden he’s a model child & I’m a Model Mommy.
Now
He made prospie visits to Carleton (where the football coach showed him
around and he ate s’mores on an island in the campus lake with the football
team), Wesleyan (his visit fell on April 20th ) , and Bowdoin. For his 18th
birthday (April 29th), he wanted a $200 check to pay Carleton’s deposit. He’d
filled out the forms to decline the other schools. He ate birthday cake with us
(the same chocolate cake with white icing I’ve baked for L and A since they were
4), and went out to mail the letters and visit an unspecified friend. He was off a
Junior license, he reminded us, we couldn’t call the cops on him for driving after
11.
A’s close friends Nate and Ken both chose Carleton, too.
The rest of his Senior year passed in a happy blur.
Fri was Relay for Life (kids camp in the football field & walk around the
track 24 hours to raise funds for cancer). Brought them pizza after
getting home from work – they’d built themselves a kind of fort around
their tents out of disassembled cardboard boxes, with a low door in the
front. Like a bunch of huge 4 year-olds, building castles with the sofa
cushions. (except when this one guy crawled through the door w/ a young
woman sprawled on his back...).
He went to the Prom with a girl from Euro AP and two of her friends and I
scurried home from work to take pictures:
Aarthi had these 6” heels on, and her mom was worried because she’d never
worn heels before. Her ankles sort of shook in them. Aarthi also
doesn’t carry pocketbooks, so a friend took her cellphone. Anyway, I
took pics for a while (Aarthi’s Mom, Joythi, said, the next time you see
him in a tux, he’ll probably be getting married) until A protested
(saying he was going to melt), and they all piled into the minivan of one
of the girl’s father’s, and off they went.
We had parents over for dinner (one Dad had worked with Aarthi’s Dad),
including (by accident), the Mom of Aaron’s date from last year (I’d phoned
invitations in a rush, and had confused two moms with similar names- A
outraged), and we all chatted companionably about how hard it was to extract
information from sons. I was relieved the next day we’d all survived the ordeal.
But, of course, I don’t really know anything – just that their prom
wasn’t excessive (no limos – well, they seem to have snagged a ride back
in Ezra S’s limo, for total cost of $25, no bride-like up-dos) and he’s
back in one piece, and she’s pretty, with an expressive mouth. I was
putting platters away, looking at the bowl that was once Ruth Sykes, and
the plates that were Lucy’s, and wondering would women I don’t even know
someday put these things away in closets, and remember me for a moment or
not.
There was Commemoration in the Swarthmore College Amphitheatre – kids
talked about their school years and laughed at in-jokes.
They finished & each kid brought his Mom a red carnation. Aaron & Ken E
started joking abt Carleton (“i’m going to a small college out in the
MidWest; you wouldn’t have heard of it”). Ben Hawkinson leaped down over
a row of chairs from the terrace above & started joking around w/ Andrew
K. Nate, Ben & I think Andrew were holding Justin horizontally across
their arms, each one clenching a carnation between his teeth.
Graduation (at the Villenova Gym) was the usual mix of earnest speeches and
distant views of the grads.
Half were in flipflops & shorts, half in the (specified) formal
garb. We cheered & shouted when A’s name called, but a man was
walking in front of us at the one moment I could perhaps have
gotten a shot that showed his face.
So I was wild to get shots of him before he shed cap & gown. [I
never did get any shots of L, whose graduation had been in the
cramped HS gym, on a thunderstormy night] ... Found A and took
multiple pics of him w/ L (but he wouldn’t put his cap back on,
and complained his dress shirt was too tight in the neck). A
strode through the crowd (us in his wake) hailing friends and
going up to hug each. Amy Jewett exclaimed “preschool to High
school!” (she knew him from Trinity). We made our way over to
the car; A put on his cap for pictures w/ Grandma.
The cohort of Moms at the synagogue met for brunch (as we’d done after our
kids’ Bar/Bat Mitzvah year) and toasted each other. We’d survived.
Aaron slept, played computer games, and hung out with friends until midAugust, when I took him to Northfield for the start of football camp. His
roommate’s family was vacationing in MN (roommate’s Mom – an audiologist–
comes from Minneapolis – from a huge French-Canadian family – and they visit
every summer for a month), and we met them for dinner. I’d imagined from the
name they’d be very WASP-y, but in fact Dad (stage crew at Radio City Music
Hall) is ½ Jewish. Granger is a foot shorter than Aaron, wants to major in bio or
physics, and had read & liked the required reading book. He and A fell into a
long conversation about bands that seemed to satisfy both of them.
Next morning, we shopped at Target, walked around campus and found football
camp signin (A spied a couple of huge young men who directed us), A lugged
his belongings up 4 flights to his temporary room. There was a program on the
Football Parents group (which tailgates to most games – most of the players are
from MN or WI).
...sat next to A as he ate w/ team members (they were talking
about teams – most knew kids going to other MN colleges like St.
Thomas that Carleton will play against) looking at the back of
his neck – a bit spotty & hairy but thinking how dear he was.
Coaches convoked the team again; that was parents’ signal to
leave. Blessed him mumblingly (it being Fri night) & stumbled
off with a lump in my throat.
I mused on Loss and Change:
Izzy asked S was he sad (at the pool; he was recording laps) and
he had to think for a min why she’d ask. L thinks I must be
abnormal; if everyone got so shook up when a kid went to college,
no one would become a mother.
JL (encountered walking yest)
asked was A in MN and had he gotten organized & bought clothes
had I bought him a jacket and did he have enough warm clothes???
I started in on how bereft I’d feel in a month w/ L and S gone
and then realized she’s a widow for godssake & said boy, I
shouldn’t be saying this to you, and she laughed & said we’d go
for walks. Mom said she always felt shook up when I left – she’d
stand at the gate & wave & wave & I’d wave once & be off to my
next adventure.
Leon: Leon proudly loaded his gear into our 1996 Subaru the day before Yom
Kippur, to drive up and keep his (also non-fasting & also Jewish) friend Adj
company at Brandeis on Yom Kippur. He rear-ended someone outside
Worcester, MA & totalled the car. My sister, Beth, drove out to get him (very
shook up) & took him & his stuff home. By the next afternoon, he and Adj were
playing board games with friends (how the Brandeis students while away YK
afternoon).
He’s in his last year and applying to grad school. We hear mostly about problem
sets
5/22/07: Phone call w/ Leon. Told him 4x how good it was to hear his
voice, but that I worried that he worked too hard. (he said he’s done
almost nothing but problem sets & bike riding). Shouldn’t he spend more
time on women and drugs, to get the full breadth of college experience?
He gave me a laymans acct of his courses. Relativistic electrodynamics:
that Maxwell’s Laws (4 diffl equs set up in the 1870’s or so) can also be
derived from the th. of special relativity, but that the course is really
a misnomer, since electrodynamics is almost the only part of physics that
doesn’t chg. w/ relativity. Complex analysis is Laurents’ series (like
Taylor series, but with negative powers)
I occasionally try to dispense advice, with limited success:
I talked L into going last night to Peking in Media for dinner. I drove
over (all 3 miles) while he criticized my driving (too timid on corners,
and I didn’t notice a stopsign in time so one stop was slightly more
abrupt than it needed to be. Didn’t I realize all the energy I was
dissipating as heat on my brake pads?). ..I drank 2 gl of wine & dribbled
MuShu vegetable juice down my shirt (he drove home) and tried
unsuccessfully to convince him that should he have a Significant Other in
the future, he should take the SO to dinner sometimes (like once / month)
if the SO likes it, even if he thinks it’s a waste of time & money.
When he sent us his Personal Statement for grad schools to edit, I couldn’t
comment on the content (he’s interested in quantum computing and spintronics),
or on his chances (everyone I meet has tales of PhD physicists having to change
fields), but there was a low-key kind of devotion in what he wrote that made me
terribly happy. His entrance essay 4 years ago was on Robert Heinlein – it was
boyish and artless. He’s learned so much in 4 years.
Leon, Aaron, & friends had a LAN party on Saturday – networking 10 or so PC’s
and spending the night in virtual battle. As usual, I retreated upstairs. I
ventured down the next morning, expecting the usual sea of wires and young
men asleep and saw no evidence at all of a party except a stack of pizza boxes in
the mudroom and a running dishwasher. They’d cleaned up.
Work: At the end of last year, I was working through Pimsleur’s Portuguese I
(each lesson exactly filled my drive to work), where Jorge and Maria have
endless drinks and discussions of who’ll pay. Then they both got sick (any
wonder?) and drank cups of milk and looked for the Dr’s office. I worked
through the next two Pimsleur courses, and got a human teacher – at 25, she
seems so young – who comes intermittently, we’re maybe 2/3 of the way
through a (very quirky, fast-paced) text for foreigners learning Portuguese.
The unit I was working on (subjunctive) started with a man asking the
garage to do various maintenance items on his car, each time he set out
for a distant city. Then, there was a series of letters from the garage
cashier to Ms. Lonleyhearts about her unmrequired love for the customer
who kept coming back to the garage for more and more maintenance. Then
there was a story about a man who took his mother-in-law to view a farm
she’d been left. The mother-in-law died suddenly, and the man & his wife
had to drive the body back to her native city. They drove & drove, then
had to stop for gas. While they got gas, someone made off with the car &
corpse.
Spent 5 weeks in Sao Paulo over the course of the year (3 trips), and feel pretty
comfortable there. When I arrive, the department secretary has my ID badge and
computer air-card ready (so my laptop can reach the internet). Being in a fancy
hotel, addressed as “a senhora” goes to my head a bit. The “Club” breakfast
room is on the 23rd floor, with ripe fruit & fresh croissants & views over the city,
and a waitress that asks how “a senhora” slept. (I asked her once what time she
had to leave home to get to work – 3 AM).
My driver (the company contracts with one of the taxi-drivers based nearby)
speaks lovely, slow Portuguese, and we joke and discuss politics. A different set
of actuaries (or accountants) takes me out to lunch every day:
One lunch w the juniorest of the actuaries (all still going to night
classes & working by day) centered on the joys of adolescence. They all
work 8-5 or so (so get up around 6) and THEN go off to night school,
arriving home around midnight. I got started (I always do) on Aaron’s
summer – TV & worlds of warcraft & facebook & weightlifting, interspersed
with a few trips to the shore. Their faces lit up, and they all said,
they were like that once, and they didn’t realize how happy they were.
Bit by bit, I’m learning my way around. I can read regulations & follow
meetings in Portuguese now, and learn from people without any English,
without needing someone to translate for me. The programming work was still a
huge slog for most of the year – for example, fumbling with this huge, awkward
SAS program we run to expand a certain code from one character wide to two
took me a week (I’m a clumsy programmer).
I was authorized by late last year to hire someone to help me with Brazil’s work,
but it took a while. The department was hiring for a number of new positions;
my position was a low priority, and a number of candidates turned us down. I
must have phone-screened or interviewed 30 candidates (almost all from the
People’s Rep of China) in the first half of the year. The (H1B) visa situation is
complicated.
Zhenyin started in mid-August, and has been a very, very quick learner, and a
huge help.
I’d managed to corrupt an ALFA model (this persnicketty modelling
software we use), and lost scenarios, and dumped it into Zhenyin’s lap to
fix. Usually people get a week or so of training on ALFA before messing
around, but I dumped this thing in his lap (well, I had done a lot of
documentation on it), and gave him maybe 45 min of demo, and said, see
if you can get this text file to load, I can’t get it to work. So he
tried this and tried that. He made a macro to print the text file out
(because .prn files have a limit of 240 char per line). He periodically
bopped up with some question, then went down to tinker some more. And he
got the file to load, and got the model to run. I kept thinking of a
Yiddish phrase Sid said once: Katchkele, vilst schwimmen? (little duck,
would you like to swim? it’s used when the answer to a question is
obviously yes). I think of him as katchkele now.
I also got authorized to bring one of the actuaries from Sao Paulo up for a couple
of years. Again, the paperwork and visa process took the better part of the year,
but Rogerio started in November. Most of the year, I felt like Sisyphus, rolling
my huge rock up and down the halls of the department, but it’ll get easier soon.
Home: I’d extracted an ok to renovate the (24 year old) kitchen while Steve was
in Germany. Shopping for cabinets and granite countertops was intoxicating,
but (of course) the actual construction seemed to drag on a long time. The
refrigerator and (nonfunctioning) stove stood in the dining room (which was
piled high with boxes and bags) ; I had the microwave and makeshift cooking
area in the family room. I washed dishes in the mudroom sink and balanced the
dishrack on the mudroom bench. There were the usual mixups and delays, but
those made it all the sweeter to stand enraptured by the flow in the grain of the
new countertops (Juparana Columbo, a with pink/white/grey swirls).
I’d resolved to get a new (smaller) car to commute with and pass the 2002 Subaru
Outback down to Leon. Tried a Prius, thought of trying out other cars (worried
how the Prius would handle snow), when, Christmas eve, Morning Edition had a
long, long piece on melting glaciers. I went with the Prius. It’s the 3rd on our
block purchased this year.
Prague: October was our 25th anniversary – we didn’t make it to Italy (yet) but
Steve proposed visiting him in Berlin and then going by train to Prague, in late
October. Pankow was pretty (sycamore-lined streets) and it was neat to see the
people Steve had talked about. Prague was gorgeous. Our hotel ( converted
from a row of 16th century houses) was on the Castle side of the river – every
day started with walking across the (14th century) Charles Bridge, lined with
Baroque religious statues.
The Jewish quarter had an ancient cemetary, with prayer-laden papers crammed
into the lettering on the oldest stones; 4 synagogues had become museums of the
people who once lived in the quarter – one had walls covered with the names of
all the deportees, and hundreds of pictures from Theiresenstadt. The oldest
synagogue dated back to the 13th century– I’d never been in a Jewish place that
old.
The Lobkowitz Palace (near the Castle), had been newly converted to a museum
by family who had reclaimed paintings (Breughel and Cannaletto) and
manuscripts (Beethoven symphonies 4 & 5, which had premiered in the palace).
There were galleries of aristocratic ancestors from the Spanish Courts. The
museum tour was narrated by Mr. Lobkowitz, who’d been a realtor married to
an elementary school teacher in Boston until after the Velvet Revolution. Now
they had multiple palaces.
Social Action: Am still Social Action chair; we’re still serving soup kitchen
dinners (but a committee-person organizes most of the time) and reading to the
after-school program & having the families to bowl & for cookie-baking etc on
Martin Luther King day. Our Congressman (Sestak) came to speak at this year’s
fundraiser brunch, and we netted about $3k again. The new activity this year is
to help raise capital to start a coop grocery store in Chester, which hasn’t had one
for 16 years.
me / us: Steve tried hard to stay in touch through email and Skype, but the 6hour time difference was hard, and the house seemed awfully quiet. He was
very happy riding trains in Germany – he was loathe to return, and still
grumbles a bit. I’m so glad, now, to be able to curl up against him at night again.
We’re both such odd, cantankerous souls – I’m so grateful L and A seem to have
less difficult adolescences than we did, and don’t seem prone to depression or
compulsiveness. When I put the Carleton sticker on the Subaru’s back window
(underneath the Dartmouth sticker), I felt like I’d gotten a passing grade in
parenthood.
Steve got me a (really nice) bike for my birthday – hoping we can go for rides
together when I’m more used to it again & when the weather’s warmer. I need
to read up on Roman history (all I know is from Steven Saylor mysteries) and
start scoping out Karen Brown’s picks for “charming” Italian inns. We’re both
getting paunchier & creakier, but life is very good.
Leon writes. Math and Majoring and Academics. I took a lot of math in high
school, and by the time I reached college, I thought that I'd had enough. After
taking multivariable calculus, I didn't take math for a year. When I decided to
major in physics (as opposed to economics), I learned that I needed to take
differential equations. I did well in that class, so I decided to take two more math
classes over the next two terms. That was my situation when I wrote this letter
last year. Although I didn't exactly say it, I didn't do as well in those classes as I'd
have liked, and I didn't plan on taking more.
I intended to only take two classes winter term (as opposed to the usual 3) –
intermediate electricity and magnetism (a core undergraduate class) and
intermediate quantum mechanics (which, despite the title, was populated mostly
by first year graduate students). On a whim, I signed up for real analysis, a math
course taught by the professor who taught the differential equations class. The
subject has a reputation for being boring – basically you use the triangle
inequality (|x+y|<|x|+|y|) and a property of real numbers called completeness to
prove calculus – and I figured that I'd drop it if my other two classes panned out.
It would be an understatement to say that the term did not work out the way I
planned. I now see it as something of an academic watershed – I wish it had
happened sooner. The quantum mechanics class was very difficult, and my
studying methods weren't working. I made two (obvious) minor changes that
made a huge impact – writing in text books, and attending office hours.
In high school, writing in books was verboten. The professor in my required
freshman writing class encouraged us to write in our books, but I somehow didn't
make the connection between writing in English books and writing in science
textbooks (perhaps because I didn't really start reading my textbooks until
sophomore year – I relied almost exclusively on notes instead). I don't recall
exactly when the break through moment came – I think some steps were skipped
in a derivation and I was so frustrated I just started writing on the nearest piece of
paper, the book. Now, I don't know how I could live without writing in such books
– it's an excellent way to both figure out what's going on and to keep focused (it's
also useful for review and reference, because you don't have to derive everything
over again).
I also started going to office hours out of frustration – I couldn't figure out what
several homework problems meant. I guess I didn't go to office hours before that
because of some macho "I can do this all by myself" notion – I've since
discussed this with fellow students and found that I wasn't the only one with that
idea (for part of freshman year, that idea extended to group work – I eventually
came to my senses). For the quantum mechanics class, I ended up more or less
camping out in the professor's office to get the first problem set done.
While all this was going on, I was still taking real analysis, and applying the
methods I was learning from quantum mechanics. It was proving to be quite
enjoyable, but I was very busy (I was still working on the free electron laser I
mentioned last letter and doing work that's written about further down) and I
decided that a class had to go. I dropped the quantum class figuring that, given
the difficulty of the first problem set, I didn't want to stick around for the second
one. I now think that I could have pulled it off, but at the time I don't think I
realized the effectiveness of my new techniques. I made some other small
changes as well – perhaps encouraged by a talk by Cal Newport '04 who wrote a
couple of books about effective study habits (he believes that a number of small
changes can have a large effect). These changes mostly dealt with when (in
short burst, including during small blocks of time during the day) and where
(obscure places that are quiet, sparsely populated, and not my room) I worked.
One consequence of all this is that I did well in real analysis, and I've since taken
more math classes and done well in them. I'm now a double major.
Cycling. Every spring that I've been at college, I've take part in collegiate road
bike races. I was never particularly serious about it – it was mostly for the
discounts on equipment, people, and excuse to be off campus. However, last
year, I decided to do some training in the winter off season, and it paid off. I
scored (a few) points at an early season race at Bucknell (the first points of my
collegiate racing career), and, much to my surprise, I won the final race of the
season at Vassar (some pictures are available on my profile on the cycling wiki –
it's linked to from my web page). Granted, this victory was in a low category, but
it was the first time I'd won anything for doing a physical task. I'm planning to step
up my preparation this coming term, so hopefully I'll have more success this
spring.
Teaching. The winter before last, I took an introductory electronics class that I
described fondly in the last letter. Unexpectedly, the professor asked me to be a
lab teaching assistant for the class last winter. Besides being one of the best
paying jobs on campus ($15 per hour) it was a lot of fun. I troubleshot people's
circuits in lab, which often required an explanation of some theory that the
circuit's creators were hazy on.
Last term I was a grader for a multivariable calculus class (it appears that
I'll be doing it again next term as well). It was a little shocking to see how
little of it I remembered, so it was good review. It was also good practice
because I plan to be doing more grading in the future.
Robotics. In high school I was president of my school's robotics club, which
participated in the FIRST robotics competition. I intended to help mentor a local
team when I got to college, but work and a lack of a car got in the way. However,
I was planning to have a car at school this year, and I learned of an opportunity
to help mentor a team participating in the FIRST Lego League competition (the
elementary and middle school FIRST competition), so I decided to join in.
Unfortunately, I got myself in to an accident while driving up to school, and, while
nobody was hurt, the car was totaled. However, the mentor organizer was able to
pair me with another student who did have a car.
The team was comprised of fifth graders who had never taken part in the
competition before. They were surprisingly calm and pleasant to work with
(maybe I didn't know what to expect – I've had little interaction with fifth graders
since I was in fifth grade – I wonder what I would have been like to work with).
They did like overly complicated solutions to problems, but they were usually
receptive to my advice, and I think that I did a decent job of leading them to
solutions, rather than saying "You should do it such and such a way". The
programming was accomplished with a language based off LabVIEW – a visual
programming language I'm familiar with because it's commonly used to automate
laboratory experiments – so I was at home with it (when I was in fifth grade, I
learned BASIC, and I'd used logo for controlling legos before then. No fancy
graphical interface, just text... kids have it so these days...)
In truth, it was kind of fun to work with the kids – it was not a position I had really
been in before. They ended up doing well for a young rookie team and seemed
to enjoy it, so I think that they'll be back at it next year. I might finally get involved
with the local high school team this coming term as well.
Physics Research. I've been fortunate to have taken part in several varied
research projects. In high school I worked in a lab that studied non-linear optics.
Two falls ago I worked in a plasma physics lab. Last winter I continued work on a
free electron laser. And last summer I got in to a National Science Foundation
funded Research Experience for Undergraduates at Lehigh University. The last
one was special because it was the fist time I did an experiment – that, to our
knowledge, had not been done before – and came away with data that was my
own. My previous work in physics labs was more along the lines of construction
or interpreting other people's data.
The group I worked with at Lehigh was looking in to the electroluminescent
properties of rare earth ion (REI) doped semiconductors (e.g. a small amount of
Europium (a rare earth element) mixed in to aluminum nitrite (a semiconductor)).
When an electrical current flows through these materials, some of the energy is
transfer to the REIs and gets turned in to light. These REIs give off more or less
the same color of light independent of what semiconductor they're placed in. The
hope is that one could, for example, mix some Europium in to silicon and make
lasers on microchips for transferring data within a computer. The problem is that
the REIs give off much less light than expected in this situation. The group ruled
out simple explanations for this, and suspected that the REIs interact with the
semiconductor in an unusual way. My experiment measured the rate and time it
took for energy to transfer from the semiconductor to the REIs. This experiment
had been done with a few materials, but it required hours of sitting in front of an
electron microscope in a dark room while manually reading off data and
controlling several parameters. I automated the experiment and wrote a program
to compare the data with a simple model we made up (an abstract is available on
my webpage). In the end, I didn't come up with anything groundbreaking, but it
was an excellent learning experience.
Grad School. As my parents have mentioned, I'm applying to grad school in
physics. I really like doing physics experiments, and that's the only real way to do
it. In a way, the thing I like the most is the engineering aspect. First off, you
engineer an experimental setup. In addition, the type of physics that attracts me
has some practical purpose, so you're also engineering a device. So why not be
an engineer? To do experiments, you make one off devices that can require
optics, mechanical parts, electrical components, electronics, programming, you
name it. Most engineers I've talked with have to deal with one aspect of a large
project, don't spend a lot of time doing stuff hands on, and have to worry about
things like mass producing their design. That's not stuff that I'm interested in. In
addition, like most other aspiring physicists, I'm interested in the laws that govern
the world around us. In short, deciding to apply to grad schools was a no brainer.
Or it should have been anyway. The problem is that I've been getting mixed
messages (from everyone) about my prospects for admission, and what the job
market is like beyond that. Every now and then some report will come out saying
that there aren't enough scientists in the United States, but the evidence seems
to point the other way.* Others have made the point that the pay isn't great in
academia and competition is tough (even after the grad school and the
postdocs).** I'm hoping to start down that path anyway, but I'm going to keep my
eyes open. I'd be interested if anyone has comments on the subject.
*Researchers Dispute Notion That America Lacks Scientists and Engineers, Chronicle of
Higher Education, 11/16/07
** http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
Aaron. (Jan 1) Usually I haven’t bothered to contribute to my family’s annual letter, but
since I’m going to be stuck in the Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, and ultimately
(hopefully) Minneapolis airports and various airplanes for somewhere in the order of 12
hours due to the wonders of bargain airfare shopping and winter weather, I’ve decided to
break the habit. Anyhow, if you haven’t been reading this letter for a while or have
forgotten most of last year’s content, let me introduce myself. I’m Aaron, the youngest,
largest, and farthest flung son of the Maurer-Stier family. I’m currently a freshman at
Carleton College (class of 2011), which is my ultimate destination in this marathon travel
session.
In last year’s letter, which was sent out right at the worst part of the whole admissions
process that ultimately landed me at Carleton, my mom probably went on about how
worried she was about it, how I had so many applications yet to submit, and how I hadn’t
gotten in anywhere. Thankfully all those issues have been resolved. By the respective
due dates of January 1st and 15th of last year (depending on the college) I had submitted
all the proper applications, and spent the next two months waiting around for news of my
fate.
This began arriving in the latter part of March with an acceptance letter from Bowdoin, to
which I had not only been accepted, but to such a degree that the admissions office had
sent me the news a couple weeks early so I could spend the time contemplating just how
much I would like to go there, which at the time was very much. Being the first college
which I was accepted to, Bowdoin made sure that my mom’s greatest fear, and in fact
mine as well, did not come to pass, namely that I wouldn’t get into college. This had two
effects: my mom’s level of stress went from severe to only extreme, and I was able to
truly begin being a lazy senior. Over the next couple weeks I received news from the rest
of the places I applied: Accepted to Bates, Carleton, Colgate, Hamilton, Wesleyan, and
University of Vermont (despite not submitting so much as my transcript); wait listed at
Cornell (which I only applied to in the hope of being able to reject an Ivy league school)
and Penn State (which ironically I had applied to as a safety school, but way too late in
the process), and rejected at Amherst (which was no surprise considering after they had
deferred me for early decision I realized that my application there was rife with spelling
mistakes). In total this gave me a record of 7-1-2, which would be good enough to get
most high school football teams into playoffs.
After the bliss of having so many institutions of higher education validate my eighteen
years of life passed, I had to get down to the business of deciding which one to go to.
Bowdoin was probably in the lead if only because they had gotten back to me first, but I
became much more interested in Carleton after the head football coach called me up
congratulating me on my acceptance to Carleton (which incidentally I hadn’t heard since
the letter had gotten lost in the mail) and trying to convince me to come there and play
football. This had me intrigued, because no other school had really given me a look for
football and the coach was a young guy trying to rebuild the program.
This helped me narrow down my choices to Bowdoin, Carleton, and Wesleyan (thrown in
by virtue of its US News and World report ranking). Over the course of April, I went
around visiting these colleges, which is necessary to get any real idea of the college as
well as to avoid going to my inconsequential high school classes. My first visit was to
Carleton, where I met the football coach and his various assistants, as well as many of the
players and other members of the student body. The trip left me pretty excited for the
maize and blue, but I still needed to visit the other colleges. Within 20 minutes of arriving
at Wesleyan I knew it wasn’t for me, a fact which didn’t stop me from having a good
time however. Finally I visited Bowdoin, where I once again met the football coach as
well as numerous students and players, and liked what I saw. The first couple days after I
got back from Maine, I was pretty uncertain about which school I wanted, but within a
week I realized my gut was saying Carleton, so I sent off my deposit.
The rest of the school year was very enjoyable and relaxed. It consisted of a whole slew
of parties, events, and nostalgia leading up to graduation, as well as a minor miracle in
me getting no grade worse than a B-. After graduation I had a rather uneventful summer
aside from a few jaunts to the Jersey shore. It mostly consisted of sleeping, eating, and
weight lifting in preparation for my first season of collegiate division three football.
That season began in mid August with training camp. My mom and I flew out, rented a
car, and drove down to Northfield. After a day of shopping at Target and various
meetings for parents, she and the rest of the players’ families left and it was football time.
In essence, camp is 2 straight weeks of football, followed by another week of mostly
football. You live with the team, you eat with the team, and on top of that the coaches
keep you busy almost all of the time. In an average day, we had 4 hours of practice, 2-3
hours of conditioning and walkthroughs, and another 2 hours of meetings. It was tough,
but I enjoyed it. The football team is a great bunch of guys, and it was nice being able to
come in on an even footing with the rest of the freshmen, as opposed to in high school,
where having started playing late I was always playing catch up. I was doing very well
for the first part of camp, but a series of injuries essentially stopped me from playing for
the last week and a half. By the time I was healthy the rest of the student body had
arrived and classes had started.
The classes I had gotten were “Black Slaves, White Masters” (my freshman seminar),
“Comparative Political Regimes,” and “Intro to Ancient Greek.” I had mixed feelings
about my seminar; on the one hand I learned a ton of interesting stuff, on the other the
way that the professor led the class bothered me. He seemed to enjoy being a hardass
beyond its usefulness in teaching, and would go out of his way to make our lives difficult
in a fashion that was neither productive nor helpful. My political science class was the
one that I thought I was going to enjoy the most, but in the end I just never really got into
the material. Finally, ancient Greek can only be described as a mistake, as I was the only
member of the class who hadn’t taken Latin or who wasn’t fluent in two foreign
languages. I barely managed to keep afloat in the class for half a term before I dropped it.
Usually the first couple weeks of freshman year are extremely awkward as people try to
get to know people on campus. With football, I had the advantage of knowing the entire
sixty odd players on the team, so it wasn’t too bad. The one difference is it took me
longer to reach out to the people on my hall, but once I did I made numerous friends. The
students at Carleton are a great, relaxed, nice, laid back lot. While much of the student
body is from the east and west coasts, a Midwestern mentality prevails, which stands in
contrast to the other schools I had been looking at, which had much more of the preppy,
New England mindset.
All in all I think 2007 has been a good year. I survived high school, got into college, and
managed to do pretty well in my college classes. The Carleton football team didn’t have a
great season, only winning three out of ten games, and in general I felt that after I missed
the week and a half of camp that I didn’t play as well as I would have liked, but I am still
extremely glad I played, and plan to work hard and come back bigger, stronger, and faster
for next year. I’m very excited for winter and spring terms at Carleton, where with much
more free time now that the football season is done I can take advantage of what Carleton
has to offer even more. I hope all of you have a great 2008.
the end!