"Modern Algebra I" met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. All of my other classes met Tuesdays and Thursdays. I had wondered whether I could save myself a lot of commuting by ditching algebra most of the time, but started off the semester dutifully attending—and, as long as I was on campus that day anyway, also sitting in on Prof. Ross's "Topology" ("MATH 450") even though I couldn't commit to a fourth math course for credit.
-Prof. Ross is an outstanding schoolteacher, the best I encountered at SFSU. I choose my words here very carefully. I don't mean he was my favorite professor. I mean that he was good at his job. His lectures were clear and well-prepared, and puncutated with group work on well-designed worksheets (pedogogically superior to the whole class just being lecture). The assignments and tests were fair, and son on.
+Prof. Ross is an outstanding schoolteacher, the best I encountered at SFSU. I choose my words here very carefully. I don't mean he was my favorite professor. I mean that he was good at his job. His lectures were clear and well-prepared, and puncutated with group work on well-designed worksheets (pedogogically superior to the whole class just being lecture). The assignments and tests were fair, and so on.
On the first day, he brought a cardboard square with color-labeled corners to illustrate the dihedral group. When he asked us how many ways there were to position the square, I said: eight, because the dihedral group for the _n_-gon has 2<em>n</em> elements. On Monday of the second week, Prof. Ross stopped me after class to express disapproval with how I had brought out my copy of Dummit & Foote and referred to Lagrange's theorem during the group worksheet discussion about subgroups of cyclic groups; we hadn't covered that yet. He also criticized my response about the dihedral group from the previous week; those were just words, he said. I understood the criticism that there's a danger in citing results you or your audience might not understand, but resented the implication that knowledge that hadn't been covered in class was therefore inadmissible.
I definitely shouldn't have worried. Other than the fact that Prof. Ferreira gave me credit for the assignment, I have no evidence that any human read what I wrote.
-My final paper was an exercise in bullshit and malicious compliance: over the course of an afternoon and evening (and finishing up the next morning), I rambled until I hit the wordcount requirement, [titling the result, "How Do Housing Supply and Community Assets Affect Rents and Quality of Life in Census Tract 3240.03? An Critical Microeconomic Synthesis of Self, Place, and Knowing"](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-ls200-final_paper.pdf). My contempt for the exercise would have been quite apparent to anyone who read my work, but Prof. Ferreira predictably either didn't read it or didn't care. I got my A, and my Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics (Mathematics for Liberal Arts) _cum laude_.
+My final paper was an exercise in bullshit and malicious compliance: over the course of an afternoon and evening (and finishing up the next morning), I rambled until I hit the wordcount requirement, [titling the result, "How Do Housing Supply and Community Assets Affect Rents and Quality of Life in Census Tract 3240.03? An [_sic_] Critical Microeconomic Synthesis of Self, Place, and Knowing"](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-ls200-final_paper.pdf). My contempt for the exercise would have been quite apparent to anyone who read my work, but Prof. Ferreira predictably either didn't read it or didn't care. I got my A, and my Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics (Mathematics for Liberal Arts) _cum laude_.
## Cynicism and Sanity
There's a substantial component of chance in my coming to finish the degree. The idea presented itself to me in early 2024 while I was considering what to work on next after a writing project had reached a natural stopping point. People were discussing education and schooling on Twitter in a way that pained me, and it occurred to me that I would feel better about being able to criticize school from the position of "... and I have a math degree" rather than "... so I didn't finish." It seemed convenient enough, so I did it.
-But a key reason it seemed convenient enough is that I still happened to live within commuting distance of SF State. That may be more due to inertia than anything else; when I needed to change apartments in 2023, I had considered moving to Reno, NV, but [ended up staying in the East Bay](http://unremediatedgender.space/2023/Sep/start-over/) because it was less of a hassle. If I had fled to Reno, then transferring credits and finishing the degree on a whim at the University of Nevada–Reno would have been less convenient. I probably wouldn't have done it—and I think it was ultimately worth doing.
+But the reason it seemed convenient enough is that I still happened to live within commuting distance of SF State. That may be more due to inertia than anything else; when I needed to change apartments in 2023, I had considered moving to Reno, NV, but [ended up staying in the East Bay](http://unremediatedgender.space/2023/Sep/start-over/) because it was less of a hassle. If I had fled to Reno, then transferring credits and finishing the degree on a whim at the University of Nevada–Reno would have been less convenient. I probably wouldn't have done it—and I think it was ultimately worth doing.
The fact that humans are such weak general intelligences that so much of our lives come down to happenstance, rather than people charting an optimal path for themselves, helps explain why there are institutions that shunt people down a standard track with a known distribution of results. I still don't like it, and I still think people should try to do better for themselves, but it seems somewhat less perverse now.
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff