How my math major prepared me to be a mom of two

You take a lot of abstract classes for a math major. I mean, a couple of them even have Abstract Algebra in the title, so they don't shy away from the fact.

But what those titles conveniently conceal is how applicable the formulas and theorems learned in those classes are to the life of a mother of two little ones.

For example, in these few short months since Matthew was born and Joseph turned three, I have been able to use proof by contradiction, Gram-Schmidt orthonormalization, reverse triangle inequality, three body problem, boundary problems, complex conjugates, Fibonacci spirals, and of course, my favorite -- the three-point Steiner problem on the regular tetrahedron.

But I'd have to say it's my knowledge of the cardinal numbers that has made my math major invaluable the past few months, as demonstrated here:

(If you listen closely, you can hear Joseph demonstrating Hooke's law on the couch.)

But what about all the other things I listed? How are those helpful?

Well that, dear friend, is left as an exercise for the reader.

How my toddler is already a master electrical engineer

During the last few months of my master's degree, I would alternate my time looking up at the whiteboard to take notes and looking down at my belly to watch my baby move inside me. As he kicked, I sometimes wondered if he was paying attention to my professors. After all, babies can hear what's going on outside the womb.

Well, after several months of observation, I am pleased to report that Joseph must have been paying attention all along because he has already mastered several areas of electrical engineering. For example:

1. Basic Physics. In order to do any real electrical engineering, you've got to have your physics down. And Joseph does! Like a miniature Isaac Newton, he knows exactly how gravity works. It goes down. Everything, from balls to cheerios to cups of water, all follow the same basic rule. Along with this understanding of gravity, it appears he also has an understanding of the potential energy, U, of each of these objects. At least, that's my guess for why he announces, "Uh-oh" (ie U0) each time one of these experiments takes place.

2. Electricity and Magnetism. After you take your mechanics class, you've got to know your electricity and magnetism. And, judging by how much joy he gains from turning the lights on and off and pulling magnets on and off the fridge, I'd say he's pretty much there.

3. Stochastic Processes. Stochastic processes, or random processes, are at the heart of signal processing. Everything from compressed sensing to information theory depends on modeling the oh-so random world around us. And Joseph is certainly good at randomness, especially when it comes to food. Chicken might be okay one meal, but definitely not the next. The same goes for bread, strawberries, peas, milk, and basically every other food he eats. When you look at acceptable foods over time, the graph resembles white noise, a random signal. Naturally, the power spectral density of his food-acceptability curve is N0, or, in other words, "No!"

4. Coding Theory. As information theorist extraordinaire Claude Shannon proved, if you pick a probability of error and a rate of transmission less than capacity, there is an encoding and decoding scheme which will have error less than the chosen probability of error. In other words, if you're willing to work for it, you can get people to understand you. Right now, our communication takes place in a noisy channel because of a variety of factors, including a lack of fluency in each other's languages. However, Joseph is nothing if not persistent, and he overcomes the noisy channel by increasing the rate of transmission. That is, he knows how to follow me around saying, "Cracker? Cracker? Cracker?" in the hopes that I will someday decode his signals correctly.

5. Feature Detection. There are a variety of transforms out there used to identify features such as edges, corners, and even blobs. And somehow Joseph has managed to build those into his own brain. Take, for example, his use of the Radon transform. For weeks, every isolated line segment was a "Dih!" (stick), and upon this classification was usually picked up.

Nowadays, his transform of choice is the Hough transform, used to identify circles and spheres. Once recognized, it is classified as a "Baaaaahh!" (ball). From pumpkins to the moon in the sky to the letter "O," he has got the Hough transform down pat.

6. Detection and Estimation Theory. There is not an airplane nor helicopter nor bus that can go by without our notice. Joseph is a master at threshold detection. And then, once the object is located, he points to it the whole time it is in his sight. Must have an internal Kalman filter.

7. Machine Learning. Right now, Kevin's PhD uses a lot of machine learning, which is basically teaching a computer to learn from data. This is done by giving it lots and lots of data to help it recognize patterns. Since machine learning is about teaching a computer to think like a human, it's kind of silly to say that Joseph is good at it. I mean, of course he's good at learning to think like a human. He is one!

But, he is sure good at it. I mean, sometimes a computer needs tens of thousands of samples in several dimensions to figure things out. Then there are these huge matrices full of all this data that the computer has to somehow make sense of.  On the other hand, Joseph has probably only seen things a couple hundred times and has no matrix to place all the data (that we know of), and he's already got a lot down. Recognizing patterns? You bet! He knows that sunscreen + shoes = outside, for example. Following directions? He knows not only how to do what we ask, but also how to disregard us.

8. Electronics. Laptop, camera, cell phone, vacuum -- you name it, and he knows how it works. All the wiring and integrated circuit boards might still be a little too abstract for him, but he knows the most important part: If you turn it on, then it works.

So, as you can see, Joseph is well on his way to being a fantastic electrical engineer.

Or maybe he'll be a firefighter.

See also: How electrical engineering prepared me for motherhood

How electrical engineering prepared me for motherhood

"You're majoring in math and electrical engineering? What are you going to do with those?" people asked throughout my college career. I would give some vague answer or a "I'm not sure" response. Deep down, all I really wanted to do with my degrees was "raise happy genius children" as I confided to Kevin at the beginning of our email correspondence before we started dating. (Apparently, he didn't mind that much because we started dating soon afterwards.) I often wondered if all my degrees would come to any use.

But the good news is, I have actually found electrical engineering to be quite useful in being a stay-at-home mom. Oh, I can't do things like execute a MATLAB script to do my laundry for me or perform a Fourier transform on Joseph to make him content in the frequency domain (i.e. actually like being in his swing), nor am I any good at fixing electronics (that's not where I specialized), but nevertheless, it has done me some good. Here are some examples:


-Signal processing: Besides being an adorable blob for the first few months, a baby is also an expert signal generator. His tongue, his arms, and eyes are all busy conveying signals. As are his vocal cords. A lot. A way lot. Luckily, with several signal processing courses under my belt, I've been ready to tackle all of the sounds and movements Joseph makes. Those cute high pitched squeals? My internal spectrum analyzer has processed those and determined those are too high to convey actual discomfort. (Really. They are several octaves above actual distress signals.) Those coughing cries? My subconscious has done a short-time Fourier transform and determined those to signal hunger. My success rate? . . . probably the same as any other mom, plus or minus 10%.

-White noise: All the baby books recommended saying "shhhhh" to calm your upset baby. That's what we normally say to people to get them to be quiet. But if you stop to think about it, your baby doesn't know that. You may as well be speaking Sanskrit to your baby to calm him down. What's so special about "shhhh"?

Here's where electrical engineering comes in. You see, sounds like "shhhh" are classified as white noise, like the blizzard that used to show up on TV screens back when cell phones were bricks. It has a flat power spectral density, which means there's nothing really to focus on. Which makes it a calming sound.

(Or you could just believe the "experts" who say that "shhh" sounds like the sounds of the womb, which is why it's soothing. Pshaw. My bet is on the flat power spectral density.)

-Tunneling: So, one required class for the major was Solid State Physics. In this class, we learned about a concept called "tunneling," which according to my textbook is a phenomenon in which a particle can make it across a barrier even though there's zero probability of finding the particle inside the barrier. (Or something like that. Physics people need not bother to correct me.) That is, there is some bizarre way of finding a quantum particle in a spot which classical physics says is impossible.

I've realized that Joseph's pacifier is a quantum object. How did I come to this conclusion? Often when he's falling asleep, he loses his pacifier and cries for us to put it back in. Sometimes we can hunt for several seconds before finding it in some obscure location such as underneath him or way above him. How on earth did it get there? Tunneling. This realization has probably saved my sanity.

-Tackling a problem: Oh, those were the days. The days I'd walk into the testing center after studying for hours and hours and take a look at the test. Look at the first problem. Turn the page to the second. Then the third. Then bite my lip and realize, I have no clue how to do a single problem on this test! Not a one!

But since I took enough of those tests, I came to expect that. I no longer had the panic attacks of freshman year. Rather, I was able to calm down and just approach the problem from whichever angle I could. As my brain turned back on, I would find myself slowly inching my way to the right answer. And luckily, engineering tests always had lots of partial credit.

Well, guess what? There are some days like that. Sometimes your handsome lab partner and husband is there to tackle the problems with you, like Joseph's gargantuan blowout in the temple parking lot or his vomitrocious display the day we were giving our talks. But then there are the days where you're on your own and you have to handle the screaming baby, spit-up, or blowout all on your own. And you don't know where to start. You don't even know if you can move without making the problem worse. That's when you inch your way slowly to the solution, and count on partial credit.

-The real world: In textbooks, things are straightforward. Breadboards work the way they are supposed to. The voltage at one end of the wire is the same as the voltage on the other end. V = IR.  The central limit theorem works. The coefficients you get for your PID controller fall easily from standard equations.

But in labs (and probably even more so in real life), things are not so simple. Sometimes the difference between a functional op-amp and a broken op-amp is if you blow on it. Sometimes random numbers aren't random enough. Sometimes you have to completely change your coefficients for the PID controller by a factor of 10. Real life is a lot more complicated than textbooks suggest.

And the same thing goes for babies, believe it or not. Oh, I did what I could to prepare. I watched this video about how babies cry. (Incidentally, did you know that recognizing babies' cries used to be one of 374 Young Women's requirements to get the reward?) I read all the papers the hospital gave me. I read several baby books including Baby Whisperer and took the quiz to see what kind of baby Joseph was.

And guess what? Even though all that information helped, Joseph was still his own person. Each time I took the Baby Whisperer quiz, Joseph fit into a different category. Sometimes his cries didn't fit the cries described in videos or books, which led me to play a lot of guessing games. Real life is complicated.

-Setting the problem aside: Even for problems that were just on paper rather than hands-on, I still found myself struggling a lot. I would find myself wrapped up in the details of a derivation and get wound around the axle so much that I couldn't think. What was the best thing to do? Just walk away from the problem for a minute.When I came back, I would find that it either fixed itself or I figured out another way to solve it. Likewise, when I just had no clue how to soothe Joseph and was at my wits' end, I would just set him down and walk away until I was ready to try again. Lo and behold, half the time that was what he wanted anyway.

-Enjoying the journey: In both school and parenthood, I've found the daily grind is a lot better endured with a sense of humor. After all, it is kind of funny when you're working on a project way past your normal bedtime or when your baby refuses to sleep and you have to keep going back and forth to console him. Or at least they can be funny if you let them be funny.

And then there are the things that are actually funny. (Maybe they're only funny to me. Oh well.)

I heard Kevin say, "Joseph, sometimes you make it hard to sleep" and I had to come investigate. It's blurry because I was laughing.

Talking about tunneling reminded me of this video from when Joseph was 6 weeks old. We are such helpful parents.

He is so talented.

At any rate, electrical engineering is incredibly useful for future mothers. In its own way.

So we're electrical engineers, part 3

I plugged in the blender today, just to check one more time if we ought to throw it away before we move to Michigan. (It had stopped working one Sunday.)

It worked.

Maybe the trick to fixing electrical devices is just to wait a few weeks. I wonder how much money I could charge for that.

Incidentally, we're hoping that trick will work with Kevin's laptop screen.

So we're electrical engineers, part 2

So following the events of Sunday, Kevin decided to plug in the food processor one last time.

It worked.

We did nothing differently.

He did finish his master's degree today, so there might be some correlation.

(And good thing, since its warranty was only 18 months. The blender is still MIA, possibly KIA.)

So we're electrical engineers . . .

On Friday, Kevin defended his masters thesis and passed with flying colors. As is traditional, there was food for the committee and audience. Kevin's parents brought a wide variety of foods, including a fair amount of fruit. In addition, they filled our fridge with even more fruit.

Combined with the fact that we have a lot of milk to get through fast, I decided it was time for us to use the blender for the second time in our married lives and make some shakes.

The first was a strawberry pineapple orange juice blend. As we moved the pitcher from the table to the blender base, some orange juice dripped out. We hurried and put it on the base and determined to tighten it when the fruit was blended.

After blending it, Kevin tried to tighten the pitcher. Only problem was, it didn't seem to follow the lefty-loosey righty-tighty rule, so instead as he lifted the pitcher up all of the shake spilled out over the base and counter and microwave.

Not being one to waste food, I grabbed a spoon and began to eat the shake (at least the stuff that had just spilled onto clean stuff like the base). Unfortunately, it needed ice cubes and sugar, so after a few bites we determined it wasn't worth eating and began to clean it up. After going through several paper towels, I had the brilliant idea to rinse off the rest of the base in the sink. I knew enough not to immerse the base in water, but I probably used more water to rinse it off than I should have.

After it was all clean, Kevin decided to plug the base in so we could try again. As he plugged it in, the motor started whirring. It's not supposed to do that. I decided to get any remaining water out by blowing it dry with my hair dryer (on its cold setting, of course . . . we don't believe in setting fires in our apartment). So I dried it and plugged it in and the motor wasn't whirring. I figured it was all fixed so I brought it back. But now it wasn't just that the motor wasn't turning on . . . none of it was turning on. We had broken the blender (mostly me, but I'll share some blame with Kevin).

Well. We still had a lot of fruit and milk we wanted to use up, so we remembered another appliance we had used exactly once in our marriage -- the food processor! We filled this one up with milk and strawberries and bananas and oats and pressed "grind."

Nothing. We tried a different outlet. Still nothing. Checked to see if there were any other switches that needed to be turned on first. Nope. Checked to see if anything had tripped the circuit breaker. Nope.

And just like that, we had a broken blender and a broken food processor. Good thing we never used them! (It kind of put a damper in our homemade salsa plans, but the peppers had already died anyway.) Those are two things we won't have to pack to Michigan!

The blender graveyard

But yeah. Here we both are with masters degrees in electrical engineering and neither of us had a clue how to fix the blender or food processor. To be fair, we both got our masters in radar, not in household appliances. But still.

On a happier note, Leslie was over here and was using my laptop and she kind of broke the keyboard about the same time we discovered the broken food processor, but she figured out the problem. Maybe she should have done electrical engineering.

On another happy note, we did get to eat our shake eventually because our neighbors were kind enough to lend us theirs for a few minutes. And the shake was . . . yummy enough. And healthy.

On yet another happy note, we've been enjoying faces like this for the past week:

I've decided that every post can be improved with a picture of a baby.  Maybe I am a mommy blogger after all.

The End of an Era

Well, I'm done. After a mad dash to Graduate Studies yesterday at approximately 1:55 to get everything approved by 2:00, I finished my masters degree and am graduating in August.

And with that last desperate sprint, I reached the finish line for a lot of different things. After 17 years of school (and some preschool I guess), I am done with school, possibly for forever. I'm done with college, done with my masters, done with my thesis . . . it's a little surreal.

Although I've reached the finish line for many different things, most of all I feel like I've reached the end of an era that began in winter semester of 2009. Why then? I feel like life has changed very little since then. I did get married in 2010 and got my bachelor's in 2011, but even those events, as momentous as they were, still felt like part of a pattern rather than abrupt shifts. In fact, I feel like the last huge shifts in my life occurred back in 2009.

Let me explain. It was that semester that I really started taking engineering classes and seriously considering electrical engineering. It was during that semester that I made many friends in that major that I still do stuff with today. In particular, it was then that I met Kevin. And it was then that I started going to the Clyde Building all the time. So even after I got married, it was just a transition from being with Kevin all waking hours to being with Kevin all hours. After I graduated, it was just a transition from going to the Clyde Building all the time to going to the Clyde Building even more.

So when I look at how stable things have been for the last 3 years and how much they're going to change within the next few months (no more school, brand new baby, brand new state), I think it's safe to say that I've reached the end of an important era in my life. It's been a wonderful 3+ years, but it's time to move on to a new phase of life (the new moon phase, pun intended).

In the spirit of nostalgia, here are a few things about the past few years that I won't miss, and some that I will.



Things I won't miss

--Research. It has its moments, but more often than not it is frustrating, confusing, and downright annoying. And sort of lonely.


--Working with engineers. At least, not engineering professors. Don't get me wrong -- they are brilliant and considerate and make awesome advisers in a lot of ways. But when it comes down to it . . . they're still engineers. By this I mean some of them would say things that were . . . off-putting. Now, I know they made fun of all the students, so I shouldn't have felt singled out, but when you're kind of the only girl they have different things to make fun of, so I felt singled out anyway. At the beginning it was all about was how I looked 12 years old (just fyi, women don't take that as a compliment until they're like 40), and at the end it was all about how grotesquely large I was (which I didn't appreciate for some odd reason). And if I ever hear the word "waddle" again I may throw something. I guess the take-home message for all professors who may read this is that you are never quite as funny as you think you are, especially when you're making a joke at someone else's expense.


--My computer. The version of Firefox it ran was made in 2006. 2006! Now, I'm sure that back in 2006 Firefox 2.0.0.17 worked great, but by 2012 it was completely lousy. I couldn't check several websites, the BYU homepage was a complete mess, I couldn't make comments on Facebook, and by the end, gmail only showed up in html. I wanted to do a print screen of several webpages to garner pity, but even print screen didn't work on my machine. Furthermore, it was just soooooooo slow. I could have exactly one program running and it would still take several minutes for it to do anything. They're finally going to upgrade the computers this summer, go figure.



Things I will miss
--Research. It can be frustrating, confusing, and downright annoying, but when you figure out how to make the algorithm work or how to simplify the equation, it can be exhilarating.

--Working with Kevin all the time. Those of you who have heard us work on homework together may wonder if I really mean this. After all, there were times when we disagreed and were quite intense in our disagreements. But we both knew that we were disagreeing about how the homework should be done, and as soon as we came to what we thought was the right answer, the fight was over. So yes, I will miss working with him. I'll miss our date nights in the Clyde Building and our late-night adventures getting projects done and the giddiness we both felt when we finally got something to work at 11 at night. I feel like we were able to see problems from different angles and were really able to help each other learn the material better.

--Learning about engineering. One comment I've never appreciated is, "Good for you for going into a technical field. Then if something happens to Kevin you'll be able to support yourself." That is a 100% true statement (albeit a bit morbid), but I feel like I misses the point of why I went into engineering (or why any woman bothers to get an education). I really did like learning about the stuff! If I hadn't liked it I wouldn't have done it. The math, the applications, the theory, all of it was just fascinating. I've still got a list at the back of my mind of stuff I still want to learn about and textbooks I still want to read. And now that school's out of the way I may just have time for them all . . .

Grad School

As you may know, Kevin and I are currently in a masters program at BYU in Electrical Engineering. I thought it would be fun to let you know some of the classes I've been taking.

670 (Stochastic Processes) This class is all about probability, especially for systems. When you put something into a system, what will you get out? If you only get what came out of the system, can you estimate what was put in? When can you ignore events that happened in the distant past? How good are statistical tests at indicating if something is present or not?

775 (Error Control Coding) This class talks about how to improve one aspect of digital communications. Whenever you use a cell phone or other wireless devices, the signal (like your voice) gets transmitted through the air to the receiver on the other end. But between you and the receiver there may be a lot of noise, which may corrupt the signal and cause errors. This class discusses how to "code" the signal so that on the other end you can fix the errors that were caused by the noise. So, it's basically a class on dealing with noise. And then some.

564 (Radar and Satellite Communications) Radar and satellite are all about detecting things. Is there a target there? Is it moving? Is what you saw a missile or the moon? How can you prevent false alarms?

671 (Mathematics of Signals and Systems) So this is basically a linear algebra class. Linear algebra is basically solving Ax = b, where A is a matrix (think of systems of equations from your algebra class in junior high). But from its humble beginnings, this class answers a lot of interesting questions. Like, what's the best way to solve the equation? If you have a bunch of data points, can you create a line or a curve which fits the data pretty well? How do you optimize things?

The cool thing is, even though all this stuff is pretty theoretical, it actually has a ton of applications. For example:

(670) Given that a test indicating the presence of hCG is positive, what is the probability that hCG is actually present?

(775) How do you deal with the noise caused by the construction across the street when certain limitations are set (such as not being able to use any of your preferred pain medicines for headaches)?

(670, well, all of them) How do you best filter out the noise to detect a signal with a rate of 150 beats per minute (particularly when that signal is buried under lots of junk and a louder signal with a rate of approximately 80 beats per minute)?

(671)  How can you tell if something is an inner product space? What properties does it take on?

(564) Given that you wake up nauseous every morning, can you detect when you will actually throw up vs. when you will be fine (that is, the nausea is a false alarm)?

and of course,

(671) Given that a body increases its mass by approximately half a kilogram per week, what is the best-fitting apparel for the curves that will soon be appearing and will change from this

to this by the middle of May?

(thanks to Matthew and Stephanie for letting me borrow their high-tech future camera!)



I'd say grad school has been a great preparation for life.
















(I guess I'm also taking a writing class. This post has been its application.)


(Kevin's in most of these classes with me. Except that instead of taking 775, Kevin's taking Real Analysis, which has been good for him in answering questions such as, "Is this really happening?" "When will this feel real?" "Do I dare analyze her mood?" "Am I really doing a 4th load of dishes in a row?")


Answers:
1) The probability is not 100%, since tests can give false positives. But not these types of tests, at least not very often.
2) Tylenol.
3) I dunno . . . the doctor used a nifty little radio/stethoscope thing that did it just fine.
4) In my case, something is an inner product space if it expands as the inner product expands.
5) Nope.
6) Whatever it is, I am going to have to buy it at some point.

...and not that any of you care . . . but I don't think I look as pregnant in real life as I appear in my first picture. I blame it on the shirt since I stretched it out by taking the second picture first. So you're not seeing a baby bump, I promise. Just poofy shirt and awkward angle and bad posture. And in my second one . . . well, hopefully the baby won't be as lumpy as it looks in this picture.

Frequently Asked Questions

It struck me today as I was walking to school that Kevin and I answer the same questions over and over again. On the off chance you haven't met us yet, you can come here to find the answers to the questions.

1. Wait, you guys had the same last name before you were married? So, is there . . . any relation? You guys have checked, right?
Answer: Yes, we had the same last name, yes we're distantly related, no, I don't think dating or marrying your third cousin once removed from another wife is all that weird or gross. People have told me about siblings marrying fourth cousins without realizing it until they were already married, so at least we got the hint beforehand. I'm not too worried about it until our kids start coming out with extra ears or missing fingers.

(as a side note, when girls who are recently married find this out, their response is usually like "oh! you're so lucky you didn't have to change your social security/driver's license.")

2. Oh! You're both electrical engineers! Can you fix my ____ (fill in the blank with toaster, oven, computer, lights, camera . . .) ?
Answer: Two fun facts. One: most modern stuff isn't made to be fixed. It's made to be thrown away and replaced. It's cheaper. Two: you're thinking of electricians, not electrical engineers. I can derive Maxwell's equations and probably do a z-transform or two, but as soon as I have to handle wires and circuits I'm a dunce.

3. You're an electrical engineer! Is your dad so happy?
Answer: If he is, he hasn't told me yet. (Okay, so I'm sure he's happy, but he's not the reason I went into it. All the exposure to engineering he gave me helped but I think it was a couple things my mom said that convinced me to give it a try.)

4. You're both electrical engineers! You must be so smart!
Answer: Thanks. It's nice to hear compliments like this but at the same time I'm a bit troubled. If I were doing elementary education or family life, would I not be smart? I've known plenty of extremely intelligent people in both majors, yet I doubt they hear this compliment when they share their major.


Okay, so now you know what questions I don't like to be asked. (I admit the last one was a comment, but I still don't like it.) Now you are free to ask me other (more interesting) questions such as, "What color is your toothbrush?" or "Given the choice between flying a kite and eating a marshmallow, which would you choose?" or even "Do you know what the weather's supposed to be like tomorrow?"

Yes, I think conversations would be a lot more fun with those sorts of infrequently asked questions.

My First (and Last) Undergraduate English Class

This past semester I took my first real English class in almost four years, and my first at BYU. (I’m not counting Technical Writing because it was technical by its very name, and not at all about literature.) After bouncing back and forth between the math and engineering buildings for my entire college career, I thought it was time to sneak in a proper English class for my Letters GE requirement. I was intrigued by what my EE 485 (Digital Communication) teacher told our class last winter — that we would “melt” in humanities classes. They were that hard.

Oh, really, I thought. I’d have to try it out.

Turns out, I didn’t “melt.” Engineering and math classes still are harder for me. But it wasn’t a waste of time. I still learned things which were applicable to life in general, which is kind of the point of general education classes.

Here are some of the lessons I learned:

1. Good authors choose their words carefully. I was skeptical the first day when my professor insisted that every alliteration, every stress on each syllable was chosen carefully if the author knew what he or she was doing. But as I’ve read more poems, plays, and novels throughout the semester, I’ve come to see what he was talking about. There is a great deal more planning that goes into good literature than I had anticipated. Coincidences just aren’t this consistent.

Of course, there were times where it seemed like my teacher went overboard, like when a passage described trees which were “blocking breezes.” “‘Blocking breezes.’ Isn’t that just beautiful?” he raved. Personally, I like alliteration just as much as anyone else, but I don’t judge a book based on it. Yet my teacher did. In fact, he said, “That’s why I couldn’t get through Harry Potter. It just didn’t sound pretty.” He said similar things about Twilight, namely, “I read it. I had to finish it. But it was like chewing on this wall here.” And I think he has a point — there’s more to a book, play, or poem than just the story. If story were the only issue, most of us would probably be content watching it than reading it. It’s the words themselves and how they connect together that make something worth reading.

2. There’s more to literature than theme. Ever since seventh grade, I’ve been hardwired to find theme in literature. “This story is about love.” “This story is about family.” “This story is about the futility of wickedness.” “This book is about inasmuch as ye keep the commandments ye shall prosper in the land.” So like many of my classmates, I was ready to find the theme in all the literature we discussed. But on the first day, my teacher basically said that he didn’t care for theme. What? No themes? What was literature without theme?

But now, having read literature without looking for themes, I think I know why my teacher had an issue with them. It’s the same issue I have with picking favorites. Questionnaires with too many “favorite” questions have always been a bit painful, to be honest. What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite animal? What’s your favorite ice cream flavor? What’s your most embarrassing moment? (Okay, that’s not a favorite, but I still hate that question.) How do any of these really help you know me any better? It’s great that you want to know my favorite candy bar, and I’ll probably be really touched if you give it to me for my birthday, but I think there’s a lot more to me than just my made-up-on-the-spot favorites.

And the same goes with literature. There is a lot more to a good story than its moral. There’s dialogue! Action! Plot development! Character development! The way the words flow together on the page! Must we force every piece of literature to have grand meaning? Can’t we just enjoy it for what it is?

3. Literature is like a mirror.  Over here in the electrical engineering department, we believe in doing research for a reason. We like building new things: bigger telescopes, faster chips, algorithms with lower complexity . . . you get the idea.

And so I think many students and professors in the Clyde Building look at the research done in the “Great and Spacious Building” (the JFSB) with a bit of disdain. Who really cares what Hemingway was thinking? What difference does it make if someone was an existentialist or not? Why write about Shakespeare again????

Having sat through an English class, I can now see why they want to write essays about old stuff. You see, I now think good literature is carefully fashioned as a sort of mirror. There are definitely things the author puts in for everyone to recognize, but somehow there are also elements of a good story or poem that are flexible enough to mean something different to anyone who reads it. For example, I read the short play Sure Thing by David Ives. It was set up sort of like the movie Groundhog Day where the two characters Bill and Betty get chance after chance after chance to go back in time and fix their words so the relationship could progress. Since I had more than my fair share of boy drama before I met Kevin, I really appreciated the play, especially with the way awkward encounters were handled. David Ives had no idea that I would be reading the play and bring my specific experiences along, but he did word things in a way I could relate to them. Thus, I was able to write a paper that pointed out things that my teacher had never noticed before because he hadn’t experienced them the same way. And I think that’s why they keep publishing papers on old literature. There’s still more to say, even if the authors didn’t originally intend for people to read everything they do into the literature that they do.

4. Aristotle is lousy when it comes to science, but he did know what he was talking about when it came to literature. Since about, oh, eighth grade, all I’ve heard about Aristotle was that it was his stupid ideas that kept Europe in the Dark Ages, since he didn’t believe in experimentation, so none of the Europeans believed in experimentation either til the 1600s or so. I saw the video about Galileo dropping the orange and the grape and them hitting the ground at the same time, and how everyone thought he was cheating or something because Aristotle said that running tests introduces bias (which we’re actually finding to be true at the quantum level).

But yeah. I had this notion that Socrates and Plato were smart guys, but Aristotle was just completely crazy. Now I haven’t actually read any of these philosophers (and I call myself an educated person . . . *gasp*), but my professor has read us some Aristotle in class, and I have to admit that Aristotle wasn’t completely crazy. I think he understood the elements of a good story, be it tragedy or comedy, and he had good things to say about “causes” in literature. I don’t think I’ll actually seriously study any of his work, but at least I can forgive him now for thinking that men have more teeth than women (seriously, man, just count them!) or thinking that the earth was at the center of the universe, since he did have good ideas in other areas.

5. English is not entirely subjective, and engineering is not entirely objective. It was kind of funny learning about poetry terms and the technical side of literature because at the same time in my control theory class we were learning about design and tweaking things. Thus, it seemed like my English class had the equations and my engineering class had the delicate, artsy side of things. The point is, for both the humanities and for engineering, there are lots of bad answers, and there’s a wide spectrum of good answers. The trick is knowing what makes things good and implementing it into both your writing and your engineering.

6. This stuff is hard. Not everyone can do Fourier Transforms, prove calculus, or design controllers. But nor can everyone write well and read carefully. Like every other art (music, dance, animation, visual art, etc), there are subtleties and nuances that make it more than just a fill-in-the-blank exercise.

And that’s very hard for me to accept. When I play piano, I like to just throw chords down and assume that they sound good on the first shot. I’m decent at improvisation because of this . . . I can’t afford to fix my mistakes while I’m performing, so I have to know a couple of basics and just go from there. But good music and good writing are carefully planned out and revised. This doesn’t really appeal to me.

In fact, that’s probably one of the reasons I never considered doing an English major. If you had known me when I was younger, you might have never guessed I would end up doing math since I wrote plays, poems, and stories long before I cared about Pythagorean Triples or differences of squares. Yet I have done very little non-academic writing other than journals, letters, blog posts, and Facebook statuses since I came to college. Why is that? It’s not because I was bad at it . . . though to be honest, a lot of stories I wrote were pretty terrible (but no worse than anything else people my age wrote). But I didn’t want to take the time to perfect them. And I didn’t want to spend four years in college trying to perfect something that could never be quite perfect. So I went for math and electrical engineering instead, where answers came more easily, and where “good enough” was preferable to perfect. (Of course, it also helps that those have much better job placement, and I slept better at night feeling like I was developing things which could help starving children in Africa.)

So this class reiterated what I already feared about literature — it’s hard to write. And even when it’s written well, only well-educated people will appreciate its true value. Yet for those who do pursue this route, just know that there’s plenty of respect coming from the Clyde Building.