![[Photo by Dale Myers]](http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lady/photos/outdoors.jpg)
``Who are you expecting to read all this?''
``Why are you telling the whole world these things about yourself?''
``Are all math professors like you?''
``I think you're awfully long-winded.''
``You should take a good course in web page design.''
| What's New |
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So then just call me stupid.
E-mail: Figure out the address from the URL from this page.
Omit the "~" of course.
A therapist, responding to one of my articles in sci.psychology,
once sent me email asking "Who is Lee Lady?" This was my response.
Only stupid people gossip about themselves.
-- George V. Higgins
-- Lee Lady
Professor of Mathematics (retired) at the
University of Hawaii
NLP Master Practitioner
Survivor of
Clarion Science Fiction Workshop (1981)
Telephone Volunteer at the
Honolulu Suicide and Crisis Center
(1985 - 1988)
Volunteer at San Francisco Sex Information (SFSI)
(1990-1991, 1998)
Briefly Staff Member/Teacher at
Summerlane and Green Valley Schools (1965)
Who Am I?
The Lee Lady FAQ |
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This is where most of the goodies are. Everything you ever wanted to know about me, and lots that you didn't.
In any formal or semi-formal teaching, there are always two conflicting paradigms being carried out simultaneously. The first one is a capitalist paradigm, where the teacher functions as a boss who assigns work, for which the students earn credit. I am convinced, in fact, that the main reason many employers look for employees with college degrees is that college is a fairly good simulation of the workplace, and it is fairly reasonable to hope that someone who has functioned reasonably well in meeting the requirements in school will also function satisfactorily in meeting the requirements at work.
The other paradigm is that of teaching as a ``helping'' profession. In this model, the student comes to a teacher because he has a desire to learn something, and the teacher works cooperatively with the student as a guide to help him achieve his goal.
I think that both these paradigms are always at work to some extent, but in my experience, the capitalist paradigm is always by far the domininant one in our system of formal education, whereas the cooperative model is much stronger in the many classes I have experienced outside the academic system.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, a college education was seen as a bauble for the rich, a finishing school for children of the upper class or a place where the youth of the nouveau riche could mingle with the upper class and acquire social graces and upward social mobility. (Upward economic mobility was not the issue for families that could afford to send their children to college.) A college education, which filled the minds of its students with esoteric knowledge and unrealistic theories, was looked on unfavorably by employers in such practical fields as journalism or engineering.
But as the century got older, gradually college became seen as the means by which citizens could become above average, and it was regarded as unfair that this opportunity should be available only to the rich.
By the Sixties, the construction of new colleges and a variety of scholarship programs (most notably the GI Bill) had resulted in a large mass of new college graduates. Discouragingly enough, though, many of these new graduates turned out to be only average after all. It was then realized that we had underestimated what would be required to raise a person above the norm. For many, at least a Masters degree would be essential. Therefore money was poured into creating new graduate programs and expanding existing ones, and creating new graduate fellowships, such as those established by the National Defense Education Act. But by the end of the Sixties, it was becoming apparent that even a graduate degree was not adequate to make someone above average. It became common to find PhDs driving taxi-cabs and painting houses.
Going to college has become the normal rite of passage for a moderately intelligent middle-class youth. Anyone who has the ability and the desire can now become educated, but the American dream of having a standard formula that any person can follow to become successful and above average is still unfulfilled.
One of the primal forces that seems to drive me
(and that prevents me from sinking into a complete apathetic
sluggishness)
seems to be the urge to communicate to people,
especially in written form.
When I went to graduate school,
I was told (at least implicitly)
that if I learned to find an appropriate sub-sub-specialty
and become really good at it,
and publish lots of original research in it,
then I would be an intellectual of the mathematical persuasion.
I devoted a large portion of my life to this endeavour,
and produced (if I do say so myself)
quite a number of very artistic papers,
which, along with the work of a very few other mathematicians,
were responsible for completely changing the shape and direction
of the theory of finite rank torsion free abelian groups.
But this never really gave me a feeling of satisfaction --
the feeling that I was involved in science
in the way that I had wanted to be when I was young.
And the mathematical papers I wrote never satisfied
my need to communicate.
What I really wanted to do was explain things,
and often the things I wanted to explain were not new results,
but better ways (I thought!) of looking at
the existing body of mathematical knowledge --
and thus not publishable in journals.
And in any case, the style which journals demand
did not allow me to give the sort of explanations
I really wanted to.
I also devoted a lot of my life to trying to write fiction.
And, in fact, this is something I still very much want to do.
And yet when I would study the various fiction markets,
I could never quite seem to come up with ideas for stories
that would fit their formats.
Now, on the world-wide web, on this web page,
maybe I can finally say some of these things in writing.
I don't have to please any editor
or shape my ideas to any pre-assigned format
(except that a certain amount of brevity is definitely desirable).
None of the things written here is very profound.
In a lot of cases,
my lack of a scholarly perspective on the issues I address
results in my restating ideas that are old-hat to people
who are better informed.
I seem to be a natural born dilettante.
I've spent much of my life trying to be an academic,
trying to be an intellectual and a scientist,
and it just doesn't interest me any more.
I no longer care that much about whether my thoughts
are original are not.
All that matters is that they seem important to me,
and I think that
maybe a few other people (fellow dilettantes, perhaps)
will find them interesting,
or curious, or maybe even valuable.
So I am left alone with a constant buzz of thoughts
going through my head.
I'm constantly observing the world,
and thinking about it -- trying to figure out how it works.
And it seems like a lot of the things I observe and figure out
have some value, and are worth communicating.
But, until now, I have never seemed to be able to find
a suitable means for communicating them.