Eigenmumbles

Literature is not about proper spelling and grammar. Computer science is not about using Windows or UNIX effectively. Mathematics is not about adding and subtracting numbers. I think professors in most subjects live with the knowledge that most people in the world identify their fields with skills learned in primary school. I’m sometimes annoyed and sometimes infuriated by people who assume that I spend my days adding columns of numbers (a task at which I have no particular skill) or fixing Windows (which I mostly don’t use). And yet, I do know how to add numbers; and I do know something about working with Windows, and OS X, and Linux. Those aren’t things I know because I’m a mathematician and computer scientist. They just happen to be skills I picked up long ago, and now mostly take for granted when I use them in my day-to-day routine. These are background skills, the technical nonsense that I mostly handle by habit without even thinking about it.

And yet, not everyone knows the same technical nonsense that I do. And one of the hardest parts of teaching, at least for me, is understanding when someone is confused not by a topic that seems subtle and interesting to me, but by a bit of technical nonsense that rarely even touches my conscious thoughts any more.