I will soon be teaching a math course. Kind of.

Looking back at events from nearly thirty years ago, I am pleasantly surprised at the decisions that I made.  One of those was to walk away from all things math, and I am all the happier.

Math came easily to me; not only did I not have anxieties, I enjoyed learning and doing math.  In school, I routinely did the classwork way ahead of the rest and then used up the remaining time to finish the assigned homework. (Which explains why my mother claims, and rightfully so, that she has never ever seen me do homework or study.)  I understood  the abstraction when in engineering too, though by then I knew for certain that my heart was not in math.

When I switched out of engineering to study the subjects that I wanted to know more about, it was clear that most faculty in the graduate program expected me to put my math and engineering background to use.  The social sciences were getting heavily into math and statistics and those who could play with numbers had an easier time publishing papers, which was all that mattered.

But, I couldn't care.  Because, I could not be convinced that mathematical and statistical modeling would explain the human and social dynamics that I was interested in and, I was even more confident that those models could never predict anything into the future.  Instead, I chose to transition into the methods that have been used for centuries--thinking and writing.  It was a difficult struggle because the years of schooling in India had screwed up my thinking abilities and had not given me any sense of how to write.

I even made fun of the articles in journals.  They were all gobbledygook.  Plenty of data but minutiae. Greek symbols expressing statistical modeling of social issues.  And sentences that rarely made sense.

As if a bunch of laws can explain quite a few things about the human condition.  The crazies who wanted to study the problems that humans and societies face decided to develop models to explain the problems.  And to develop laws and theories.  Madness, I say, madness!

The net result of all that?  I was a loser out of graduate school!  A loser I continue to be.  At least, I am a loser on my own terms, eh! ;)

Despite the losses, I am confident that all it will take is one look around the world in order to understand that developing mathematical and statistical models will do nothing to help us with the problems all around.  Oh well.  Losers don't get to write history! ;)

But, I will soon get to teach math to incoming college freshman students.  Details in another post; stay tuned!