It’s not math that is on my mind tonight – at least not here, been tweeting a bit looking for help!
My wife just recently started a new job. Rather than working at the same school where I work and where we live, she is now working at a Catholic college about a mile away or so. Yesterday morning we took the kids with us to a breakfast with Santa. I was so charmed by the co-workers I met, by the good cheer in the room, by the warmth of the people who interacted with my kids – especially my 4 year old little girl. It was a great way to start our day. It was snowing when we went, a gentle snowfall that ended up lasting all day and into the night. Being a Florida boy, I don’t have much inherent appreciation for the whole white Christmas thing, but I was taken by it yesterday.
Tonight we had our community Christmas dinner at my school. We eat twice a week with students at a sit down mean we call family style. The students rotate through and receive new assignments every three weeks. Our res life director tries to switch it up so there are boys and girls at each table, kids from different dorms, friends and strangers. I really appreciate these dinners for a variety of reasons. Tonight we dressed up, had a lovely meal prepared by our hard working dining staff, had kids sing holiday songs and had a student play Santa for all of the faculty kids (there are about 20 of them on campus!) One of the dining hall staff buys individual gifts for all the campus kids, the students sit and watch the Santa festivities and coo over the youngest ones. It’s a pretty magical night really. We have four more days left – if the weather allows us to! – and this is just one of the terrific traditions of our boarding community. I’m going to go to sleep feeling happy and peaceful tonight.
This is the kind of story that gets me into the holiday spirit, but I would also still be thinking about math. Like the rate of change of the gift exchange, the proportional reasoning between sizes of various quantities, statistical implementations of wait time, probabilities distributions, and the like. Well a very Merry Christmas to you and yours, and a great post.