My Fifth Graduate Class at Hopkins

My fifth graduate class at Hopkins was Discrete Math, taught by an employee of APL. It was wonderful.

The first day of class, I arrived early. I was sitting, texting and waiting for the professor to arrive. I looked up to see a rather handsome man with absolutely no hair staring at me. “Are you Laurel Maury?” I nodded.

We went aside, and I showed him how the streaming microphone worked. He nodded, and asked a few questions. He put it on.

Other than using my streaming microphone, he treated me like any other student. It was great.

I thoroughly enjoy engineering, and math. It’s fun. Yes, I find it hard sometimes. But good hard.

The discrete math professor liked football analogies. Football and poker. He was a mathematician at the Applied Physics Lab and, I came away from his class with the sense that, if you want to understand discrete math in American, you need to understand the basic poker hands, how they’re ranked, how poker betting works, and how (American) football playoffs work. I knew most of the poker basics, but was in the dark about the football.

(The looks on the faces of the other women in the classroom suggested that they, too, didn’t understand how football playoffs worked. Football was something that came on and caused men to leave a mess in the kitchen for women to clean up — even if you’re interested in football, the pregame explanations of team lineups and rankings tends to be the part women miss.)

But mostly he was great. He cared deeply about his subject and had about fifty pages of notes on discrete math that he’d prepared with great care. I still have a copy somewhere; sometimes professors take the care and thought to produce something that’s worth saving long after the class is over.

And he treated us with respect, too.

At one point, he asked me if everything was going ok in the class — with the streaming mic. It was, and I told him so.

I believe this is the only time in all the classes I’ve taken at Hopkins that anyone — administrator or professor — ever asked me how things were going of their own volition.

I believe he did so simply because he was a decent human being saw it as part of being a responsible person. He also asked for feedback on his notes, and really listened.

He even seemed to understand that football playoff analogies and word problems weren’t for everyone — because everyone doesn’t watch football. At one point he seemed to realize that, unlike the football true believer he was, everyone in the room didn’t know how the playoffs worked. So he explained. Then he started to use fewer playoff analogies.

He also explained that many probability problems and theorems depended on a knowledge of poker, because that’s how mathematicians often explained them. So we needed to understand the basics there.

When it came time for the midterm and exam, I explained how a professor had left my belongings in a classroom and went home once. Sure, I’d give him my computer and cell phone, but he had to give me his car keys.

He smiled and handed them over.

Was it perfect? No. I believe someone interrupted my midterm. Am I sure that happened? No. My exams were interrupted so many times, I didn’t keep track of which ones were interrupted.

But it’s much easier for any student to work when the professor is a decent human being who treats his students as people.