The Importance of Not Being Ernest

I was thinking to title this post Haileyburying the Hatchet. That ridiculous episode, however, plays only a minor role in this post. Plus, at the moment, I have little interest in burying the hatchet. On with the post.

Once, when I was a post doc, I gave a couple lectures at a workshop for grad students and the like. I then wrote up a fleshed out version for the proceedings of the workshop. For that, I wasn’t sure how to refer to myself in the title bit, and so I asked Tim, another post doc, who was editing the proceedings. Tim replied:

“Basically, whatever you want. As long as you don’t refer to yourself as ‘Destroyer of Empires, Scourge of Infidels’, it should be fine.”

And thus:

Why do that? Simply, because I thought it was funny, and I thought Tim might find it funny, and that it would be funny to include in the published proceedings. I wouldn’t have cared less if Tim had asked me to remove it. As it happens, Tim never even mentioned it but obviously found it funny enough to leave it in for publication. Yay, Tim.

I have long been one for jokes. Why? I guess, as why most men do most most things, it was to try to get girls. I was never very good at getting girls but at least it meant I kept practising at telling jokes. It became my medium for everything. Not that I didn’t take things seriously, and I think I am a very serious person. But I took only the serious things seriously, and everything else was fair game and expendable.

Most people can understand and take a joke, even if it is somewhat inconvenient. When I first drifted into doing some teaching in schools, I had to fill out forms for permission to teach, to be signed off by the school principal. One of these forms required me to say something about the safety and security of my classroom. It was nonsense, at least in my context, but of course I could have played it with a straight bat. Instead, I wrote,

Very few students have died in my classrooms.

The principal, who was widely considered to be a dragon lady but with whom it turned out I got along very well, returned the form to me via the HoM, to be de-humoured. The only comment from the principal: “He has a wicked sense of humour”.

I have never been good at taking unimportant things seriously. For many, many years Burkard – my partner in crime – and I gave presentations here, there and everywhere. We had to have little bios, of course, saying the bland things that pretty much no one would read. So, at some point, I stopped taking the bio thing seriously and just provided various versions of the following:

Marty Ross is a mathematical bum. At the age of 2, he ran away from America to join the circus. After some controversy involving an elephant, he returned to America to do his PhD on minimal surfaces at Stanford University. After a stint at Rice University, he came back to Australia. Since then, he has wandered from Maths Department to Maths Department, aimless but happy.

Not one person ever objected.

Other such jokes are more pointed and have a point. The Godzilla picture above was the headshot for my final keynote at the MAV, and it was the correct headshot. That keynote resulted in controversy, about which I have written and which ended my association with the MAV. But the controversy was about MAV’s refusal to allow me to criticise VCAA and ACARA and other such organisations in the abstract, not about the jokes.

Prior to the blow-up, the MAV tolerated, and clearly appreciated, my pushing the boundaries, over many years. I pushed the boundaries in the presentations but also in the titles and abstracts, for everyone to see, not just the Marty fans. Here is a list of titles, all of which were accompanied by abstracts in the same vein, and for none of which the MAV ever expressed a problem:

Mathematics Education: Australia’s Very Own Titanic

The Da Vinci Code and Other Nonsense

The Australian Mathematics Curriculum is a Disaster

Theatre of the Surd

The Joy of Gambling

The Joy of Sports Gambling

How to Teach Mathematical Methods (If You Must)

How to Teach Specialist Mathematics (If You Must)

CAS: Is it the Messiah, or Just a Very Naughty Machine

Signs on the Road to Mediocrity: A History of Exams in Victoria

Idiot Wind: Climate Change, Freak Storms and Blowhards

Martin Gardner and Bullshit

Poker, Nuclear War and Other Fun Games

Ten Mathematical Gems, or Horrors, or Both

Marty’s Mathematical Horror Show

Back is the Only Way to the Future

However one regards such content, or the manner in which the titles and abstracts promoted this content, there was plenty here to make the organisers nervous, and tons more in the presentations themselves. But, to their great credit, the MAV dealt with it all and actively supported it all for many years.

Which is why, at the moment, the MAV is much higher in my estimation than researchED.

I will not go into detail here into the researchED absurdity; I will save that for comments or updates on that post. But I will briefly try to clarify how I think the researchED absurdity fits in.

I am talking here about humour in a number of different contexts employed for a number of different purposes. I don’t want to get too pedantic about what I do and why I do it. Thankfully, I have no theory of humour, which would be as pointless and as boring as a theory of explicit teaching. But I think it is pretty easy to give the theme.

In Australia, mathematics education, and education more broadly, and culture even more broadly, is a disaster. For decades now, we have been led in sundry directions, all of them insane, always by arrogant, know-everything idiots and idiot classes. On top of that, we are all drowning in an inhuman and insane managerialism, where the quality and the health and the meaning of everything is measured by autometrics rather than by sane human interaction and civilised discourse. Sensibly, many people no longer even try in the workplace: they know the forms and the development programs and the evaluation mechanisms are all madness, but they also know the system is the system and that no one with power, many of whom also know it is madness, will ever admit to the madness. Sensible people swallow their daily pills of madness and try to get on with non-mad things. I have just never been that sensible.

I am not saying that to puff myself up. I am saying it as a simple fact. I simply cannot look at a form that contains something pointless or stupid and not physically react, to not feel an overwhelming urge to treat the form with contempt. I simply cannot be requested to do something pointless without feeling an overwhelming urge to tell the requester that it is pointless.

Also, at this stage, I feel almost an obligation to act in such a manner, that to do otherwise would be inconsistent with my public persona. Whatever way it evolved, and I am still coming to terms with the very unexpected reality of it, I now have a non-trivial public presence, and whatever benefit I provide from that presence is in treating self-satisfied institutions and self-satisfied leaders with the humourous contempt that they so richly deserve and so rarely otherwise receive. It would seem hypocritical to express such contempt globally but not locally.

This local contempt can cause some trouble, of course, and I do try to keep it low and respectful and humorous. I try to always attack the system rather than the deliverers, often fellow victims, of the system. But on occasion it gets tangled. And, on occasion, I get it wrong, in either substance or in temperature.

Do I think I was wrong to write my company as “assholesRUS” on the researchED form? No, I really do not. I still have it filed under Who the Hell Cares? I am astonished that the organisers cared and, given that they cared, that they didn’t simply ask me to delete it, to which I would have immediately agreed along with an apology for the inconvenience. My only possible regret is that I hope I didn’t actually write “assholesRUS”: the proper form is Assholes R Us. It is important to get a joke correct.

Although I don’t think I got the researchED thing wrong, I completely understand that a person who does not know me might read it and think “What the hell is this?” That is of course fair enough. I am aware that when I write such contemptuous jokes, I provide an opportunity for people to mischaracterise me in a certain manner. If it goes pear-shaped, I have to live with it.

The opportunity to mischaracterise me, however, is not the same as the license to mischaracterise me. Although I never make these jokes as a test, on occasion they end up being a test. ResearchED failed the test. I wear the consequences of my jokes, but researchED also has to deal with the fact that they got this badly wrong and treated me in an appalling manner.

I will end with a great quote from the great H. L. Mencken, which I stumbled upon when digging up the talk titles above:

One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. 

At the moment, I think people are laughing at researchED and that people are right to do so. I think that researchED only have themselves to blame.