Daft Musings

The New York Times recently reported on the San Jose State’s Philosophy Department’s critique of online courses, as the university considers issuing credit for students who take and pass an edX online course taught by Professor Michael Sandel.

However, one thing that’s often been missed in the reporting is that San Jose State is pioneering in allowing its students use online courses for credit. This year, several courses in the math department are available as online courses. As far as I understand, there is still graded homework, and a proctored test at the end of the semester. But it only costs $150, rather than $740 for an in-class course, and it’s available as an Open University (non-matriculated community enrollment) course as well. You get full university credit for the course, making it a terrific bargain.

I can vouch that the university students have been eager to have online options. I remember nervously waiting with Neil before his Calculus II class began. I spoke to a transfer student who, because of a system quirk, wasn’t able to enroll in a Calculus II class before the semester began, and was just hoping for a spot. He needed the course as part of his Computer Science major, and more than anything, he wished a section was available online so he wouldn’t end up with odd classes at odd hours.

You gotta give it to the philosophy professors — they know how to argue well. Their argument roughly boils down to opposing the fact that more online courses means there will be less need for philosophy professors. Behind that there’s some insipid commentary about social justice (yo, the 80s are calling, they want you to know it’s 2013 now), and the better argument about the value of interacting with professors in real life.

Neil has enjoyed his math classes at San Jose State, and enjoys talking with the professors occasionally after class. This semester, however, he took an online class rather than a class at San Jose State. The classes is Bob Sedgewick’s Analytic Combinatorics I and II on Coursera. (And yes, Neil refers to him as Bob Sedgewick, not Professor Sedgewick.) He’s enjoyed it as much as his real courses, and says Sedgewick (possibly because of the medium) uses many examples. And Neil likes that Sedgewick is a disciple of Don Knuth, because anyone taught by Don Knuth is someone Neil would love to learn from.

This amazing class is free, and includes problems Neil spends hours working through each week. But there’s a clear downside in that he can’t ask the professor questions after each lecture. And only a very few work through the problems and post in the associated forum. And I missed sending Neil off to a campus to hang out with professors and students. There was always something going on, like a fundraising barbecue, or products being test-marketed on students. The ROTC will march through; so will an occasional student protest, or ethnic dancers celebrating the Day of the Dead. I bet there’s even a philosophy professor hanging around willing to argue with you personally about the effect of online courses in education.

So where does San Jose State go? They’ve come up with a good hybrid, giving their students classes with star professors, but still with a campus life and presumably access to someone on campus (like a T.A.) to discuss problems, at a price which works both for students and the university.

And whither higher education? Besides Sedgewick’s course, Neil’s listened to lecture series by professors from Stanford, Brown, Cornell, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and more (largely via The Teaching Company and public lectures), something he’ll never be able to do as a student at a single college. And with distance learning, you don’t have access to the professor at all, though if you’re lucky, you can get a good discussion going with fellow students. And yet, if we limit ourselves to distance learning, where are the professors who come up with different ideas and angles on a topic, and how do they get us to come check out their courses, live or online?

Related: a response to SJSU from a University of Wisconsin professor who teaches online courses (via Twitter)

Yesterday, I was dismayed to find out two professors in the meteorology department at San Jose had posted a picture of themselves about to set fire to a book, presumably because they disagreed with its contents. The picture was taken down but not before it was captured, because the idea of professors literally — not figuratively — burning ideas is such a shocking one.

And here I thought the whole process of getting a doctorate involves coming up with ideas and/or supporting or refuting ideas. I thought a professor who was handed a book he or she disagreed with would take advantage to write a long, wordy, obtuse point-by-point article and get it published in an obscure journal, whereupon another professor will then respond to the article with another long, obtuse critique. And so academia goes round and round. I guess just “burning” the book and posting a picture is easier for the lay public to understand but how do you respond to that other than saying “what are you thinking?”

This story hit home particularly since my son has been taking classes with San Jose State’s math department for several years. The math department is a lot of fun. They celebrate Pi Day, they host and sponsor a math circle for local teens who want to learn more about math topics, and the head of the department likes to toss juggling clubs around with the students. After Neil’s math abilities surpassed mine, they took him under wing and taught him calculus and linear algebra, and he’s enjoyed the classes and the professors. Rather than incinerating ideas, they toss extraneous books and magazines onto a free rack near the department office, which Neil often raids.

I also love meteorology. In fact, one summer when I was Neil’s age, I wanted to become a meteorologist. I spent a lot of evenings watching the sunset (events on the horizon are good predictors of the next day) and desperately failed in my attempt to “salt the clouds” to create rain. So still in search of a lab science, I looked into the department at San Jose State — which is one of the two colleges in the vast CSU system which offers such a major. They have their own weather station on the roof of their building. How cool is that! So I sent them an inquiry to ask if Neil could sit in on one of their introductory classes or if at the very least we could arrange to see the weather station. I got no response to either inquiry, so I bought a used copy of the second edition of the text one of the syllabi for the course mentioned, and we muddled through it ourselves.

I could have also sworn that like just 15 minutes ago (ok, that is last year or the year before), the department used to be called Meteorology and Atmospheric Science, not Meteorology and Climate Science. At least for the beginner, understanding weather is all about currents. And like the currents, it’s always changing. Our old text talked about the ozone hole; now it’s about climate change, worrying that the weather is changing too fast in one direction or another; back when I was a kid it was killer smog and the coming new Ice Age. Given that it changes every 20 years, what’s exciting about weather should always be up for argument, shouldn’t it?

So I really hope there was a context to that picture that I’m missing, other than what it looks like. Was it to go with a critique, as in now that we’ve “burned” this book with words, watch it “burn” for real? Did the author somewhere in the book dare those who disagreed with it to set themselves on fire? Are they getting a huge grant from some environmentalist organization to explore new forms of natural energy, and they thought the book was so full of hot air, it’d be an efficient source? Perhaps all the prospective students for this year declared their passionate hatred of anti-global-warming arguments, and this bold statement will bolster departmental enrollment.

Meteorology is a legitimate, honest science, even if it essentially comes down to weather changes all the time, and wow, isn’t that exciting. I’m hoping this book burning will blow over, like a thunderstorm, rather than being the harbinger of our educators trying to destroy anything and anyone they don’t agree with.

Comedian John Heffron often compares the independence he had as a child to the way we raise our children today. I told this to a fellow mom at a park as we watched one of our peers go scurrying off in search of her 7-year-old son in the very suburban park. She told me that as a child on a rural farm, she’d often saddled up her horse and gone off for the day before her parents were even awake, and often returned at dusk, with her parents unworried. Now her 10-year-old niece has a horse of her own, but her mother will groom and saddle it for her, and only let her ride for 1/2 hour or so at a time, constantly under supervision.

It makes me wonder what our protectiveness is doing to our society. I confess to being a paranoid mother myself. We bought an iPhone for our son Neil on his 15th birthday largely because I wanted to be able to stalk him on his way to and from classes at San Jose State. No kidding. Before that, he once was late returning from a calculus class, and I went nearly mad, running over to the campus myself, only to find out he’d been talking to the professor, who’d been charmed to have such a young and diligent student in her class. My fiercely independent 9-year-old daughter has worked hard to help me break the habit, only to leave me scorned by other parents who are shocked I let her walk the one block to the nearby elementary school all by herself, or that I let her pack her own lunches, with all the consequences thereof (mmm, leftover Peep casserole!).

But I’ve noticed a lot of people just don’t know how to be independent, at all. If you’re watched over and guided your each and every day from birth through high school, and possibly even through college, what chance do you have to do things without instruction, much less learn how to make a mistake and fix it?

I homeschool my son, and I’m one of the more structured homeschoolers, giving him specific assignments and deadlines for a variety of subjects. As I soon found out, he’s adept at managing his time, and he doesn’t need a schedule to do academic things he’s passionate about. When he’s not writing literature essays for me, he’s writing computer games or working on sliding-block puzzle algorithms (don’t ask me, look here.) And if there’s a day we want to pay our respects at a funeral or attend a robot block party, the economics lesson or chaos lecture can wait for another day.

Having gone in this direction for years, I was disconcerted when we went to a high school campus to sign Neil up for an AP test. All the classes, for all the subjects, are exactly the same length of time? Really?! And the students obediently respond to bells and must be in their seats on a timer? Really!? However, the students will be really good at taking tests, where Neil has become weak. I give him practice SAT and AP tests, and inevitably, he’ll argue with the questions. I struggle to teach him that the trick is not to think about the question, but to figure out which answer the test-makers want you to put down. And it doesn’t help that I think a lot of the questions are obscure and irrelevant to the subject’s real-world usage.

And so I get to the point of my real world, which is filled with well-trained people who were taught to follow instructions correctly, and the correct thing is to say, without thinking about it. I see college students incapable of the personal initiative to market their own passions into their own business, instead opting to work for free at internships in the hopes of eventually getting a minimum-wage entry level job. I get emails from people having genuine problems, but when I tell them how to work on getting it resolved, I often get a furious passive-aggressive response because doing so involves some personal initiative, like picking up a telephone, or leaving feedback. People will languish for years at jobs which make them miserable, giving credit to petty reasons for their own imprisonment, like good health insurance, while independent contractors (like me) know crappy health insurance is a better option than a crappy day job.

And an obedient populace is a scary thing to me. I’ve also been surprised how often people just want to be told what to do, and if you can muster the right authority, they will just do whatever you tell them to do. I’m shocked when it works, but I’m not immoral enough to make people do something against their own interest, but there are those who will, unless more people learn what it’s like to be free — really free, with all the risks it involves. And the fact is, we’re not letting our children run free, and maybe we should.

I’ve been going to shows at The Pear Avenue Theatre in Mountain View whenever I can for several years now, and the Pear Slices were a particular favorite for our family. They’re a selection of short one-act plays by local playwrights, like any Pear performance, imaginatively staged and well-directed. We were sorry that other commitments had us missing out on the Pear Slices last year, so this year, I made sure to make time and get us tickets during the opening weekend.

For the first time, a Pear show disappointed me. For the most part, the one-act plays were boring at best, and at times, cringe-worthy. The Distractor was a painfully long exercise of clueless upper class guilt. It started out with two thieves digging through a purse they’d stolen, one of them excusing both of them due to their impoverished backgrounds. Enter the victim, a teacher who lives a posher life than anyone in my acquaintance, who celebrates being able to enjoy a “heady red” wine despite the fact that her identity, money and car keys have been stolen. Then she waxes on about how much she liked the thief, and, oh, if only she’d given her middling students all an A+, she wouldn’t have been the victim, because  it’s all about self-esteem, and if the thieves had had more self-esteem she’d be safer. It ends with the police knocking on her door and returning a journal which had been in the purse, which makes it all ok. I still don’t know where that teacher was living, but, honey, I can tell you I live in San Jose, and here the police don’t even show up if your house was robbed.

Blues was a trite conversation between an old woman and her middle-aged daughter. At first, the old lady complains to her daughter that the deceased husband/father left her nothing; a few minutes later she says she wants to learn how to drive because she’s had to cut back on her chauffeur’s hours. And then mother and daughter discuss dinner plans, the emotional highlight of which is the selection of salad dressing. Every single one of my friends is more interesting that these ladies, and I’m not paying to watch them go on and on about dinner plans.

Hejab was about the spoiled daughter of an Arabic immigrant who puts on a hijab and joins the Muslim club, but only for the cool stuff like pissing off her Americanized dad, and not for the boring stuff like going to the mosque and staying chaste, just ’cause she’s got some issues with her parents divorcing. She decides to ditch the Hawaii trip her dad brought her to, changes her mind because his new girlfriend is ok, despite being a despised blonde, and is simply a total brat. Oh, and father and French(?!) girlfriend have some c-razy accents. Honestly, I wish dad had shipped her off to Egypt where she could experience the respect she insisted Muslims give to women, like free clitoridectomies, thinned the accent down to that of a long-Americanized Arab, and gotten an American girlfriend instead.

Chickens took too long to get to its reason a granddaughter was nervous around her grandmother, and felt like an Improv skit the playwright had copied down. Lost Melody had a son looking for a “classical” song his mother had recorded for him on a mixtape which also had Abba. The MacBook he’s using to preview songs implies it’s set in modern times, but inexplicably, the mix tape his mother made him when he went to college only 4 or 5 years ago was a cassette tape. Given what else was on the tape, we Bickfords quickly figured out the song was probably not Bach or Mozart, but rather an instrumental of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, but 3 days of searching never got him that answer. Did he really never ask his mother the name of the song, or for that matter, is he so isolated he has not a single music geek friend?

The only play we enjoyed as much as we have enjoyed previous Pear Slices was Schrödinger’s Cat Goes to the Vet, which had Erwin Schrödinger cleverly playing off Jorge Borges about uncertainty and quantum physics, complete with the set switching between Princeton and Buenos Aires. In this portrayal, Borges comes across more serious than I would imagine him to be, but the lines give him a dry wit. And I’m pretty sure the story Borges remembered writing three years from now is one on which Neil wrote an essay.

The Human Dilemma closed the show, and it was a cute, simple story about a robot family revealing a secret to their son. It couldn’t clear the bad taste of the rest of the awful plays — it just made me think the pickings for short, local plays had to be terribly thin this year, and more playwrights should submit their work for consideration. In any case, next year I’ll wait for reviews of the next Pear Slices to come out before I buy tickets.

After our visit to UCLA, my family decided it would be interesting to visit a bookstore in LA. I scoffed at the very notion: Los Angelenos do not read. They watch movies, they write screenplays, but they do not read. And, therefore, I insisted, an LA bookstore is a chimera. Nonetheless, they used Yelp and GPS to identify a highly-rated bookstore called The Last Bookstore, and I reluctantly agreed to see it, though absolutely sure it would be mediocre at best.

This snooty San Franciscan is hereby schooled. The Last Bookstore is a real Los Angeles bookstore, a good one, with the unique character and personality of LA, which, even I will admit, is not all bad.

It was housed in the very downtown downtown of LA on Spring and Sixth Street. It reuses an old space — perhaps a former back — which it shares with some independent 3D artists who have small studios on the second floor.

The first thing that caught my eye was the creativity of the interior design. Possibly inspired by the artists, and possibly by the vast collection of available books,  employees had built a desk out of old books, as well as some other sculptures:

So it showed the imagination and reinventiveness of Los Angelenos. And it showcased Los Angeleno’s knack for being accessible (thus making it easier for them to get you to pay them.) The entire top section, that which wasn’t housing artist studios, was called The Labyrinth, were all books — thousands upon thousands of them — were all only $1 each. It was a true treasure trove. Organization was haphazard — the children’s books were more or less in one section, but books were also organized in one area by color alone. And, having to express themselves however they could, the employee-artists built a book tunnel you could run through, or not:

For a $1, there were few books I could refuse if I had even the least interest in them. And back downstairs, the more expensive books weren’t very expensive either. I picked up a trove of $2 cheesy 1960s paperbacks with cool covers and titles like Psychic and Strange People, my favorite kind of fluff. A hardcover book of women prisoner’s hard life stories compiled by a favorite author was my most expensive purchase, and it was only $5. Kelly found a Mary Poppins book, and Peter bought almost $100 of stray ephemera from essays to pop culture.

Oh, and did I mention there was a stage in the bookstore as well? Because in Los Angeles, nothing is only what it seems. I assumed the stage was a great place for author readings, but they have a number of small concerts there, too, by bands like the Skatellites, and lectures, such as an upcoming one on opera (who knew Los Angeles has an opera?!)

In contast, though I love our local used bookstore, Recycle Books, it has a character suitable to our area that’s in stark contrast to Los Angeles. Just the name is more serious, while the Los Angeles bookstore hints at a pop apocalypse. All the books at Recycle Books are carefully sorted into their categories, but they’re a lot more expensive than similar books at The Last Bookstore, and there are no $1 books — there’s no books at even double that price. Instead of art and artists, there’s a cat which likes to peer down at the patrons from above. The math and science categories are far better stocked at Recycle Books than at The Last Bookstore, but the Last Bookstore has a lot more books, as well as the promise of getting truly lost in a labyrinth of them.

I dream of The Last Bookstore now and the books that eluded my grasp. And so, oh, help me, I want to go back to LA to see its bookstore again.

This blog has chronicled the shocking ease by which at least one criminal was able to scootch around the California criminal system, despite multiple felony car thefts. The felon in question, Andrew Clark Bergman, stole Peter’s car on Labor Day 2010 and was caught red-handed by the San Jose police six weeks later. If there was any doubt about the case, it was resolved by the fact that Andrew Clark Bergman (whom I’d nicknamed Mr. Skeezebag) posted multiple pictures of himself and his floozy in the car on the internet.

When Andrew Clark Bergman (or his clone) returned on Cinco de Mayo 2011 to burglarize my car, I found out only then that he’d jumped bail, and he and his floozy had gone on a multi-state crime spree, being caught at least once again in a stolen car, before returning to one of his favorite hunting grounds, that being my own driveway.

The district attorney lamely told me everyone has the “right” to bail, and that certainly he’d be back in jail when he was arrested again. Yeah, right. Shortly thereafter, he returned to his home town of Fresno and was arrested twice again for stealing cars, and let loose to roam. I posted his name and picture on the internet, to let the world know a criminal is loose and to call the police.

Some curious things happened then, based on what little as I could follow from a distance. He seemed to have changed his name to “Rv Na,” a moniker that makes no sense. Then, last month, his mother tried to contact me via this site. Just a note to the loved ones of criminals: anything you have to say, you say to his lawyer and/or the district attorney. Victims tend to be angry and you shouldn’t mess with them — just ask Richard Ramirez.

That inspired me to do a new hunt and it looked like Andrew Clark Bergman found a new whore to take him in, back in San Jose, only about 2 miles away, and was advertising himself as a handyman. I gave the district attorney and the fugitive hotline all the information I’d found; I don’t know if they followed up. But in any case, by March 9, 2013 he was 150 miles away driving yet another stolen car, with ammunition, drugs, and brass knuckles, all no-nos for fugitive felons to have, and got arrested by the Clovis police department.

This time, a judge actually decided to keep him in jail and set the bail at a high enough amount that to this day (March 30), he has yet to find another naive fool willing to give him that money so that he skip his cases and can continue his life of crime, unsentenced. Now, he may actually go to prison — after at least 5 car thefts and almost as many arrests for drug possession and burglaries. And wouldn’t that be nice, for once?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the City of San Jose went after my son for a business license because he’d reported his modest non-employee income to the IRS and the State. Despite multiple protestations from me and our city councilman (and the opinion of everyone else who heard of the ridiculous decision), they held fast that Neil should pay. And so, I wrote a $76 check for 2011 and 2012, sent it to the city, and had Neil pay me back.

By all rights, Neil should get his money back with an apology that the city shames itself. Note that as it rapes its productive citizens, San Jose has cut libraries to half-time, put its police force on a skeletal crew, cancelled its Fourth of July and Cinco de Mayo festivals, and complains it doesn’t have money to fix the roads while at the same time maintaining a luxury resort and sponsoring tennis tournaments.

But what did Neil get besides the apology he (and other people who earn a few hundred bucks a year doing odds and ends of work) deserved? He got another BILL! After having taken 2 weeks’ worth of earnings from my 15 year old son, they now want him to pay another $38 for his “business.” Well, guess what, San Jose, he’s not in business any more. They need to be informed of this, or else they will hound him and work to extort more money from him with no proof. Oh, heck, even with the information, they’ll probably still hound him just as they did Peter, trying to hit him up for back business license money and penalties for years he was not in San Jose.

So instead of the money they were greedily grasping for, like a junkie for his next fix, the city finance department got this note:

In response to your venal bill for my 15-year-old son’s “business” for 2013: he is no longer in “business.” His “business” is closed as of 12/31/2012. Thanks a lot for destroying a young man’s wish to work. Suck hard on the money you extorted from for having done paid work for his parents in 2011 and 2012 because you’re not going to see more.

I found myself surprisingly infuriated when yesterday a friend told me about a near-attack from a vicious dog, with an even more vicious owner. According to him, he was out and about one day when an unleashed dog ran up to him, barking and snarling. In self-defense, he grabbed his can of pepper spray, whereupon the dog’s previously-absent owner appeared and threatened to beat our friend if he sprayed the dog. We said both dog and owner should have been sprayed, but quite honestly, had the dog gone through with its attack, it would be facing a worse fate that a faceful of pepper spray. A cheap $5 leash and a conscientious owner prevents all sorts of tragedy, as I can relate below.

This story came on the heels of a genuine dog attack on my friend Chris’ dog in North Las Vegas. She has a dog named Sydney rescued from an abusive situation, who is more than a little neurotic. I’m convinced that if Sydney were a human being, she’d be on massive anti-depressants and in serious therapy. As a dog living in a modest household, all she can get is love and care.

So as Chris was walking Sydney (yes, on a leash) one day, they passed another family with a pitbull. The pitbull was on a leash, but when it lunged at Sydney, the owner, on a bicycle, toppled over and lost control. By the time Chris and the owner had managed to pull Sydney out of the pitbull’s jaws, Sydney had massive injuries, and Chris was traumatized. The pitbull’s owners paid for Sydney’s veterinary care, and Sydney and Chris will eventually heal, though the shock of it will stay with both forever.

Sydney back from the vet after having been attacked by an off-leash dog

The pitbull’s owners said their dog had been a friendly family pet up to that moment, and I believe that may have been the case. But the pitbull suddenly saw a threat to its family, and without being under control of a human who could judge the situation in the human context, the attack happened. Animal control stepped in to make sure the pitbull had had its vaccinations, especially against rabies, as well as quarantine Sydney and the household for 1o days.

For losing control of the leash, the pitbull’s family is in its own world of hurt. They can either have their dog put down, or pay a massive fine to keep that dog. Beyond that fine, they have to put a muzzle on their dog whenever it goes out in public, sterilize and microchip the dog, post a sign on their domicile announcing they have a vicious dog (maybe not a downside in North Las Vegas), and buy and carry proof of a $100,000 personal liability insurance. And if that dog ever bites or threatens any creature again, it’s a guaranteed death sentence.

So why in the world would anyone want to let their dogs go about unleashed, in a public space? And furthermore, threaten those who object to the potential danger? Peter and I sometimes see unleashed dogs in the neighborhood, but they’re on their owner’s property, friendly, and under voice command. If you want your dog to have the unleashed experience, San Jose (and I’m sure other municipalities) have dog parks, and there are other specified areas where dogs may run free, and people may avoid. And yes, even in the dog parks, your dog should be able to play well with others, so if your dog can’t do that, your dog’s either going to have to learn, or put up with the leash. In all these situations, dogs are dogs: they all have the potential to freak out and bite someone, and it’s the owner’s responsibility to prevent that by all means possible. The consequence of not doing so is death for your dog, and in my opinion, that’s a lot worse than just having to put a leash on your dog when you go out.

At the end of our weekend in Los Angeles, and since we’d already visited one college (Caltech), Peter decided an impromptu visit  to UCLA might be in order. I mildly discouraged it — some of my friends went to school there in the 1980s, and I once visited it then, but I’d had the impression it had very little student housing, so we’d get no idea of the student life.

As it turns out, it’s changed. Since then, the university seems to have build several new large dorms so it can house most of the student body and make their life easier. We drove up through Westwood, the cute hipster neighborhood on the south end of campus (also where two of my friends had shared an apartment), and immediately found an information booth, where we got a map and friendly tips for reviewing the campus.

Peter liked UCLA. It reminded him of his alma mater, University of Wisconsin-Madison, another large, top-notch public university. We couldn’t see the bookstore, since it was closed until noon. Instead, Peter made himself as familiar as he’d been at his own school and led us straight to the dorms, and through a dining hall, where students were eating breakfast. Neil and I were happy to exit and leave the students in peace, but at least we got a positive impression of them. Clean-cut, well groomed, studious and polite, they looked like they were taking their studies seriously and enjoying life on the campus.

In a way, it was nice to see the UC system’s other flagship university. UC Berkeley often comes up as an option for Neil, but like Peter, I have to admit there are reservations about it. The politics often appear to take precedence over the academics, and at least once the grad student teachers have gone on strike, essentially screwing the poor undergraduates trying to finish off a class.

The campus itself was eerily bereft of the signage and announcements that litter every other campus. One of the many helpful students I quizzed told me it was because they were in finals week, and no one would be interested in any events. But I don’t quite buy that. Caltech was also in its finals week, and still had student art and class announcements posted, not to miss the Pi paper garland strung through its trees. You can’t see a pole at Stanford, since it’s always under a stack of papers, calling students to one gathering or discussion or event. Same goes for San Jose State and Berkeley, and UW-Madison. UCLA, in contrast, looked like the set for a movie about a Californian campus, waiting to be decorated in whatever mood is called for on a particular day.

That’s not to say the architecture was lacking, or that the students were boring. Not surprisingly, the school has a vibrant performing arts program. It has beautiful, large sports fields and stadiums. And the math building has a whimsical mosaic band running around its perimeter:

When Peter’d mentioned UCLA, Neil immediately knew mathematician Terrence Tao is associated with them. Some other students on campus also mentioned them, in the context that they’d met him as well, indicating he’s actually on campus some of the time, unlike many stars, who prefer to let grad students do the teaching. We made a pilgrimage to his office,and when we got there, we were surprised to see that he was teaching a full load of classes, which must delight UCLA’s math students.

Just like the campus, the professors’ doors were bare of decor. At first, we thought it might be some department diktat, except for a few professors who bucked the trend. Professor Bruce Rothschild had an office next to Tao’s, with cartoons demonstrating a dark sense of humor, and a pamphlet of mathematical goodies, one of which Neil recognized, since he’s worked on it himself.

Peter found other treasures on campus he liked. There was an arcade. There were ROTC offices, indicating at least some tolerance for military folks (not that we are that, but I like campuses that are open to discussion rather than banning what they don’t like.) There was a wide open grassy hill where students were studying in the sunshine, and a man was walking his dog. I was more reserved — a huge student body also means huge competition for classes, and you don’t always get the class you want. And unlike Caltech (where the classes are tiny), no one will notice if you’ve gone missing, or if you’ve accidentally signed up for a course you’re not actually attending.

We left, and I still don’t know how a homeschooler gets in. But if Neil wants to give UCLA a shot, I’ll figure it out.

Like most homeschoolers, I’m just blundering through, hoping for the best, and being as surprised as anyone that it seems to be working out just fine. But as Neil is technically in his high school years, and he likes college, it’s been time for me to take on the role of college counselor. To that end, I’m drifting into the process of locating various tests for him to take (which is easy with some, more complicated for others), and reluctantly training him how to take tests.

Another part of the role is the campus visit. Neil’s already spent time at San Jose State and Stanford, but they’re not the only Neil-compatible schools. So, in conjunction with a planned trip to Universal Studios, I signed our family up for a tour of Caltech. More than a few of Neil’s puzzle party acquaintances have gone there, and needless to say, it has a stellar reputation for geekitude. Whether I could fit Neil’s eclectic education into a format comprehensible to an admissions officer there was another big question for me.

So we took the tour. The students (or Techers, as the admissions office likes to call them) are the kind of kids Neil likes the best: smart, with a quirky sense of humor. They’re all brilliant, so all the classes are really hard, in order to properly test the academic mettle. It is incredibly small — there are only 1000 undergraduate students, making it half the size of my alma mater, which I thought was too small. And the core curriculum is heavy on math and science. Even if you were to go for one of the rare humanities majors, you’d have 3 hard-core science courses behind it.

Best of all (to me), that is, the students get to do actual research. And if it’s their research project, which they’ve managed to market to a mentor, they get paid and published by the university. Now that’s pretty awesome, particularly if you want to become a research scientist.

But being Bickfords, we had quirkier concerns about the college. Peter wanted to get a sense of how many coffee shops were in the vicinity of the campus, because if it truly is rigorous, there must be caffeine. Luckily for Caltech, students not only have a fine selection of Starbucks chains, but also Peet’s coffee as well.

I wanted to know how they’d celebrated Pi Day. It’s a big deal to us here on the “geek farm” and I would be skeptical of Caltech’s reputation were I to hear they didn’t celebrate it. Well, not only do they celebrate it in the traditional way, with pie at 1:59:26 AM on 3/14, students also come up with other impromptu ways of celebrating. Even though we were there the day after Pi Day, the campus was still festooned with a Pi paper chain:

If you looked at the rings, they each had a digit written on them. As our guide told us, the freshman class [actually 6 spirited pi-loving students, not the whole class] celebrated by creating the chain on Pi Day, and got up to about 10,000 digits. Then, to our group’s collective dismay, we saw another student angrily walk through and destroy the chain in front of us.

Back at the admissions office, I was glad to find out I haven’t destroyed Neil’s chances of getting into college by homeschooling him, but he is in for a number of College Board tests. And I am currently flummoxed by the limitations of the common application’s Home School Supplement form, but I’ll have that worked out by the time he takes all those tests.

We’re all fans of the Big Bang Theory, so of course, we also had to map the campus to the fictional show. Wolowitz works in a funky building with cool architecture. He may also be based on the person who almost ran us down on the street in a new sportscar. The dining hall in  the show is accurate, at least in table and spacing design to the real thing on campus.

At the end of our tour, Peter picked up a coupon for the campus bookstore, which ironically, didn’t have books. I did get Neil a Caltech shirt. I was pleased to see they sold pocket protectors, the emblem of nerd pride, and something not readily available on most campuses.

I plan on giving it to an MIT alumnus, a fact which should please any Caltech Techer no end.