Fall, the Smell of Grass, and Shame

 Fall, the Smell of Grass, and Shame

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are coming into the Fall of the Year.  The nights are getting longer, and so the days are getting shorter. It’s getting a bit cooler, and there are more fallen leaves on the ground.  

And the grass is different. It knows something is going on.

This last is important because we are moving toward the last mowing of the year. We know not the hour that it will come, but all the signs that it is coming are in place.

I am being deliberately ambiguous here.  I don’t know how many more times I will mow.  If the weather conditions are right, I may have just mowed for the last time this year and simply don’t know it yet.

It’s hard to tell, because, as I said, the grass is getting different.  It’s fall grass.  What I mean to say is that the grass is a little different at every station of the mowing season, and the fall grass is here.

For one thing, the smell is different.  

Yes, the grass smells different--the mown grass that is--at every part of the mowing season. I state this as a plain fact without supporting argument.  If you know, you know, and if you don’t know words will not be able to convey anything to you.

I’d like to believe that if I were put into a coma and then woke up at an unknown time later with a blindfold on, I could tell what time of year it was just by the smell of the grass.

But if I couldn’t tell, there are people who could because the smell is different, and that’s a fact.

Not only is the smell different, the grass itself is not as heavy as it is at other times of the mowing season.  It is so heavy in the spring, I have to stop and change batteries in my mower.  As the season progresses and the relative amount of moisture in the grass decreases, I can get it on one charge.

Because of the current lightness of the grass, right now would be an ideal time for me to mow with my battery-powered mower except that it--much to my disappointment and shame--is broken.

Let’s talk about that.

Back in 2020, during the lockdown, I bought my first battery-powered lawnmower.  I liked it: I didn’t need to buy gas for it; I didn’t need to keep it oiled; it was quieter than my gas mower; it was easier to start.

I wrote about it.  I had people say they had read my article and followed suit by buying their own battery-powered mowers.

I felt good, like I was helping to save the planet from global-warming one lawn-mowing at a time.  They would put up statues to me; they would name a Monday Holiday after me.

Then after a couple of years, that mower died; se morto’.  Something in the safety system--the stuff that is put in to keep the consumer from killing or maiming him- or herself--broke down. 

I tried to fix it, but at that time there was precious little help online for a DIYer to fix a battery-powered mower.  I decided that maybe I’d just been unlucky, so I bought another.  Same make, slightly newer model.

After the same amount of time, the same thing has happened.  

This time I didn’t even think about buying a new one.  Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.  Well, they fooled me twice.

In the intervening couple of years, there has been an increase in the battery-powered mower ecosystem. There is help online about how to fix it, and that is good news. The bad news is that most of that help boils down to getting around the mower's safety system.

Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t want you to think that I’m putting on airs.  I am from Oklahoma for goodness sake and safety isn’t a big concern to my people.  A siphoning hose for gasoline is referred to as an Oklahoma credit card after all.  The only thing wrong with that phrase is I don’t know of anyone ever giving any gasoline back.

The thing is that I am going to have to think about it a while. If I’m going to have to learn something.

Anyhow, I put the mower away in the potting shed, brought out the old gas mower, filled it with gasoline, and started it.  It only took about three pulls.  I went a little overboard and put some oil in it. It hadn’t had oil since at least 2007. You gotta love Briggs and Stratton.

I wear hearing protection while I use it, so at least it won’t hurt my own hearing, and I’m having to buy gasoline.

I also have a gasoline-powered chainsaw now, which is not only loud and produces carbon dioxide, but it cuts down trees.

I don’t think there are going to be any statues for me.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

The Method of Partial Fractions

 The Method of Partial Fractions

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am teaching Calculus II again after 22 years.  None of my students had been born yet the last time I taught the course.  They are all young, fresh, and full of energy. Their brains are so sharp. They keep me honest on my “arithmetic.”

I put the scare quotes around “arithmetic” because most people would call it algebra, but to a mathematician algebra is something different.  If you are not a mathematician, my telling you what we mean by algebra wouldn’t help; if you are, you already know.

I try to make it easy to tell me when I’ve made a mistake and how to do that kindly because that is a skill that will be useful to them even if they don’t use a single thing they’ve learned in Calculus II.

That does bring me to a question that does come up from time to time: When will I ever use this?

It is a legitimate question.  They--and the Great State of Kansas, bless it from border to border--are paying good money for them to learn this material.  When will they use it?

An easy answer is that I don’t know.  There are a lot of students, and there is a lot of material.  They have different backgrounds, different talents, different ambitions, and different plans.  I don’t know what those plans are, what all of them entail, nor how they might change.

What I do have is a collection of mathematical material that was invented by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz about 300 years ago, has been found useful by scientists and engineers, and has been refined over the course of a couple of centuries.

It is like a huge toolbox that is full of expensive, well-used tools. I am teaching them that the tools exist and the best way that I know to use them.

To continue with this metaphor, I’ve been having to clean up and sharpen the tools because I’ve had the opportunity to use them for the last two decades.  

Well, that is not entirely true.  While I was in administration, I didn’t continue to teach calculus, but I did continue to teach a course called Introduction to Analysis.  This is a course in which the theoretical foundations of Calculus are taught. To really explain what this means in a way that would satisfy a fellow mathematician would require a lengthy article that not many would read.  Not “many might” be a great exaggeration of the number. For the current readership, let me just say that Newton and Leibniz were scary smart and did things that folks like you and me have difficulty understanding.  The theoretical framework that has been set up makes it accessible to a few more.

Recently, I caught myself with a topic I had not seen at all in the last two decades: the Method of Partial Fractions.  Again, this is one of those things I am not going into detail for the current readership, but folks who’ve had a course in high school algebra (fairly recently) would be able to understand.

Metaphorically, this is a chisel in the toolbox that is Calculus II, and I needed to sharpen mine.  Because of this, I came into the office before church on Sunday morning and spent a couple of hours with the equivalent of a whetstone and a leather strop. It was a yellow pad and a pencil, but a whetstone and a leather strop sounds much cooler.

It brought back a bunch of memories, not all of them comfortable.  Believe it or not, I was something of a know-it-all in my college days. (There will be a pause here to let those who knew me during those days spew whatever they are sipping as they read this through their noses.) I remember when my Calculus II teacher was teaching me this method.  I thought I knew a better way to do it than he did.

To his credit, he said nothing and let me do it my way.  I got the right answers; the math was correct; but it was a lot more work. 

It took me 44 years to figure that out.

I understand why he let me do it that way; I believe it was the right thing to do; I would do the same thing myself in the same circumstances.

But it does make me smile a little right now.

But that is neither here nor there.

The alert reader will notice a couple of things.  The first of these is that I’ve not used this particular technique in more than 20 years and before that I only used it whenever I was teaching it.

These alert readers will also notice that we learn other things while wrestling with hard material:  We learn to wrestle with hard material.

Things will be easy for these students that other people think are hard.

I believe that it has helped me, at least.

So, if you’ve had algebra within the last couple of years, you can bring your yellow pad with you up to me at the coffee shop, and I will tell you more about the Method of Partial Fractions than you ever wanted to know.

Maybe I already have.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

The Value of a Picture

 The Value of a Picture 

By Bobby Neal Winters

On a Saturday in early September, in the entrance to Timmons Chapel on the campus of Pittsburg State University, I had a vision.  It was a flash of movie dialog going through my head:

“You come to me on the day of my daughter’s wedding, and you ask of me a favor.’

It was my wife asking me to put together a tripod that was to hold a poster that contained pictures of the bride and groom as babies with baby food smeared across their faces.  

On one hand, it was a worthy thing, well within my skillset, all the parts were there, no tools needed, no glue necessary.

On the other hand, it was less than an hour to the wedding; I was dressed in a coat and tie; and I didn’t have a work bench.  All I had were the “directions.”

(In my wife’s defense, she hadn’t known that the tripod required actual assembly or we would’ve assembled it ahead of time.)

Let me say this: The directions weren’t useless; they were worse than useless. They were written on a tiny piece of thin paper, and consisted of tiny pictures with tiny labels. Connect part G to part H, when you can’t tell what parts G and H are from the instructions.  This sort of thing continued until the last, and perhaps, only useful line of the directions:  Look at the picture on the box and put it together.

So, after 15 minutes of fumbling, I looked at the picture on the box and put it together, with my wife and two of my daughters (not the bride who was otherwise engaged) helping.

A picture is worth a thousand words just as they say.

Description of physical objects is difficult.  When I was doing mathematical research in the topology of 3-manifolds, I sweated blood in describing the pictures I saw in my head.  Was I right in my descriptions?  The first time anyone reads one of my papers, we might know.

But I am not the first person to have had this difficulty, far from it.  This is a problem that goes back literally thousands of years. To know this is true, all you need to do is read Chapter 26 of the Book of Exodus where the construction of the Tabernacle (the tent the Children of Israel used to worship) is described.  If you have a Bible near to hand, I would encourage you to take it in hand, open to that chapter, and read a while.

It reminds me of an exchange from “Paint Your Wagon”:

“You should read the Bible, Mr. Rumson.”

“I have read the Bible, Mrs. Fenty.”

“Didn’t it discourage you about drinking?”

“No, but it sure killed my appetite for readin’!”

My point isn’t to discourage you from reading the Bible but to emphasize how difficult it is to describe reality without pictures.  Even using a lot of words and taking admirable care in description, describing the Tabernacle was hard.  

Can  you make one from reading it?

I am sure you can, maybe several of them that look quite different from each other.  Drawing a picture of the Tabernacle would’ve been helpful with a list of parts and tools needed, but that idea hadn’t come yet apparently.

But things like tents aren’t the only challenge.  A lawyer came to Jesus asking him how he might inherit eternal life.  A discussion ensued in which it was suggested the lawyer should love his neighbor as himself.

This sounds like a simple rule, but the lawyer asked for clarification.

Jesus responded with the story of the Good Samaritan.

A story isn’t literally a picture, but it serves a similar purpose.  It builds a picture in our minds, a picture we can relate the words, the concepts to.

The poster I referred to at the beginning--the one on the tripod--had pictures of the bride and groom with baby food on their faces.  It reminded us that these two responsible, grown-up people were once babies in our arms. To some degree, they are still babies in our hearts, but as parents we need to now let that go.  While that connection can never completely be overcome, we have to know that they must be more important to each other than we, the parents, are to them.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 It’s a title

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been very lucky.

Given that start I could go on to talk about a number of things: My wife; my children; my job.  It could be quite a long list.

But what I am thinking about right now as I write this is my education.

I went to a high school that was small enough that you could know just about anybody, and more than you wanted to in some cases. The universities I attended were not the most prestigious in the country or even the state, not even the state of Oklahoma, but they were places where I could be successful and not get my ego crushed.

I read somewhere that was very important.  I don’t remember where, because I only went to small schools, but that doesn’t bother me.

When I went to graduate school, I was lucky enough that school was my entire life.  I got up in the morning, ate breakfast, and went to teach.  There were mornings when I taught classes at 7:30am. I then went to the classes I was taking the rest of the morning, and I worked on my homework throughout the afternoon and evening.

When you transition from masters’ work to doctoral work, your classes get smaller and smaller until you are the only one in them.  Then, working with your advisor, who is in some sense your only teacher, you choose one homework problem which neither you nor your advisor know the answer to.  You then work on the problem, not knowing whether it even has an answer, until you are done.

This changes you. Not necessarily in good ways.

I do have a doctorate, but I don’t introduce myself that way because a doctorate is a wall. I am already an introvert, so I don’t need another wall around me.

But, like I said, it changes you.  Not the degree, the process. It’s like boot camp in the military, but spread out over a long time.  I don’t mean to say that at any point we had someone like Louis Gossett Jr screaming at us like he did to Richard Gere in “An Officer and a Gentleman,” but some of us have our own little personal Louis Gossett Jr in our heads because of it.  It was laid on in thin, semester-thick slices.

I am in a profession that has titles.  Those titles carry meanings with them: Professor, Doctor, Dean, Chair, Provost. They come down to us from medieval times.  They carry with them expectations accreted over the intervening tim, and when we come into them, we bear the weight of those expectations.

Or maybe, I should say, we try to.  Or some of us try to.

Some try to take advantage.

But there are negative expectations that come along with titles as well.

When people change the way they act around you--one way or the other--because of the title, you have to remember that it’s not about you.  It’s the title.

I’ve seen this in a number of different areas with a number of different titles: Father, Reverend, Doctor, Colonel, Professor.

I listed “Father” first because it is the oldest of those listed. It’s been around for a couple of thousand years and comes with a couple of thousand years of expectations. If a writer introduces a character with the title “Father” there are numerous expectations that are set up which can either be met or subverted.  This is true with the protestant “Reverend” as well. This evokes expectations which are different, sometimes subtly, sometimes not.

The same is true to each of these titles.  The human being steps into them though some sort of rite of passage, but having done so they get the rights, benefits, and responsibilities that have been created by the collective of all who held the title before them.

It’s like a little mask you put on.  The Romans had a name for the little masks that actors used in the theater of their time: Persona.

I can use this as a teacher.  When I am in front of my classes, they react to me according to that persona, that title. I am smarter/weirder, wiser/bigger jerk because of it. It builds a set of expectations that you can either try to inhabit or try to subvert as is best for the teaching process.

Along the way, one of the things that has given me insight on this is attending the ROTC commissioning ceremony. This ceremony is brilliant in its simplicity.  There comes a point where the newly commissioned officer receives his first salute.  He gives a sergeant a coin and receives a salute in return.

The sergeant is paid to do it. It’s his job. He is not saluting you; he’s saluting the rank.  No doubt many an officer goes on to earn the respect through his actions, but the respect he (or she) is given to the thousands before who’ve inhabited the rank.

One of the benefits of growing older is learning that everyone at base is just a human being. Title or no title, you grow-up, you grow old, and you go on.

And if you’ve been as lucky as I’ve been with my wife, my children, and my job, you get to be happy and learn a few things.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.