Story
. 5 Oct 2025 .
Today my friend’s son requested that, during his virtual math lesson, we discuss his essay for “Stump the Teacher”. For school he had been instructed to submit a passage of text that did not contain the name of the topic. His topic was transport phenomena. In California, he is in 7th grade.
Preparing for the lesson for 45 minutes before it started, I struggled. The boy’s father, a chemical engineer like I am, remembered more from our similar educations. But the focus caused by a deadline, and also the freedom to fail with friends, forced me to choose three stamps for my student:
Conservation of mass is the simplest conservation concept.
Conservation of momentum is a famous conservation concept.
Forces change a momentum balance.
In college 35 years ago, I greatly admired physics students. More accurately, I admired the idea of a physics department and the people within; I knew no physics students myself. I understood that I would fail academically as a physics major, although I received an A+ in freshman physics (classical mechanics) and won a prize of textbooks for having one of the top two grades of the class. Upon accepting my books, my professor told me that I wouldn’t have received the prize had it been awarded after the final exam. I thought the professor not nice to tell me that.
I got good grades at Rice, although not the best, becoming Magna Cum Laude. But I liked doing math. (Professor David Hellums — transport phenomena! — called me “remarkable”.) Engineering math is doable. The math of undergraduate math majors is not doable, at least by someone with my mind.
In graduate school at Stanford, I veered into molecular biology.
I am an honest and good person, appreciated by my ex-husband because I have treated his family well. I played with his son since his son was a toddler. I met his daughter, now 7, on the day that she was born. His family has treated me well.
This past summer when I visited California for a vacation, in a park my ex-husband’s daughter and I were playing together while nearby on a lawn my ex-husband and his son practiced soccer. His daughter, with the initials AEM, asked me a succession of questions: “Do you have children? Do you have children all grown up? Do you have a husband? Have you ever had a husband, at all?”