For all my talk of leaving, my first stop was barely two hours away, and very familiar. I visited Audrey and Aaron in Amherst. Before meeting for dinner I took a quick tour through town, driving past two of the three houses I stayed in during my five years at UMASS. Then for my first stop, I stepped into Rao's coffeehouse, and promptly left my camera. Fifteen minutes later I came back in, frantic and frustrated, and retrieved the camera from the nice lady behind the counter. Not a good start. I'm a little worried that I'm going to leave a string of belongings behind me, like breadcrumbs strewn across the country and leading back to New England...
Dinner was with Audrey and two of her professor friends. While I'm not an academic, I feel very strongly about education, particularly in the sciences. So I was interested in hearing their concerns about attracting students to the sciences, how to introduce liberal arts majors to take science courses, and how to approach students who are only in classes to meet a distributive requirement. I worry when I think of how little a lot of people understand the technology that they use every day. More than not understanding it, but feeling like they won't ever be able to understand it. I don't mean that everyone should be able to talk about the communication protocols that cell phones use to talk to cell towers, but more generally, how do cell phones work? How does it happen that when I dial your number, your phone rings? Why does pushing the gas pedal make a car go faster? How does Facebook know who to suggest as people I might know? It seems like more modern devices are packaged so nicely that we can't see inside them, and it's easy to never think about how they work. Hopping off my soapbox, dinner was good, and the conversation was definitely lively, and I started to feel like I'm heading off into an adventure!
No comments:
Post a Comment