As another school year begins, here comes that question again: “As a teacher, how should I ask students for their pronouns?” To be clear: What follows is my own personal opinion. Nonbinary people are not a monolith. Read multiple opinions, as many as you can find. Also, I laud the effort of any cisgender, heterosexual teacher…
Author: Clio
The Clothes That Make the Man
Once upon a time, Eddie Izzard (who was at the time presenting as a man) said, “They’re not women’s clothes. They’re my clothes. I bought them.” This is how easy the logic should be: People can wear whatever they want to wear. Clothing has no inherent gender. Our modern definitions of “what men wear” and…
On Simone Biles and mental health
When commenting about Simone Biles’s decision this week, I made a mistake. I was meaning to respond to people mocking her for giving up, so I pointed to her accomplishments. To how hard she worked. To how complicated her decision was. In other words, I gave her permission to be mentally overwhelmed. In so doing,…
On “You might change your mind!”
Less than one in ten people who being transitioning step backward (“detransition”) at some point. Not all of them detransition completely. About two out of five first marriages end through divorce rather than death. (This number is higher for second and third marriages.) And yet… it is far more common for people to try to…
North American Traveler
In the summer of ’76, my family–my father, mother, older brother, and myself–travelled from Michigan to Alaska and back by car. Our family station wagon started out towing our trailer, which is where we slept, and where my parents cooked our meals. On the side of trailer, my father had painted a map of North…
Unwrapped Candy
on the coffee table in my grandmother’s house in a depression era green glass bowl on a doily that was handcrafted by my great great aunt: there was a mass of unwrapped peppermints the pillowy kind half crunchy half chewy which had been there long enough that they had grown together inseparable covered with a…
What’s the Deal with Logarithms?
I’m going to talk about logs here. I have more to say later, but this is a basic intro sketch. First I’m going to talk about the stuff of elementary school. When it comes to mathematics, most people find comfort in elementary school mathematics. So, consider the humble number line: We want to move along…
Should People Who Aren’t Nonbinary Use Mx.?
Like most Indo-European languages, English has a lot of gendered words. Most have standard gender neutral alternatives (boy/girl/child, brother/sister/sibling, etc.), and a few do not (Sir/Ma’am, aunt/uncle, niece/nephew, etc.). This article is specifically about Mr./Ms./Mx., but I’ll start with niece/nephew. The nonbinary/genderqueer community has suggested a few gender neutral forms, the most prevalent being “nibling”….
A Hodgepodge of Inconsistencies
Mathematical terminology and notation through a linguistic lens Introduction The first time I attended graduate school was for Linguistics. My first year, I taught English as a Second Language. My most resistant students were Mathematics majors, because many of them held the opinion that mathematics is a universal language. Why bother getting fluent in English?…
Keeping, Changing, Flipping
Consider the following task: \[1.\quad \text{Simplify the expression }\frac{3}{4}\div\frac{2}{5}.\] It is very common for students to struggle with this sort of task. A common teaching approach is “Keep Change Flip,” but too often that’s presented as a mechanical trick without any deeper understanding of why it works. In proper mathematical language, “Keep Change Flip” translates…