summer stroll (CC / BY 2.0 by Muffet)

Tonight was the first midterm for Linear Algebra, a class I am ostensibly taking to prepare myself for graduate study. The last question on the exam was especially challenging for me. It felt as though I had the pieces I needed, but didn’t know how to fit them together to yield a solution. I banged my head against it for quite a long time, ultimately leaving a note explaining my reasoning, and heading out into Harvard Square to retrieve the car, and pick up Negin at her lab.

One topic that came up during the cluster agency meeting last night was ego, and the way that we leap to defensiveness and criticism when our ego-cultivated identity is put at risk. I’ve been noticing this a lot in the last 24 hours, and it feels good to notice it, and try to re-focus my attention in that moment.

“The ego wants to be right, so it has to create a situation where there is a wrong. With that dichotomy, then the ego places itself in the right and in this way can constantly strengthen itself. We create an identity that is built up on these experiences – but this identity is based on illusion. …These are the mental tests blowing over the friends.” (From the consultation last night)

I guess the mental stress that accompanied confronting a challenging math problem is one example of this. I conceive of myself as someone who is intelligent – as someone who possesses knowledge, and when the problem wouldn’t fit together, then that illusory identity was placed at risk.

Outside of the exam, in the car driving to meet Negin and head home to Lowell, the pieces started to move and fall into place in my head. I remembered that we can create a transformation matrix with respect to any basis by combining the coordinate vectors of the transformed basis vectors. And so we try to develop our capacity for mathematical reasoning without buying into notions of knowledge as commodity or unchanging foundation.

And, so you don’t go home empty-handed: here’s a link to a great blog that Raina passed on to us: Advancing the Spirit of Economics.