Physics, no Chemistry

Jon, Mrs. E.

Welcome! If this is the first article you’re reading, you’ll want to jump back to the beginning. This might not make much sense out of order. But you’re welcome to glean what you can. I’m talking about competence here, using stories about people I know, and they’re in rough chronological order.

Jon is the next example I have for you from high school. An important figure in my life, naturally I had a crush on Jon. He was a year older, straight-A student, theater person, musician (french horn), and thoroughgoing geek. I don’t actually remember meeting Jon, he just became a fixture in my friend group. We were competitive in Science Olympiad.

My father had given me an HP11c calculator, which uses Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). So I was faster than anyone at the calculator competition run by Mrs. E, the Physics Teacher and Science Olympiad coach. I think Jon felt he should have been able to win anyway, but when you need fewer keys to calculate, it’s just faster. Competent people either use the right tools or use the ones they have to the best of their ability. Jon came close to winning those competitions with an inferior calculator.

Having Jon as competition in High School was a great help. I tried so hard to match or beat or even just impress him, and I learned that it was useful to be around people who could challenge you. Different people challenge you in different ways. Jon was smart and shared my academic interests, and being a year ahead of me, I was always playing catch-up. It wasn’t mentorship, because who has mentors at that age, but it checked a lot of the boxes mentorship does. But Jon was ahead of everyone in his own class too, Valedictorian of course.

His parents provided what you might call “a lot of structure” in the form of knowing where he was and who he was with. Considering the origin of Competence, I think Jon had an upbringing that gave him a platform for success. There was no chance he was going to go off the rails, not with curfews and a mom we all respected. But by the time I knew him, none of that was necessary, he proved that in college where he still managed straight A’s (while throwing his "curfew” to the wind).

But let me jump back a bit to another source of competence in part of Jon’s and my shared upbringing. Mrs. E. She’s the Physics Teacher who ran Science Olympiad. She was a huge inspiration to me. In addition to being a magnificent teacher, who brought Physics to life, she was also just a ball of energy. She was rarely without a granola bar or other snack in her hand. We joked that if she stopped eating she might use up all her energy so fast she’d just disappear. She used to hold little “mini Science Olympiad” competitions in the school. Paper airplane contests, bridge building, egg parachutes, and the aforementioned calculator competition. That’s how she screened for the team, but it also gave geeks a fun outlet for showing off, testing things, and having fun.

I was sure I wanted to be a Physics Major because Mrs. E made it seem like such fun. (Nobody mentioned that modern Physics even back then had progressed past classical Physics, and that it would be all math and no rolling balls down inclined planes.) But I did learn from Mrs. E that competent people bring energy to their work. Maybe not always “joy,” precisely (though she tended to have a joyful presence) but an intensity that is a bit inspiring. They are INTO what they do. They can bring others along with them just by doing what they do so thoroughly and convincingly.

I think that bit of competence is a kind of charisma, but it’s not about the person, it’s about the work. Incompetent people can still draw followers with regular charisma, but they don’t usually inspire people to work well or to love the work. Competent people draw interest to what needs to be done and draw out the best in others.That was Mrs. E.

Part of her drawing out was kindness. Physics isn’t easy, and she knew that. She was supportive, and didn’t see mistakes as a terrible thing, just as a bit of fun or an example to learn from. I remember her explaining to a group of us once how to tell if a joke at someone’s expense is funny. It’s funny if it’s not true. So a joke about your smartest friend doing something dumb might be funny. But a joke about someone less smart being “dumb” would never be funny. There’s so much truth behind that. It’s carried through to what I’ve learned in studying bias, and “isms.” Jokes about a lower-power group (race, gender, etc.) are pretty much never funny, though people in those groups tell jokes like that all the time. But jokes about someone in a higher-status group are often hilarious. The underlying point is just considering the feelings of the joke-ee and whether one’s position is of higher or lower power. Are you being a bully.

But back to Physics. given Mrs. E’s inspiration I got interested in superconductors and became fascinated by them. I wanted to be the one to discover a room temperature superconductor and essentially eliminate the problem of energy loss in transmission, along with many other applications of the uncanny features they have. I even performed a Forensics five-minute speech on the topic. (Sadly Forensics judges are less into materials science than I was, and my ability to inspire them was too limited. Just bringing passion to something doesn’t make you Competent.)

It’s my observation that that’s one way Competence grows more Competence. Mrs. E supported thousands of students in her career. Above and beyond the work assigned to “teach Physics,” she taught a lot more, and made space for teenagers to grow into people. Jon and I were beneficiaries of that, and each of us can surely trace some bits of our better selves to that.

So Jon and I competed until he graduated and went to UW Madison. I wrote to him regularly (I have a hazy memory that “regularly” understates it) and he was nice enough to write back (less regularly.) He wrote one letter about a guy from his dorm house who could do Rubik’s cube puzzles even faster than Jon could (which was very fast indeed). More on that person later.