misc fun with teaching

(1) this morning, one of my students came up to me after class to comment "guess what... you did research in prague with my girlfriend's brother this summer... i was looking at your website, and was really surprised when i saw a picture with sam in it... isn't it a small world?"

(2) in one of my recitation sections i have a hearing impaired student, so rutgers provides a sign language interpreter for her. i finally asked the lady after class today, "so, i can't watch you while i'm lecturing, but i've been wondering for awhile: are there set signs for calculus words, or do you and students agree on some signs ahead of time and stick to them?"... she explained that there's a whole set of signs for math words and she had to go through technical courses to get certified... she showed me some of them for like derivative and integral and stuff, which was kinda cool,... her comment was "i can sign the words, i just have no idea how to do the computations, so as long as you know what you're doing, we're all set." :) it makes sense... just no one thinks about how you would sign a lecture that's all math... so it's kinda fun to discuss. :)

(3) i like getting emails like this:
"AHaaaaaaaaaaaaa (light bulb goes off in head)... i get the answer now.
Thanks for taking the time to help. See you next wednesday."

(4) yesterday when i picked up my half of the calc exams to grade, the prof said he normally gets a class average in the high 60s when he gives that exam, and the half he graded averaged in the high 70s... the average for the half i graded was 81. actual scores covered a large range, but that's still a really decent class average, right? at least i'm fairly content with it.... and i'm glad to be done with that stack of papers... it took me about 9 hours to get through my share of the work, 8 of that done today...

now, to crash.