misc.

* there's a world of difference between students with different motivation. i had two students with appointments to come in for extra homework help this afternoon. the first said she wanted good pictures to help understand the ideas behind things. she was looking for the intuition behind problems and ways to put all the big ideas together. she got really excited about some things when she saw them clearly for the first time. it was fun to watch her figure things out. student #2 came in also to talk about homework, but seemed to just be looking for a "formula" for how to solve each type of problem. no motivation wanted, just wanted the path to the answers. my way of teaching is to make every 3rd sentence into a question so that whoever i'm working with has to think and pay attention, and so i can sense how much they're actually catching on... the first student, whether she was right or wrong, wasn't afraid to make informed guesses... the second frequently looked at me like i had two heads or made guesses that didn't make sense. actually wanting to understand the big picture instead of just a bunch of formulas to do cookie cutter example problems makes a world of difference. calc 1 and calc 2 are survivable by either method, but i really don't think the latter works for calc 3... we'll see...

* i hate feeling controlled. i commented how last week the professor i TA for visited my 2nd two sections and completely interfered with classroom pace. he's stopped me twice in the past week to tell me topic by topic what he's covered by lecture, and listed all the examples of types of problems he's done too... tonight, i got a long email from him telling me exactly which problems to cover and asking that i make all 3 of my recitation sections as identical as possible. this frustrates me, since seriously, 3 different rooms full of different people have 3 different class personalities and different questions they need to get answered. last semester, my 1st section didn't talk much, my 2nd section was all over the place.. they asked similar questions to my 1st section but were much more interactive in helping me work through them at the front of the room... and my 3rd section generally asked questions completely disjoint from the other two... it wasn't uncommon in there that we'd start making models of things out of paper to illustrate what we were doing and talk about ideas instead of the chalkboard driven explanations the other 2 sections needed. in theory i have no problem with the professor expressing preferences in how he wants the recitations for his class to be run, but really, i don't know that his requests are completely feasible, or even if they are, how beneficial they are to all the students... we'll see.

* conversation earlier:
me: "leigh, there's too much math in the world"
leigh: "ok, let's get rid of some of it"
me: "really? ok, modules are gone!"
leigh: "score! i'm ok with that!"

pros: 1/3 of the minor topic for my qualifying exam would be gone and leigh would have no more representation theory homework
cons: colleen wouldn't have a research area anymore... oops.

* last week, i was feeling pretty calm about pending exam... over the weekend, when i started getting some of the deeper details of things straight, i got a better picture of how much more there always will be to learn... even restricting to the specific topics i need to know for my exam and considering the amount i already know about them, there will ALWAYS be more to figure out, and i just hope i get enough figured out before the exam. i've gone from serene a week ago, to high tension mode for the past several days... we'll see how the darn thing goes, and in the mean time, study, study, study.

* my homework in the next week for my one and only graduate class this semester (my advisor's bioinformatics/exp. math class) is to write a program that solves sudoku puzzles. next monday, everyone will run their program on the same 10 puzzles and whoever has the fastest average run time wins $10. my advisor is funny, and that means we get fantastic homework. (if you're wondering how sudoku relates to bioinformatics, it doesn't... but the programming technique we just used for an actual abstract biology related problem also applies to solving puzzles like that.)

* i think that's it... i get to teach from 8:30-1:30 tomorrow, then studying, office hours, grading 75 quizzes, and more studying. i know, you're totally jealous.

later dudes.