"oh thank God, you speak english!"

indeed, that's the first thing any of my students said to me this morning.

i was up at 6:45, chugged theraflu with my breakfast and was sniffling my way out the door by 8:15 to go teach this morning.

i walked into my first class, set down my bag and said "good morning" to the dozen students who were 10 minutes early, and immediately the girl sitting in the first row in the middle of th room said "oh thank God, you speak english".

my response was "well, only 1 of the 5 calc 3 TAs this semester isn't a native speaker, so you had a good chance".

for 8:40 am, my first section was impressively awake. not excited about being there, but they were functional and responded to my questions.... my second section was full of chatty guys who wanted to make smalltalk about math dept. people before and after class, which was moderately entertaining... my last section seemed the least happy to be there and it took them a little longer to come up with the right answers to my questions, but maybe that's a lunchtime class thing? we'll see.

my first week last semester, my 1st section struck me as the most awake and interactive section, but as the semester progressed they were the most quiet and stubborn section... we'll see how the personalities of the sections play out this time.

it's a world of difference talking to a room of 20 2nd or 3rd year students who are all engineering, physics, or math majors instead of a room of 35 1st semester freshmen who have non-math related majors. they just interact differently, and i was pleased with the level of response i got to my questions all morning. i gave them sample problems to solve to guide us but basically said "tell me what you remember about limits? about derivatives? about integrals?" and it was a party all around. already according to my math website statistics counter, i've gotten 2 dozen hits from rutgers computers this morning, which means they actually went to look up the useful links/ideas in the webpage i made for the course, which makes me feel useful already too.

so, even though i'm sniffly and sneezy, for a first day of teaching and not knowing any of the students (i take that back, one of scott's last semester students who failed then is in my 3rd section and recognized me, and vice versa but i don't know his name), it went really well.

btw, the last thing i was asked by a student today, was on the way out of my 3rd section, one of my students stopped me and asked "so, our professor, does he actually speak clear english too or is that wishful thinking?"

wow.

so calc 3 students at rutgers apparently are used to being foiled by accents, and lucked out this semester... whatever that means... i just know i was popular today because english is my first language, and that's a fairly easy way to get on peoples good side.

go figure.

lunch, then back to campus for a bit.

later dudes.