feelings

* tired

there's a heck of a lot for me to study before my qualifying exam, and i am chipping away at it... but it seems like it's never ending. i hoped to figure out 3 theorems today, and i kind of understand one of them... there's always tomorrow... but there's only so many tomorrow's before the text... so yeah, tired of studying

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* overwhelmed

i don't know what i got myself into when i agreed to be head TA for calc 3. right now, just figuring out how to be a good TA in general is going to be a lot of work. if the format was like calc 1, where students do homework, and come in prepared and i answer questions for an hour or so, then i'd be set... even though the beginning of calc 3 is vector stuff that'll be straightforward for me to remember, my first two weeks teaching this semester are going to be a lot of work. classes start tues (1/17) here. my students will have lecture with the professor on mondays and thursdays and see me on tuesday mornings. that means i run 3 80 minute recitation periods where they haven't been to any classes whatsoever ahead of time... what to teach them? i'm supposed to come up with an 80 minute review of calc 1 and calc 2 lecture to give 4 days from tomorrow... not excited. not impossible, but still a lot more work than just answering questions... the second class i teach will be crazy too, since it'll be in a computer lab and i'm supposed to teach them how to use maple (a math programming language). i was given the job of calculus 3 head TA because i know maple, but i get along well with maple 9.5, and don't like maple 10, which, as of a couple months ago is what all the university labs have... so in the next week i need to learn the new version and be ready to teach a whole class on using it for calc 3 stuff too... the maple part won't be as hard for me as for people who don't use maple at all, but it's still considerably more work than calc 3.... and this isn't even thinking about my extra work as *head* TA yet... i'm sure that there have to be other calc 3 TAs this semester who are more experienced with teaching calc 3 than me, so i'm not quite sure what makes me get the job ahead of them... i feel underqualified and overwhelmed... and figuring this out so i can present myself well to 3 rooms full of students each week is going to take a decent chunk out of the qual studying time, thus enhancing tired.

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* amused (at least 1 out of 3 isn't that bad, right?)

beauty and the geek 2 season premeire was on tonight. i saw all of season 1 as a marathon one day when i wasn't feeling well and spent the afternoon curled up on the couch in our living room... it was cute... then i've caught bits and pieces of the marathon of season 1 last week on the WB, so tonight it was worth a shot to watch again.

in particular about this week: chris is going to get on my nerves because instead of thinking he can learn from others he seems to be so sure of himself to a fault. his appearance on this first episode showed he has lots of brainiac knowledge and quite a bit of pop culture knowledge, but even if he knows things, he doesn't have the "plays along well socially with others" going at all, which is exactly what he's supposed to be learning... i hope he calms down soon, or gets out of the house...

in general: i find this show entertaining to watch because seriously i can relate so much more to the guys on it than to the girls... i wonder if a gender-reversed version of the show would be equally fun to watch or just weird... i don't know... but also, the further they get into the show and bond and bring the best out in one another, the more satisfying it gets to watch them all grow and branch out, from both sides of the coin. it's a lot more entertaining and worthwhile in my estimation than i would have guessed from previews last year. we'll see how it goes.

so tired, overwhelmed, and amused... i think that sums it up.

night y'all