Quarter in Review

As you probably know this last August I moved up to Columbus Ohio. I left behind the best of friends, the familiarity of Rice, and the comfort of having your parents only 2 hours away (I don't know how they have time to do their jobs and be as good to me as they are). The move meant change and more change than the landscape or the climate. Although I do think of Jack London's "To Build a Fire" every morning when I walk to school.

The past few months I started cooking for my self and teaching first year calculus. Each had their share of ups and downs.

About mid October I had tired of the few meals I knew how to cook and frozen Pizzas. I wanted something new and different. So I set out to make cheese quesadillas. Being completely inexperienced in pan frying tortillas, I called my mother for guidance, but even she could not prevent the mess that followed. To cut it short, cheese + oil + tortilla + inexperienced cook= big mess. If any one out there has a good tip for getting burnt oil off my pans I would really appreciate it. They are still dirty.

Winning the award for biggest teaching goof of the quarter came in the fifth week of classes. Often when teaching math, the teacher takes the liberty of shortening words or phrases to save time. Continuous becomes cont and measurable becomes mble. "Without Loss of Generality" becomes WLOG and "The Following Are Equal" becomes TFAE. These short cuts liberate the students from burdensome words that hinder the flow of ideas, but sometimes they create the wrong idea. As was the case when I tried to shorten "Want To Find." Fortunately no one took offense.

The quarter of teaching held also brought many successes, and perhaps the best of which came in the form of terrific students. I had quite a few, but the best by far was a first year girl in my 4:30 class. She made my classes so enjoyable. What I would not give to have 10 students like her. Every class she came presented me with 2-3 difficult problems that she wanted to know the answer to. I'm thinking of doing a second post to just present to you all the neat problems she asked me. Among the best she posed was "why does the derivative of arcsec(x) change when you used a different definition of arcsec(x) (An explanation here)?" For a first year to ask such a question blew my mind. I thank her so much for being my student.

Thank you to Beth for helping me out with my question about snow. I feel better prepared already.