First Day of School

Today was the first day of school.  I teach at 8 AM, and I was actually awake and alive!  I might be turning into a morning person   :)      The class went well and I enjoyed teaching.  There was a little difficulty (because of first day chaos) of switching from my class ending to the next professor's class starting, and I did the very adult thing and went and found him later in the afternoon and just chatted about how we want the changeover to go.  He was impressed a GTA had the wherewithal to do that and said he was going to try that approach in the future with other professors since just taking the time to communicate (and not between classes, but an actual face to face chat) was going to make things so much better and less frustrating for both of us.  So I am finally learning to tackle problems head on before they become drama  :)

What else?  Oh yes.  Excel doesn't make histograms.  Don't ask me why, but it is like a zillion step process to get a somewhat legitimate histogram.  Plenty of bar charts, just no histograms.  But in researching I found a FREE add-on to Excel (made by some awesome person who just shares it with everyone) and it works great.  So fast and easy.  I love it!

And now it is time for funny stories from Topology.  Just a few words about the prof:  he is our new department head, I had him last semester for Linear Algebra, he is insanely intelligent, and he speaks several languages (English is NOT his first language).

Story #1  At one point he writes a word on the board.  We aren't sure what the word is because he is talking so fast it is hard to understand.  Then he steps back and stares at the word and announces there is something wrong with the word because there just aren't enough letters in it.  I wanted so badly to laugh, but I managed to keep a straight face.  And then he asks us how to spell the word correctly, but we still had no idea what the word was because he had been talking so fast, and he was like c'mon guys - you should know how to spell this.  (At this point I am thinking to myself:  this.  T - H - I - S.)  He did figure it out and we were all like ohhhhhhhh - that is what we are talking about!

Story #2  When he comes into class, he starts lecturing at record speed.  I mean lightning fast.  At one point he looks up at the clock and he says, wow - I am behind.  I only covered 40 pages of the textbook in 40 minutes.  That is only a minute per page, I need to be teaching faster than that!  (I am thinking to myself, are you serious?!?!  Each page takes me many minutes to read, reread, digest, and try to understand.  And he thinks he can cover them in like 45 SECONDS per page?!?!  Oh dear!  At that rate we will be done with the book before Halloween!)

Story #3  He tells us that even a 3 year old can do a bijection.  (A bijection is where each number is paired with one, and only one other number.  And it has to be unique.  So for example you could put 2 and 4 as a pair.  But then you could never again use 2 as the first number and never again use 4 as the second number.  Typically this is what you think of as a straight line on a graph.  So it is more or less like matching the items on one list to a unique item on another list.)  I am thinking to myself, really, a three year old can do a bijection?  Good thing I didn't ask the question with the amount of dubiousness and sarcasm I was thinking in my mind, as he proceeds to enlighten us.  He is like sure - ask a kid how old they are and they will start counting on their fingers.  So they pair being 1 year old with their index finger, 2 year old with their middle finger, and 3 year old with their ring finger.  So they hold up three fingers and tell you they are 3 years old.  They just matched each year of age with a different finger.  (Yes, feel free to groan here and shake your head because I am pretty sure almost no parent says to their child, ok kiddo - today we are going to learn bijections - 1, 2, 3, .... as they count on their fingers!)

Story #4  Last but not least.  He talks about equivalence classes.  (This is kind of like where you make some rule about how items are related to each other, and this rule allows you to break up the list of items into groups and each item can belong to one and only one group).  So he proceeds to compare equivalence classes to cliques of high school girls.  He says that girls are really cliquey in high school and they each belong to only one group and they don't socialize with people from other groups.  Ok.  I can see that.  And then he proceeds to try to expand on this analogy.  Well there are 3 properties of these relationships.  So he starts with the first property, which when translated into his analogy would mean that a high girl likes herself or is friends with herself.  He stands there for a second and says.  Well actually that isn't always true.  I don't think many HS girls like themselves.  He says ok - second one would translate to if Mary is friends with Suzy then Suzy is friends with Mary.  Again he pauses and he is like, well actually that isn't true either.  Mary might treat Suzy as if she is her friend, but maybe Suzy only tolerates her presence and doesn't consider Mary a friend.  AND then he reaches the third property which would be if Mary is friends with Suzy and Suzy is friends with Heidi, then Mary is friends with Heidi.  And then he just shakes his head and says wow that is definitely not true.  This is a terrible example!  None of these properties hold up!  The whole class was laughing at this point.  I will say though that his insight into the typical HS girl and HS girl relationship dynamics was quite impressive!

So that is my day in a nutshell.