Bounded in a Nutshell

The thing I hate about Tuesdays: it's almost 10:30, and I feel like I've been awake for too long. In reality, I've only been awake for a little over three hours, but they've been three hours before 10:30. I don't mind Thursdays as much, even though I do the same thing; I'm not sure whether that's because after my last class on Thursday I go play cards and am then done with my week, or some other, more sinister reason.

On the other hand, today's the first day I felt really comfortable about my early morning class. This might be because I didn't lecture so much as give the kids a worksheet and a laptop apiece and set them to playing. But it was good: I was in a room full of people discussing and debating about mathematics, and how can you not like that if you're in my profession?

After class, one of my students came and asked me about a mortgage problem we'd discussed last week. (This is an upper-division math course, so this came up by way of deriving the formula for mortgage payments... not just applying it.) I showed him how to set up a spreadsheet to check his answer, figured out why his answer was wrong (sign error!), and then was bamboozled regarding why his corrected answer disagreed with my spreadsheet. Turns out I'd made the Third Classic Blunder: my equations started counting at 0, but Excel rows start at 1. Oops. Me good mathematician, really.

Later today: inflicting standard deviations on unsuspecting liberal arts students. Twice. Then sleep.

OK, perhaps I'm overstating the case. But few things are as disappointing to me as when my first cup of coffee of the day is as bland as the one I've got in front of me now. (There are those who would say that I'm totally crazy for having my first cup of coffee be at 1:30 in the afternoon... particularly when my waking-up happened sometime between 7 and 8 in the morning. Of course, others among my friends don't drink coffee at all and I tihnk secretly look askance at those of us who do, so maybe it all balances out.)

So today's the second day of lectures at my Urban Commuter Campus, which translates as my first day of lectures, thanks to a Tuesday-Thursday-only sort of schedule. Sort of rambled in the morning class, but that's OK because we didn't do anything real today anyhow. (I tend to make it a firm policy to do either review or overview on the first day, and that's it; since all of my classes this time out are sort of self-contained units, not directly dependent on any one thing, the lecture plan is just to give a broad look at the material.) The noon class went much better, possibly because I've taught versions of this class in the past and am correspondingly more comfortable with the material. After dismissing the class, one guy came up to me and said that I was the first math teacher he'd had who didn't have him feeling bad about the class after the first day... which is quite a complement in a math-for-people-who-hate-math class, I think.

I'm wondering if I should give up on trying to guess the pronunciations of my students' names beforehand, because I always end up feeling like a bit of a show-off. I've got one student with an obviously Italian last name, which loses a syllable when she says it. On the other hand, I had one student correct the way I said her (reasonably obviously Arabic) name, only to come up to me after class and say, Actually, you pronounced it right. I told you the Americanized version from reflex.

People in the first-class cabin on an airplane aren't just paying for better treatment. They're paying for worse treatment for the people in economy class.