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.