Yet another new country to blog from! It’s been exiting, but also tiring. The sights are “interesting” and the puzzles are hard…but that’s expected. I’m having a good time here.

Question: When is the next time I will be in Minsk?

More writing later, I hope.

Once again, on the eve of a big trip, I’m still totally not prepared. Haven’t even finished the work that I’m supposed to do. Haven’t started packing, but that’s to be expected. It’s tough to get excited about it, but I will look forward to enjoy a week off, spending a total of around $2,500 along the way.

I guess my biggest challenge at the wpc would be the social aspect of the gathering. I should be mingling with people and stuff, but I’m not sure I would be able to do that. There’s also the challenge of staying an extra day…but I have some time to figure that out.

Robo Rally is a good game, a game so good that I have never been able to win it. That’s just sad…

I was talking about inverse transformations, and it just ended up feeling way too abstract and technical again. So I don’t know if they understood anything. I didn’t like that lecture. Oh well, I’m going away for a week anyway, so they probably won’t remember anything.

Preparing things in advance is certainly a chore, and quite difficult, but I got it done. Finished preparing everything about determinants, and hopefully Pat will finish it all. Also hoping that when I come back, I don’t get booted off the stage because Pat is so good at it.

At least one person knew where Minsk is…

It was a disaster. I was planning to do a quiz, so I only had about 35 minutes to do my lecture. And it just happens that I prepared a bit too much, and I really needed to cover all the material since they need it for the assignment. So I kind of rushed through everything and it just fell flat…that’s a bad lecture. Never again. Or so I thought.

As for the quiz, I made a slightly tricky question at the end which only a few people got. So that became a bonus question. But, when lots of people couldn’t even identify when two matrices can be multiplied together, it raised some concerns…

It’s so hard to prepare lectures in advance! And I’m trying with the determinants and stuff, but it’s really difficult. Time is certainly running out.

I’ve made history on Monday. For the first time ever, I used my debit card to make a purchse.

Recently the thoughts about the future has resurfaced, and it’s making me very uncomfortable. I really don’t like to have a job in academia, except maybe teaching. I try not to get this to depress me, but it’s about to happen…

I’m just a few days from Belarus! Yet I’m so not prepared to go…

It got cold today. Hovered around 4 degrees all day. And rumour had it that we had our first snow of the season today, so off to winter we go!

I finally replaced my windshield wipers, and the new ones are awesome. Now if only I go and fix my car’s rust problem…

Now I’m just eating free food from everywhere. That’s one way of living…

I thought it was a pretty good lecture. At least the Indian guy smiled when I showed the rotation matrix, and he talked to me afterwards about it. I was kind of on a roll that day, and it was good. Good thing I didn’t get the quiz in time, because I would have had to stop at an awkward spot. So that’s a satisfying lecture, a rarity these days.

During the lecture, I heard a cellphone ring, and I immediately said “hello?” I got some laughs…actually, I was surprised that they laughed at that…so it’s good. They also laughed when I was complaining about drawing vectors in 3D…but that’s just the usual.

The next few days are critical, as I have to prepare a ton of stuffs before I go off to Minsk!!!

This is where I thought I had everything well prepared and I was very ready for this lecture. But…I hit a snag. I just felt that while I was teaching the material, it was too abstract and technical. I didn’t get much of a reaction from these science students, but I just felt it was there. I don’t think they knew what I was talking about, or why I was talking about linear transformations. Actually, I don’t know why I was talking about linear transformations, either! So yeah, I figured I’m probably better off teaching math students rather than science students, because of my mathie kind of mind.

Apparently there’s controversy regarding midterm 2, since apparently it’s on a week with a heavy load of exams and labs. I don’t know, I don’t really want an alternate schedule there.

Jessica can’t subsitute for me anymore, and now Pat is a potential candidate for that. This should be interesting. Maybe the students will love Pat so much that they will never listen to me again…heh.

Well, it’s just after Thanksgiving long weekend where I spent almost no time thinking about this lecture. So of course it bombed pretty badly. I didn’t explain any of the inverse stuffs well, and it was probably one of the worse lectures ever.

On the other hand, I was more comfortable with explaining linear transformations or mappings. I provided some comic relief once again when I miscalculated an evaluation of a simple polynomial function. They were rumbling down there after I made the mistake, so I figured there must be something wrong, and there was. The answer is 1, I put down 3. I “humourously” said it’s a “malfunction”…hahaha… They laughed, so it’s all good.

Trying to hand out the midterm is a bit chaotic, but I remember in undergrad they did that too, so I was doing it as well. There are too many faces that are too similar, so I couldn’t for the life of me remember more than 10 names. The average is 65 with the median 69. I thought it was a bit low for a first year course, but after asking around, the consensus seems to be that this is just right, with Furino saying it’s “bang on” with the caveat “the highest score of 93 concerns me.” So after saying the I might adjust the marks to the students, I may end up doing nothing about it. Hope that’s ok with the students…

It’s supposed to be the Thanksgiving long weekend, but there were no explicit “thanksgivings” being thrown around during this time. That’s because it was so jam packed with events that any mention of thanksgiving seems to be secondary or implicit. Started out with the Yuan Zhiming evangelism thing that took place Saturday afternoon, evening, and Sunday morning. I was there Saturday morning, and it was a long and exhausting day, dealing with powerpoint and computer recordings. The computer recordings ended up being an epic fail, but the other parts were awesome. I was astounded with the number of people who showed up (must have been close to 1000 per meeting), and especially with the number of people coming to Christ. Seeing that was an amazing experience. Of course the difficult part would be the follow ups, but I don’t know which part I would play in this. In any case, I’m thankful to be part of this giant experience.

Now as if that’s not enough for the weekend, Stream of Praise was in Toronto as well. So after the Sunday service, I rushed to Toronto with Roger Clarence Christina. First stuffed ourselves silly at Mongolian Grill. Then wandered aimlessly at PacMall (still don’t like that place). Then finally arrived at the church with SOP. The music was as loud as before, even though we weren’t sitting in the front rows. I’m still pretty uncomfortable whenever I go to an SOP thingie. I don’t know, something just feels shallow or fake…but it’s probably just me being shallow and fake. Anyway, after the thing, we headed out to T&T where at 10pm, it was still packed with people! I finally got a chance to stock up on drinks and bread, and headed home. It’s a good thing that I let Clarence and Roger drive the 401 for me, because I was so exhausted from the evangelism things…and I slept well on the car…heh.

Now as if that’s enough for the weekend, on Monday, Roger and I headed off to Blue Mountain to see the famed fall colours of Ontario! It was sunny and warm, and supposedly peak colouring season for the Blue Mountain area, so that was a perfect chance to go and see it. Our first stop was at Orangeville for lunch. Well, Orangeville is exactly as it’s named, since we saw lots of orange trees there! Lots of these trees lined up along the roads. Even the name of the city as painted on the water tower was in orange… In any case, we headed off to Hockley Valley, planning to just pass by this place. And boy was it beautiful there! From what I saw in the car, it was a scene of expansive endless hills of multi-coloured trees all along Hockley road, and later Airport road. Very beautiful there. It’s too bad that we didn’t make a stop there since there were so many cars lined up along the road. Definitely on my list of places for a return trip. Once we got to Blue Mountains, it was not as good as Hockley, but still not too bad. Unfortunately it was just past peak there, as there were lots of leaves on the ground rather than on the trees. We did take the gondola up and take in the sights of the scene below. The light smog didn’t help, though, but the sun was a welcome sight for the cameras. Roger wanted to take an adventurous approach home, and that we did after realizing that the roads to “Little Germany” were unpaved! It was a rocky ride through another beautiful scenery in the backroads. And people live there! Definitely another candidate for a return trip…if we have the Highlander hybrid…heh. So yeah, after that, I let Roger take over the driving while I slept in the back of the car. Nice trip, but we were probably off by a day or two… More next year, I say.

So the midterm ended up running smoothly, as I worried too much ahead of time. The pool proctor was very nice, and that made things even better. As for the stuents who wrote the exams…well, some say the exam was ok, some say it’s bad, so I don’t really know how to judge the fairness of the exam. I’m pretty satisfied with the 7 true or false questions where the distribution is really like a normal distribution, with only 1 getting all seven correct. And the office hour prior to the exam was good, too, some interesting interaction with the students. If there’s more of that kind of interaction, that would be great.

For Friday’s lecture, I couldn’t print the notes because someone jammed the printer. So I went into it semi-blind. The big things are the prepared examples that I wasn’t able to give. But overall it went pretty smoothly, I think…not sure, though. I’m trying to determine what to do next… I probably want to chicken out of vector spaces until November, but who knows…

I said, there’s no class on Monday, and they should go vote on Tuesday. “Who should we vote for?” one student asked. “Certainly not Harper, I hope” I replied.

Wow…horrific errors abound in this lecture. I seem to claim that if cd=0, then either c=/= 0 or d=/=0… Good thing they caught it…

I forgot to mention from Monday that it was a good thing the midterm scheduling fiasco is done. Thankfully a pool proctor was found quickly, and that’s good. Now the midterm must go on!

I made some concessions in making assignment 4 a bonus and giving away the proof question on the exam. Is that a good thing? I don’t know…

I think I explained the “solving linear systems using elementary matrices” pretty well. One of my flaws, I believe, is doing too few examples with these science students, and I think I illustrated using an example in a good way. So that’s one plus for me…although I have no idea whether they have learned it or not.

Apparently these students don’t like proof or concept questions…heh.

I’m starting to know some names, well, actually, just 3 or 4. There’s this student (who I think is Kyle) who is pretty keen on the things that I taught. So that’s one good sign there. Also there’s another student who has been doing extremely well according to the marks, although I have no idea what he looks like…heh.

I was excited about this lecture because I was going to do something fun and I felt it might be enjoyable to teach. Turns out that this means I didn’t prepare a whole lot for it, and I ended up getting stuck as to how to transition between related topics. I really need to prepare, I guess.

Students asked for a practice midterm. And I’m like…why? This is the first time I’m teaching, so I don’t have much to go on. It was tough to come up with one midterm, and now I should come up with another one? Oh well…I grabbed some questions from the text, added some of my own, and voila, a practice midterm. Not sure that would help, though. I put the disclaimer: “These are problems that may (or may not) be helpful for the midterm. User discretion is advised.”

Midterm madness…one student tipped me off that some pharmacy club is using the exact room that was booked for my midterm at the exact same time. I asked about it and yes indeed, scheduling made a mistake. Oops…now I wonder what would have happened had the student didn’t tip me off about it. Thank God for that! But now the more difficult question arises…the midterm is now booked into two rooms, and it makes proctoring very difficult with just me and my TA. It used to be in one big room, so it was ok, but now I have to account for the alternate exam people from earlier, and the proctoring situation is bad. So now I need to request a pool proctor, but it might be too late for that… So maybe the midterm won’t go on…yikes…

It’s getting cold! 3 degrees to start the day… At least the heater is finally turned on. That’s good. Also, a portion of the leaves have changed colours…and fell. Doh…I seem to never be able to see the fall colours in full bloom. I need a trip to Algonquin!

Yesterday while I was in the office, somebody knocked on my door and asked, “do you know where Michael Phelp’s office is?” I was about to answer when he added, “I mean, Michael Best.” I didn’t come up with a clever answer during that pause anyway.

Lead in nail update: I was originally afraid that the lead would stick into my skin rather than come out… But I’ve just checked, it has room to come out, so that’s a good thing. I don’t feel the pain much now, only a little bit of annoyance when writing, that’s all. And it shocks people and I have fun seeing people getting shocked…heh.