Monday’s class…not so good when I tried to explain the change of basis formula. But I saved it by saying it’s not important, just remember the formula…heh. I don’t know, this is the kind of thing where I should have prepared much more in advance so that I don’t have to improvise so much about stuffs.

Wednesday’s class…I was rushing. A lot. So I didn’t even have the time to pause. Went through diagonalization and eigenstuffs, but I don’t know if I rushed so much that it was just terrible for the students. One person handed in the optional assignment even though I’ve only posted the previous night…that’s pretty fast.

Two more lectures to go!

For the first time ever, I have gone through my prepared materials so quickly that I was almost improvising at the end. I didn’t expect that coordinates with respect to a basis would be so quick… Of course this might mean that I went through it so quickly that they totally didn’t understand it. But I would never know, because most of them don’t tell me.

I was writing fast, and when I wrote the word “where,” it was a bit messy. Mirko piped up and asked what I wrote, since the first “e” looked like an “o”… All I could say was, “don’t have a dirty mind!”

4 classes left…it’s been a wild ride.

Monday’s class started out very empty because of the snow storm, I think. I counted about 25 students in the classroom to start…heh. But of course people started filling in as the class went on. I was talking about dimensions, and it just felt…strange. I tried to explain some of the intricacies about subspaces of the same dimension, but I think that failed miserably.

Wednesday’s class started with a very warm classroom, literally. I was breaking a sweat just a few minutes into the lecture. I was trying to explain how to extend a basis, but I think I went into too much details (even though it was with an example), and that took way too much time. That left very little time for rowspace and student evaluations, which are all going to be disasterous.

Based on what the markers said about the last assignment, there seems to be a polarization between students who understand vector spaces and those who don’t. It’s kind of frustrating, because most of them don’t ask for help even though they seem clueless about anything that goes on in class. That reminds me that I used to be like that in a couple of courses…heh. Anyway, I try very hard to explain at their level, just hoping that some people would understand…

St Louis wings are so good…and they are so expensive! Even on a special!

I finally won at RoboRally! Twice in a row! Against two newbies, though…

I’m in a kind of “I’m hopelessly lost and don’t care anymore” regarding my immediate future plans.

Wow…snow…it was pretty bad Saturday night with the snowstorm during the fellowship. First big snowstorm for me this season. Then it got really bad Sunday night. This morning, I went to my car only to find it buried under about 10cm of snow! Has there been that much snow that early in the winter season? I don’t remember. In any case, I was exhausted with the clearing of the snow…time to buy a house and put the car in a garage?

I was bored and cashed out $100 from pokerstars. I thought it was pointless to have the money in an online account anyway, so might as well have it in my hand while the exchange rate is still favourable for US–>CAD transactions. So I should be about $122 richer within the next couple of weeks.

I still don’t understand how the stores decided that Christmas stuffs should come out at the start of November… I’m already annoyed by the badly-rewritten Christmas music.

I don’t remember much from this lecture. I was pretty sleepy because of the marking from the previous night. I did arrive kind of late, didn’t even go to my office before heading to the classroom. I opened up my computer so that I have notes to work with, but these were only outlined notes. I think I explained in a good way, but then again I still have no idea if they understood anything at all.

Handed back the midterm, and it was not too bad of a midterm. The average of 69 and median of 71 are both higher than the first midterm. I guess I really was very generous. Most of them were jammed in the 60s and 70s, with two abnormalities at 98 and 100 (too much bonus?). In any case, the final should be easier…maybe.

I’m not sure if I want to teach again…there were pros and cons, obviously, and they both weigh heavily.

I’ve just had the painful experience of having to re-install my computer. Basically, vista sucks…but it’s nice to have a new start to things. Definitely turning off the aero thing to speed things up a bit. It took a long time to find my vista CD, though…rummaged through my stuffs at Li Zhen’s place and found it in the very last box that I needed to search in…oh well, interesting experience, I guess.

First sight of snow on Monday. Winter is here…or not…it turned into +10 again yesterday.

Still no sign of anything happening for next year…

After the midterm madness from the previous day, I didn’t really prepare much for this lecture. I only had an outline in memory, and that’s it. But it didn’t turn out too badly, I guess. I was doing linear independence, and nobody asked questions about it. So either I explained it well with lots of examples, or they totally didn’t get it at all. That’s part of the problem, I guess, which is not knowing where the students stand.

Ah…the midterm. I was dumb enough to give them a 6×6 determinant to complain about…heh. But overall I thought it was a fair midterm, but I guess not everyone thought so. I discussed the solutions at the beginning of class, and it was a light-hearted approach to the exam. I tried to get them calmed down a bit by saying that I would be very generous, but that didn’t seem to have received well. At least they did well in the true or false questions, most of them got 7 out of 10 right. And with the impossible determinant (although I thought it was entirely possible), 5 of them got it right and a few more got very close. So it’s not an entirely impossible exam… Then there’s one student who not only got the determinant right, but also got all 10 true or false questions, hence getting a whopping 10 bonus points…that is a bit scary.

My right arm is still sore during the lecture…

It’s official, I suck at lecturing. It began well today, trying to explain span in the easiest way possible. But once I started columnspace and nullspace, it got really technical again. I was a bit pressed for time because I wanted to leave some time for them to ask midterm questions, so I don’t think they got it through my rushed explanations. I guess one problem is that I don’t spend enough time preparing these lectures, so I didn’t think through how the students can be confused and stuff. Once again, it would help if I understand the material as well…heh.

Tons of people came to office hour today, after I woke up. A lot of them are having problems understanding the materials, unfortunately, so maybe I’m not doing a good enough job in the lecturing. But I really liked the interaction with the students, in a kind of relaxed office hour environment. So I don’t know…maybe I’m suited more for a TA rather than a lecturer.

My right arm gets sore during the lectures… Maybe I’m just too tense.

What is up with all the Christmas stuffs coming out so early? I don’t get it…

So Li Zhen’s wedding was yesterday. It was tiring, of course, but it was good. I botched my speech a little, but it was ok. Lots of cold jokes. I guess I was going through the whole day as more of a duty rather than enjoying the celebration…

Somehow I feel both grim and hopeful for the future. More grim than hopeful, I guess…but I’m kind of tired of all this uncertainty…although that is probably the most valuable lesson to learn.

It was a horrific lecture. I was slower than I thought, and yet I didn’t explain the simplest concepts clearly to the students. Of course they only asked me about it after class, which was too late…but I really presented the material in a way that is way too theoretical, even if I included many examples. The concept of span isn’t hard, so I didn’t think of the simplest way of explaining it. Oh well…

I’m kind of scared that I might not finish the materials for this course. Even more scary is that because I will be rushing through the vector spaces and eigenvectors, they might not have enough practice with them to be well prepared for the final exam. This is going to be a disaster!

I have finished preparing the second midterm, which I thought might be easier than the first, but just as long. So who knows what’s going to happen…

This jetlagging thing is crazy. Even though I slept a lot during the night and also during the day, once the clock hits 8 or 9pm, my mind just goes numb… It’s like that during Thursday night’s wedding rehearsal, and also yesterday’s drive from London to Waterloo. It’s kind of scary, actually, how I couldn’t do anything, as if I hit a brick wall or something.

I’m now thinking about what would happen if I get to run a world puzzle championship…heh. It’s a very long shot, but who knows… I have some great ideas already, but of course they are never going to come true.

I’m supposed to be the best man at today’s wedding…scary. I haven’t even written up a speech yet.

So I missed 4 lectures in total, 3 of them filled in by Pat, who actually finished everything about determinants. So he must have been blazing through the materials. I guess we will see how he does when the midterm is over…heh.

It was a difficult task to explain vector spaces, and I don’t know if I have done well enough for them to understand. It took a while to think through the material and decide how to teach it. Certainly it would help if I understand what I was doing…heh.

I felt ok with the lecture, though, not too many slip ups. But I did catch myself talking too fast in many instances, and that tends to be bad.

Back home now. It was a crazy trip, but an excellent one. The flights were all very full, so that made things quite uncomfortable. I managed to watch Get Smart on the plane, and it wasn’t too bad.

One random comment about the trip. It seems that the Europeans cared a lot about the US election as well. They are also pretty knowledgeble as to what’s going on there. It just sounded funny when Will talked about a poll where about 90% of the Europeans would have picked Obama over McCain… Clearly America cannot vote on their own…they need the assistance of the rest of the world! Who knew?

Back to regular life now, and I’m so very tired, as usual. I don’t really want to teach about vector spaces, but I guess I will have to…

Well, this has happened two years ago, and it is happening again. I’m stuck in Frankfurt! And once again I’m stuck with Will, Stan and Helene and I guess that’s the good thing about it. Company is important.

Flight goes tomorrow morning, and I will miss a class…that will create chaos…which is not a puzzle.

So the reason I missed my flight to Toronto is really bizarre…it’s the fault of Libyan leader Qadhafi…and I’m absolutely serious.