Amazing Race: Wow…what can I say? Everything went almost perfectly. Great weather, not too many people around, timed it almost exactly right. There were hiccups, of course, but they were ok. I had this weird feeling about the whole race, though, like I wasn’t really excited or anything. But they ended up enjoying the race, so I guess that’s important. Still very proud of the final puzzle…that was awesome.

Still sick after 3 full weeks…what is up with that? Is it really allergy or something else? I tend to feel better in the day and it just gets real bad at night…I don’t know.

Apparently 2-7 triple draw cash game is my game now. There are swings, and lots of frustrations with this game, but at least it’s overall moving my bankroll in the upwards direction. So maybe I can do something about it…

It has been 3 lectures in graph theory since I wrote last time. I think it’s gotten into such a routine that I didn’t find enough interesting things to write about here. It’s just going through the usual basic graph theory stuff. I have been much more prepared, typing up lots of details in my notes, so not too many hiccups. I’m very behind, though, which is a shame because (a) I will need to rush through things, and (b) I can’t teach what’s much more interesting than in the text. So, just need to continue rushing until I find some time at the end to do entertaining stuffs, I guess. And I guess graph theory stops being entertaining once I start proving things…

Oh yeah, and the attempt to explain equivalence classes was an epic epic fail…apparently that’s not in the first year math curriculum anymore… What is up with that?

Looks like I’m definitely not teaching next term. That’s too bad, I think this is given me a sense of rhythm in living the life. I think I might be (gasp!) improving as well…so I don’t know.

I have been sick for two full weeks now. It’s a bit ridiculous, actually, since most of the time I would get well in a week. But this time, I’m starting to feel that this might be some kind of an allergy thing, since almost every year I would get sick at this time of the year. And my eyes get itchy often as well. So…I don’t know.

And how do I know that I almost always get sick this time of year? It’s because I’m usually sick during the USPC, and it’s always in the middle of June! The USPC was this past Saturday, and I did horribly bad, so I don’t expect to get to Turkey for the WPC this year. That’s sad.

This coming week will be crazy. The Amazing Race will happen this Saturday, and things are shaping up quite nicely, but there are still lots of gaps to be filled. Also, I need to come up with an assignment for class by Wednesday. Also, I’m supposed to talk to Therese about some paper thingie. Also, I’m supposed to guide the engineering guys on how to do graph theory programming and stuff. Also…also…I’ll pass out soon.

Just as I have predicted last time, I should have prepared way more than I have been. It caught up to me this lecture where I flustered on the simplest proof. It was slightly embarrassing. Also, now that I’ve totally plunged into proof-mode, it becomes a bit dry, and students might get bored quick, I think. Oh well…

Meanwhile, I’m about a lecture behind. And I still want to do more things than what the textbook says. So I don’t know…

Talked to Mike who told me that Ian said the teaching positions for next term has been filled. I asked Ian about it, and he had no idea what Mike is talking about, or maybe he has alzheimers (I guess jokes evolve with age). I emailed Bill, didn’t get any reply, so I would assume that I’m not going to teach next term. Which is kind of sad, actually, since I do enjoy teaching. More so than researching, at least.

It’s been 3 lectures spent so far on graph theory, and it seems that the response has been fairly positive. I’m still sick, and have this heavy nasal voice in all the lectures. I’m pretty sure some couldn’t hear me, but didn’t complain… Anyway, in the first lecture, I spent (too much) time on motivational problems, which are essentially entertainment at that point, I guess. They seemed to like it. In the next lecture, I tried to explain the tricky thing with isomorphism and somehow get them convinced that the handshaking lemma is true. In the last lecture, it was about the n-cube, the failed example, and boring walks and paths. There is a lot more opportunities for in-class interaction, which is nice. Now that we are in graph theory, though, I find that I’m getting lazy in the preparation. So sometimes I do get flustered unnecessarily.

Fun stuffs: “Vertices is the plural form of vertex, not vertice.” “Edges is the plural form of edge.” (boo) “This looks like chicken feet” (a star). In explaining an example for the stable marriage problem, I got them to give some names. After seeing that Diane in the example is married to her lowest-ranked guy, somebody said “but Diane is screwed” and I said “screwed is probably not the best word in this context”… “There is a tutorial today, but it’s probably not going to be so useful…oh no, I shouldn’t have said that!”

So far, Freeyon and another guy have expressed interest in elective courses that study the subjects of this course further. That other guy even mentioned that this is his favourite course this term, so that was nice. After the first lecture, some tall guy said something like “Graph theory seems easier and more interesting, I have faith in you” and I responded “that’s good, because I don’t…” Ah the self-depreciation that I always get into.

Two lectures where I was sick, but once the lectures started, adrenaline kicked in, and I was able to do it. After the lectures were over, though, I was totally drained… But these are nice lectures, I was sort-of well prepared once again, so it went mostly smooth. Explaining the shortcut to the recurrence problems was a bit hairy, but got through that, then the nonhomogeneous version, which just has this additional “guessing” part which is annoying. But the students were asking questions and stuff, so hopefully they do understand what’s going on…hopefully. I’m not sure if they like my style of teaching, though…didn’t really get enough feedback.

Some lectures ago, I used the \ sign in the lecture. I called it the “set minus” sign just because it’s what LaTeX calls it, but I wondered aloud whether it has another proper name for it. And one student (I’m guessing he’s Derek Cohen) said “backslash”…heh. Oh the creative math people… Then on Monday’s lecture, I made a wrong claim when I was giving hints on finding roots of polynomials. I wrote down “the product of all roots is the constant term in the polynomial.” But then the example I was working on had three roots of -2 and the constant term in the polynomial is 8, so I got confused. Then I started crossing the line out, replacing parts of it with different phrases (“something similar” is one phrase that I wrote), and eventually got to be such a mess that it was funny in a bad way. Cheap laughs, I know. Then on Wednesday’s lecture, somebody asked what could be a wrong guess for a recurrence. Well, I sort of remembered something while preparing my notes where there was a wrong guess, but I never sorted it out. I presented this spontaneous example anyway, and indeed it was a perfect illustration for a wrong guess. But my attempt at a right guess, while it seemed correct then, turned out to be wrong. At that time, though, it must have looked like a miracle or something… Anyway, hopefully somebody will bring this up next class?

People do take advantage of my office hours, or rather, anytime I’m in my office. And I enjoy having students visit me anyway, since most of them are nice and stuff. There’s one guy who came in and asked me to explain a lot of things, and it ended up being a mini private lecture for him…heh. Eventually the conversation drifted towards how I got into this teaching gig, and all sorts of discussions on bad profs and other things. Somehow his visit went on for so long (probably around an hour) that he missed his next class by 10 minutes…which is almost exactly why he came here in the first place, since he missed a class or two…heh. Oh well…glad to help…I guess.

It was sort of a disaster. But it’s almost the fault of the materials anyway. So I was trying to solve homogeneous recurrences using this very long method. I’ve already simplified it by solving by example, since the big scary monster theorem in the book is not understandable. However, there is a shortcut to solving these types of problems, which cannot be understood without going through the long version. The conclusion is, then, that I must endure this long and tedious calculations in order to get to the shortcut, and then they would forget about the long and tedious version anyway. That’s a paradox in teaching, I guess.

I did start out with an error, which I caught while I was writing them on the board. After that, it was just a lot of small tricks that probably not all of them got. In any case, it’s all useless.

I got lots of complaints about the marking of assignments and quizzes, adding unnecessary work for me, which I forgot to do over the weekend…doh.

I’m sick. And that’s not good.

I hit a 16-game losing streak in poker. Why am I still playing?

Somehow managed to create a “companion” photo blog, Pi on the Earth. It’s supposed to showcase my favourite photos from the past, but it’s got only two so far… More coming…hopefully. Most likely, though, that it will become yet another one of my abandoned blogs.

I thought that was a fantastic lecture…and it’s rare that I would dare think of something this good! But yeah, it was just going through some block decomposition examples, and then make a fool of myself by trying to explain recursion. Once again, being well-prepared helps a lot.

I felt like a doctor after the lecture was over, where people lined up to ask questions. And it was a long line. Not sure if that’s good or bad.

I met two of my students when I went to Roger’s convo today at Laurier. It was funny.

For these two lectures on binary strings, I felt quite so-so about them. I don’t know if I’m making sense or not, and certainly my proofs of uniqueness aren’t really convincing. I don’t know if I over-explained things, or under-explained things. Or maybe I just didn’t feel comfortable about this topic at all. So yeah, I don’t really know. Maybe I just suck at teaching. Maybe.

These math students certainly pick up things very quickly. They do point out my errors quickly, and they think fast about alternative solutions. Most likely a very good thing, actually, so I don’t need to be very careful about what I say…heh.

They do care a lot more about the marks than the science students, though. They would care even with one tiny mark… I don’t konw, probably a bad thing.