If the entire premise of the HST is to save money for the businesses so that they can pass the savings to the consumers, why is it that there are so many ads that are about “hurry, buy now and beat the HST”? Wouldn’t the introduction of HST lower the prices anyway? (Yes, it is a majorly flawed question.)

I just sort of stopped making any efforts to attend any church events on time. I used to be very vigilant about it, but why should I be on time all the time when nobody else is like that?

I’m tired of my water bottle’s loose cap. My backpack had been the victim of flooding so many times. Need a new water bottle, I guess.

I could never find a good way to explain unique creation of strings. It’s one of those subjects where I wish I could just say “this is what’s required” without explaining why. This lecture was particularly interesting, though. I started by asking extremely easy questions, and three different people answered them! That’s like a record. And then when I started the awkward unique creation things, perhaps seeing that I was struggling (or not), they actually asked questions that helped me along in explaining this bizarre concept, asking me to do an example to clarify things. So that’s a surprisingly interactive class there. Good stuff.

Nick asked what a squiggly line on the board means. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, so the other students pointed out that it is a star. Then I started drawing different possible types of stars, and they laughed, especially with the super mario star. They do like to laugh at simple things, but not the really geeky things, I guess. Mike asked if they can claim uniqueness by inspection. I responded by saying by inspection, a lot of things are true, especially in engineering. Then retracted the statement since there was at least an engineer in the class.

Ian is coming next class, and I’m not sure if I should be extra nervous about it. If I just pretend he’s not there, then I should be ok…hopefully.

Sometimes I do feel helpless in trying to gauge if I’m making sense or not. I was rushing (as usual), and getting the murmuring treatment (as usual). I just felt like something must be wrong, but I don’t know what it is. And after class, several people came up to ask me the same question, which is a bit frustrating. I did make a joke that they laughed at. Someone powered up his Mac and made that familiar sound that the whole class heard. I said that this reminds me of Wall.E in sunlight. Somehow they laughed.

I made assignment 3, and although I thought it wasn’t too difficult, apparently many students had trouble with it. First they don’t know what “parity” means. Then they screw up on a simple generating function formulation question. But at least I had fun with some of the students coming. Nick and Lan are a blast, they seem to come regularly now. Mike is a joy to talk to, and he agrees with me that calculus is a grind. Jason always overstays, but he definitely persists in seeking help. Anyway, I expect a disaster with this one.

Can’t wait for graph theory to show up…

Once again, had to rush to get an example of recurrence in, otherwise they would have too little time to do the assignment that I made… This time it didn’t feel so bad, I guess. I might have gotten a little bit of interest from them when I mentioned the connection to Fibonacci sequence. It’s funny how just the previous day, Mike was just randomly mentioned this sequence in my office… The composition problems are still more of a “I’ll do a few examples and hope that you get it” type of thing rather than fully explaining what I’m doing, which is totally not my style of teaching. But I had to rush…I didn’t have a choice there, unfortunately.

In the middle of this lecture, my stomach started feeling weird. Probably because of the Harvey’s lunch I had. So it took a bit more effort to finish the lecture than usual…

I still like teaching, but still not sure how good I teach, and don’t know if I can teach again. This is so sad…

I was rushing yet again, but this time it’s just horrible. I wanted to go through so much stuff (4 printed pages!)… Normally I would like to go through the concepts slowly so that the examples would make sense. But I don’t get that luxury this time around. I was almost sure that the students were just mindlessly copying down the notes without much of an understanding of what’s going on. I really don’t like teaching them a formula to follow, but apparently that’s what I’m doing for this class, and possibly the next few classes as well. Sigh…I can see it on my next set of student evaluations now…”bad start to the term, improved later.”

I had office hours where lots of people came. It’s always nice when they come, this time they even played with the dice, so that’s fun. I’m surprised that a lot of them asked about one of the easiest questions on the assignment. It was so easy that I didn’t really know how to answer it initially. I guess it’s just one of those concept things that’s difficult to grasp initially.

I typed up solutions to assignment 3, and found one question to be a pain to type up. It’s a long and tedious calculation question. I’m sure the markers won’t appreciate that… At least I decided to remove one question from the mix, mostly because it’s long already, but also I’m behind schedule on lectures so it’s not exactly a good thing for them to do that question.

I had to rush, because I was at least one lecture behind. But this time, it didn’t feel so bad. I went through a ton of things, and finished everything just in time. I’m sure it caused a lot of confusion, because these are fairly complex operations that I was doing. But I feel that it’s not that bad…

There’s this one guy who I always look to when I ask if things are ok. This is the guy who sits on the second or third row, and is now the only one who would answer my questions. He’s also the only one who would make some kind of head movement to indicate that he understands what I’m saying. So as long as he gets it, I’m assuming that everyone else gets it…heh. Couldn’t figure out his name, though.

I made the third assignment, and it received surprisingly positive response from the other two profs. Very thankful.

Last Saturday I went shopping. Ok, it’s out of necessity since I have gained weight and my clothes don’t fit anymore, so I had to get new ones. I’m pretty bad with this shopping thing. I had a hard time trying to pick out which shoes or clothes I want, and eventually pick something that I don’t particularly like anyway and overpay for them. The weather was crazy with huge wind and snow! Yes, snow in May. And the whole week has been cool… I don’t mind it, I guess, except living in the basement sucks during the cold. But back to the shopping, somehow I managed to pick out three polos and two pairs of shoes. And I won’t be doing this kind of shopping trip in a while.

Yesterday was the first meeting of the new fellowship. They made it so that it’s exactly the same as the original fellowship, so I don’t know why the split anyway. And besides, I find this group less friendly, or as I suspected, I don’t fit in. The women talk about their womenly stuff, and the men talk about…well…blackberrys, apparently. So obviously I would be left out. I was trying to decide if I want to attend the original fellowship today, but the headache prevented me from going. So…maybe I won’t attend any fellowships then.

I haven’t done this in a while, so I’m going to write a bunch of short random things in one paragraph: On Tuesday my tablet netbook caused a brief panic when it just died, no response when pushing any buttons, but eventually came alive to my relief; 0 for 3 on SCOOP tournaments, I just sucked; my left knuckles are hurting, and it’s very annoying; I was randomly posting photos on facebook, and the one photo with Will Shortz using my laptop got the most reaction; for the first time ever, today I made an error on the rice cooker and made inedible rice; so much ice cream on sale recently, and I bought too many, which will cause more weight problems.

I rushed through a lot of things because I was way behind on the schedule. So there are lots of pockets of confusion where different students have different misunderstandings. It’s pretty frustrating for me, because the pace of this course is way too fast for my liking. And it doesn’t help that I was breathing heavily when teaching this fast. Next week isn’t going to be any better for sure.

Normally only two students would answer my questions, and this time one of them wasn’t here. So nobody answered my questions this time. Well, I guess I asked some nontrivial questions, so that didn’t help.

Got the student evaluations from last term. No unsatisfactory answers, so I guess that’s good, even though sample size is small at 21.

There are many instances where I was going to do something, but because other people are aggressively asking me to do this same thing anyway, I feel like I don’t want to do this anymore. Like this new spin-off fellowship for older “youths”…I was planning to go, and had in fact previously lobbied for this to happen. But now several people have been asking me to go to this new fellowship, as if I wasn’t going. I don’t like this kind of pressure, so now I’m hesitant about going. Does that make sense? I don’t know…maybe it’s just a quirky thing of mine.

And now that I have thought about it, there are problems. This new fellowship retains the secretive coworkers group that no longer fits into an adult fellowship. I believe that everyone should be coworkers, and not have a select few be on the inner circle and thereby making the others feel distant (that’s my experience in the original fellowship after I quit the committee). The inner circle doesn’t take considerable weight the needs of the other people in the fellowship. Also, this new fellowship is saturated with married or to-be-married couples, and I just don’t fit in. They would talk mainly about things that concern their relationships (and also materialistic things), which is fine, but these things don’t concern me in the minority.

I’m in an awkward position. I’m too old now to go back to the original youth fellowship, even though I probably have better personal connections there. And I don’t fit in to the new fellowship. I understand fellowship is important, and it’s more about the other people in the fellowship than it is about me. But still…this is frustrating. I can complain so much about the fellowship, overall just very disappointed with it, but that doesn’t please God. So sad…

I think that might be a disaster, I’m not sure. I made a last-minute decision to move the dice example to just before the product lemma, but now that I had the lecture, I think it might have been better if it’s done after the product lemma. It is a weird concept for sure, one that is difficult to explain. I tried my best, but if they don’t get it now, they will surely get it in the future. But for now, this might leave too much confusion with the students.

I skipped the technical stuffs about the algebra of power series, wanting to do them after the product lemma as good motivation for them. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea, as my students would fall behind the assignment schedule. But I don’t see how useful the calculations are until they see what kind of power series they may encounter.

Still feeling incredibly nervous just before the lecture. I don’t know. Maybe it’s partially because I received some third-party positive feedbacks, and feel like I may need to live up to some great expectation… Or it’s just natural. Who knows.

I prepared two pages, and went through the first page in 10 minutes. That’s when I started stalling for time. Well, turned out that I didn’t need to, since I didn’t have enough time to do the last example anyway. Overall it went well. I thought it was a bit too easy, but some questions I get after class suggest that I didn’t explain enough…it’s weird, I’m not sure what to do with it.

The same two students answered all of my questions. I’m not sure what to do with this either. I’m thinking that once I get the new photo sheet of the students, I might start to play a game to know people’s names before the start of class. Don’t know if that will be awkward though.

Around 30 students were in the room when the class started, and I think that almost doubled by the end of the class. I was starting to get worried about attendance, but really I shouldn’t.

I felt like I was rambling on and on at the beginning without making any sense. But the lecture wasn’t too bad overall. I saw a few students whose eyes lit up when I was explaining generating functions. So hopefully it wasn’t too bad.

Two errors on assignment 1, not a good start.

I get some positive signals where Angela’s friend seemed to think my lectures are good. Hmm…I still lack confidence, of course.

I used to put a link of this blog on my website, which could be linked from my UW page. But after I started teaching and I would blog about my lectures, I decided it’s better to hide this from the students and removed the links. Sure, some students still managed to find it (nice!), but for the most part it’s been hidden from view. So I don’t know why I’ve decided to put a link to this blog back up to my website, albeit it’s still not obvious where it is. As such, I still don’t expect many people to visit (so far I see there are about 6-7 regular visitors), but at least now I think it would be indexed on Google so people who really want to stalk me can do that. No, I don’t know why I would allow people to stalk me…

Right now I’m in one of those “I don’t have any feeling or care for anything” mood. I got a rejection letter from CEMC, which is certainly disappointing, but not unexpected. So I didn’t react badly to this news. Getting rejected from a dream job certainly stings a little, but whatever. I don’t know how to describe this feeling of being indifferent and unresponsive…

Apparently I now weigh more than Harry. What is up with that?

It was a bit of a disaster. First of all, my jetlag returned and I was extremely tired. Also, I couldn’t find proper lunch in time, so I was malnutritioned. All of this is the start of a ill-prepared lecture. Well, I did prepare well, it’s just that I probably prepared the wrong thing. Of course, these are all excuses for my procrastination…doh.

Anyway, presented three identities. First two are very easy, but took very long to write. They got confused with the bijection proof, and I don’t have a clear way of saying it. Last identity was the horrible one. I tried to motivate some intuition on how to possibly find a combinatorial proof, but that ended up badly, and instead I just gave them the short proof anyway. I guess I was also rushing a little, so that made it worse. Now I think I’m really behind with the course schedule, haven’t even talked much about polynomials and power series yet. Doh…sad day.

There’s a student Jack who came up to me asking about the permutation question that I posed last time. It was an extracurricular type question, and he seemed interested in it, so that’s great to see.

I forgot to mention the trip back to Waterloo. It was expected to be a 24-hour trip, and surprisingly, it took about 24 hours to complete. No delays or cancellations, so it looks like my travel curse has temporarily lifted. The first flight was normal, the 4-hour layover was ok with me buying Yoshi and staying in the lounge to get food and sleep. And then there was the long NRT–>YYZ flight…boy, that was really bad. It was almost a full flight, people everywhere. It was also a very bumpy flight, with seatbelt signs coming on and off constantly (with the accompanying repeated announcements). I was tired and hungry, and was half awake/asleep. Being half conscious, plane constantly shaking, plus squeaky noises that comes from the overhead bins, I became delusional and almost went nuts. I was imagining the plane would just fall off the sky anytime. It was a terrible way to experience a 12-hour flight. There were other annoying things, like the girl beside me constantly wants to go through me to go to the washroom, and one of the washrooms closest to me was not working so there were long lines all the time. Anyway, it got me thinking a lot. I was getting a bit complacent, thinking to myself that I’ve flown so much that flying doesn’t seem to create fear anymore, which is now proven to be false. Also, I really need to think about death and eternity a lot more. I guess I should end on a positive note…it looks like I had no jetlag problem this time. I slept well last night from 11-7, so hopefully this continues.

Tim visited today, and I (almost) always loved having past students visit me. Too bad he couldn’t be in my course this term, and he was asking if I’ll be teaching it again next term. Good news is apparently my teaching isn’t too bad, bad news is chances are low that this will happen as my postdoc runs out in July. Anyway, I might have talked too much at the end, though…oops.

I have too many things on my list of things to do, and as always, it paralyzes me. I wish I have just one thing to do, and that thing is teaching. There’s always something else (i.e. research) that’s left undone which leaves me hanging and dissatisfied. So instead of doing all the things I need to do, I instead played poker, and somehow lucked into a minor score after playing 6 hours (was planning to lose quickly, but somehow kept on winning until the last hand). So…looks like the procrastinator in me is going to prepare the lecture tomorrow morning, and hope for the best for the rest of things to do.