UPDATE: This blog is now permanently moved to here: http://www.proofbypicture.com/piinthesky/. Update your bookmarks!!!

After 6.5 years of blogging on blogger, Blogger has moved on, and so I will have to move on as well. It's sad, but I guess I'll embrace Wordpress for now. I'll move this to a new location soon, and will post the link here as the final post. Pity that I couldn't get to the 2000-post celebration (this is the 1906th post)...oh well. And now, two more useless thoughts...

Ok, so I'm ignoring the check engine light on my car. Don't feel like applying for jobs at all...

Lecture 13

I had a boring lecture. It's not bad, it's just that I didn't feel like teaching at all. I really don't know why. I like this projection stuff, but I always have a hard time conveying its great points.

Seen a draft of the first test, and it could potentially be nasty...heh. For some strange reason, I end up being responsible for about 60% of the marks for the current draft...yikes.

Yay for possible teaching again next term...?

Lecture 12

There were so few people in class at the beginning of the lecture that I was starting to wonder if I should start the class at all... Eventually I did, of course, and slowly but surely people started trickle in. While I was preparing for this projection lecture, I was really not satisfied with how the text arbitrarily define what a projection is and then go on to prove things about it. So I went the other way and defined orthogonal complement first, then tell them results about orthogonal complements which naturally led to the definition of the projection. I thought that was pretty clever, but apparently I wasn't good with the presentation so the reaction had been minimal...heh. Oh well, need to prepare better next class.

I really should ask for feedback on my lecturing style soon... I'm still not sure if I'm doing ok.

I'm living on the edge...I never know what I'm going to teach the next class!

Lecture 11

Slightly late to class today. Had a light plan for this class, so it all went ok, except for a few miscalculations, and trying to get the class to prove a simple result which ended up too complicated. I had 10 minutes left at the end to hand out assignments, which was good. Still don't know a lot of names, though, but I'm learning.

It was funny when Michael got his assignment back with a perfect score, and he said "this is crap! because my proofs are crap!" Heee...

Now that the material is getting more straightforward, fewer people are getting help. Which is good?

Lectures 9 & 10

Lectures are going on just fine. It just feels a bit...boring. I don't know what I did right, what I did wrong, and I just keep on doing what I do without knowing whether it's good or bad. Handed back the assignments on Friday, which was slightly chaotic. Monday's curse was broken, and it wasn't too bad, but I can't believe I didn't think of a quick illustration for my big picture. Anyway, just a bunch of blahs.

Now the scary part...coming up with exam questions on materials unfamiliar to me or difficult to formulate question.

Heh at David who asked me about group theory which I totally forgot about.

Life outside the lectures

Life still goes on despite the intensity of the lectures. A few things come to mind that's worth noting. I almost had a panic attack two days ago. Why? Well, a student informed me that my @uwaterloo.ca redirect email address was not working. I checked, and indeed it wasn't working! This sets off all sorts of panic in me since I used this email address on all of my job applications! Several trips to the mfcf office later, it was finally resolved. As it turns out, my account had somehow expired, and it might not have been working for about four months... This is pretty depressing news. On the bright side, though, I'm very thankful that the student came in during lunch hour to ask for help and tell me about this information. This would not have happened had I went out for lunch in the first place, which didn't happen since I was not hungry, which was because I had a late breakfast, and the lateness was because Roger wanted to go to work late! So as much as I was depressed by the bad news, I'm also very grateful for the good news.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally made the decision to leave the fellowship coworkers committee. It was a long time coming, and I felt that given my age (i.e. not youthful anymore) and problems, it is the right thing to do. Of course, secretly I just feel that I was disappointed in the committee and thinking about the fellowship brings too much pain, so I would rather not continue in this painful state. I was considering withdrawing from the fellowship completely, but for the sake of many friends and new believers, I'm sticking with it for now. I really shouldn't criticize the fellowship, but I've had enough of it for now.

I have been very tired lately. More than usual. I haven't experienced this much voluntary yawning for a long time. Maybe it's just the lack of exercise. I don't know.

Lecture 8

Ah...a Wednesday lecture, so it must be better... And I think it was indeed better than Monday's lecture. Prepared well enough that I could explain things. The material is a bit dry, though, so I'm not sure how much the students learned. I saw one person just sleeping in his seat...but I guess the good news is it's just that one person. And now I'm panicking, since I don't have anything prepared for future lectures... Oh well. I did start the lecture by telling them my real email, and they seem to like it...heh. Now they know my birthday, though...

Monday's office hour was crazy... One by one, people came an hour before it started, and remained almost an hour past its finishing time. Of course, in the middle, nobody came. So maybe I set up the wrong time. Awkward moment: two female Chinese students came in and started talking to me in Mandarin. I've never advertised that I can speak Mandarin, and I can't explain math in Mandarin, so I just awkwardly responded their questions in English...I don't know what else to do.

Met Durgesh the TA, whom I missed his office visit before class by a couple of minutes. Decent guy, doing CM now, but wanting to do business degree for PhD. We talked various topics like the combination lock, job market, and the geography bee...heh.

Lecture 7

I think I have a conclusion: Mondays are bad for lectures. I had another bad lecture today, and it wasn't even close. I think the reason is that I got complacent with the materials that were prepared for last Friday, so I didn't go through it to make sure that I can explain clearly. Also, I guess I just didn't spend enough time when preparing isomorphism stuff, so it came out pretty badly. So yeah, I really need to spend a lot more time with the prep work Sunday nights, which I didn't get last night.

I'm really on edge now, since I'm going to be teaching things I haven't learned properly yet...

I have never really given a reasonable explanation for changing the coordinates...

Lecture 6

This lecture is about change of basis. But, it has great potential to be confusing. In fact, I was so confused during lecture prep that I almost cried. Thankfully, it went well. I think. Didn't get to go through everything I wanted, but I think I explained it the best that I can. Drawing diagrams helped, maybe. The thing is, I'm really not sure how well I'm doing with these lectures...it could be entirely possible that I made no sense at all, or there's something that I do that's very annoying. Or I might be doing very well. Anyway, it shouldn't be that bad....

I'm behind schedule again...by about 1.5 lectures.

Essentially two people come to my office hours, and I want to (metaphorically) kill one of them. So that's a 50% rate...which is bad. Yeah, Jason keeps on asking the same questions over and over again, and I basically lost my patience. And he came before office hour started, left and came back to stay past my office hour, and asked questions after lectures anyway. No, there is no algorithm for proving things!!! At least the other guy Peter is better, and keeps my sanity intact...heh.

Lecture 5

I thought that went well. It was pretty tough to prepare for this lecture, though. I had too many things to sort through, and eventually got a lesson plan that might have actually worked. I didn't fluster all lecture long, which is surprising. Even more surprising is that although I had 3 pages of typed notes, I finished 5 minutes ahead of schedule! Ok, I guess I should have prepared more then...heh. So at least now I'm not too far behind.

The real interesting story came after the lecture. The background is the during the lecture I asked them why is it that the coordinates of a vector with respect to a basis is unique. The normal answer came out quickly, but in addition, this guy who had been sitting in the front row every lecture (whom now I know is Michael) came up with the other proof that I had in mind (which I wasn't planning to talk about). This proof involves knowing something about the translation of the nullspace. This little sidebar blew up after the lecture. Two people came up to ask about this alternate proof. One got it soon after Michael and I tag-teamed the explanation. The other guy (whom now I know is Jason, who came to me for a ton of extra help previously) just didn't get it. We eventually moved on to the physics study room, where Michael and I were struggling to convince a (former) engineer this concept. I almost lost my patience. At the end, Jason seemed to understand it, and I wanted to end there before he start to doubt himself again. I left soon after, leaving Jason and Michael to discuss other problems.

Got the page of watcard photos of my students today. Still missing some of the late registrants, but whatever. I'm going to have a late start to this knowing students and their names thing. At least I had a good start with 2 names (with 1 other possibility).

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! The WBCOOP is a free online Poker tournament open to all Bloggers, so register on WBCOOP to play.

Registration code: 373214

Yay wbcoopament!

Boo probably will lose them all.

Lecture 4

It went fine for the first 40 minutes until I realized that I had only 10 minutes left to do one big proof. So of course I rushed through the big proof, making a fool out of myself. I think I write smaller on the board in this room, probably because I didn't want to make that squeaky noise... Anyway, this is it for all the things I know, now onto teaching things that I don't know...

Lots of people showed up in the office hours. It is a hard assignment, I guess. And, as one student said, it is at a much higher level than the first linear algebra course. Also, asking engineers to do proofs is a tough task.

Hopefully this will be the last bad lecture for the term. Not looking good for it, though.