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).