If I had known that the Baltimore/Washington/Richmond area would be receiving this weekend its worst snow storm in many years, then I probably would have packed the following things for my trip to Maryland and Virginia:
I should count myself lucky that I did at least have the presence of mind to pack a pair of shoes that wouldn’t immediately soak through while worn in snow.
And now, the top ten numbers used in top ten lists:
The jeweler was able to repair my eyeglass frame. The process of soldering it back together left a lot of the paint near the bridge burned off, but that’s okay because the paint was coming off anyway. And the jeweler didn’t even charge me for the repair. I think he felt bad because I had to wait so long for him to finish. While I was waiting, I think I saw some sort of courier make a gold and/or jewelry pickup. It’s not often that you see someone packing a gun in his jeans pocket.
The jeweler suggested I take my glasses to Lenscrafters to have the lenses put back in. This I did, but I think something is still out of whack with the frames. Maybe they’re bent out of shape from the soldering. Or maybe things just looked odd through the repaired glasses because I had already gotten so used to my old prescription again. I dunno. For the moment I’m sticking with the old pair. Thursday I’ll go to another Sears Optical and see if there’s anything they can do to square everything up.
This morning my eyeglasses experienced a sudden and catastrophic failure. I was pushing them up my nose when all of a sudden one of the welds failed, and I was left with a lens on the floor and an inability to see. Thankfully, David Swinarski volunteered to drive me home so I could get my old pair. And lucky for me, my old prescription wasn’t much different from the new one. A picture of the devastation is below.
My broken glasses
Now I’ll try to make an appointment at the optometrist for next week. If this hadn’t happened, I might have put off this visit another year and a half.
This is going to sound petty, and it surely is, but when I’m doing research, I find it obnoxious to have to walk to the library (down two floors, over to the library, up one floor to the science stacks, and then back again) to physically retrieve copies of journal articles. I know, it’s not that far, it doesn’t really take that long, and I can use the exercise, but it would be much easier, and I would feel much more productive, if I could just download a digital copy of the article from the internet. I would almost prefer the library to not own physical copies of the journal, because then I could request a copy of the article through interlibrary loan, and I would almost surely receive the requested article in scanned, digital format, delivered to my inbox via email.
The journal in question today is the Journal of Algebra, and the article in question is J. Peter May’s The cohomology of restricted Lie algebras and Hopf algebras, from 1966. Our electronic subscription to the Journal of Algebra only goes back to 1997 or so, and it was late in the day, so the article will have to wait until tomorrow. On the other hand, I was able to retrieve Milnor and Moore’s On the structure of Hopf algebras, which was published in the Annals of Math in 1965. I was able to download that article because the Annals is archived in JSTOR.
I take comfort in the thought that someone as illustrious as J. Peter May started out his career by studying the same kinds of things I try to study: restricted Lie algebras, Hopf algebras, spectral sequences. Of course, the big difference is that May went on to become a famous and productive mathematician.
Attendance in my Calculus class has been decreasing monotonically the last few class periods. That’s unfortunate, because at least two of the final exam questions will come from material we’re covering in the last few days of class. One question comes from material I’ll be covering tomorrow, my last lecture of the semester.
Our final class period is on Tuesday. It’ll be a review day, so I don’t expect attendance to be any higher then than it has been lately. As a reward to those students who make the effort to show up, I think I’ll stop at Dunkin Donuts on the way to school and pick up donuts and/or donut holes for everyone. Perhaps the food will entice anyone who hasn’t already done so into completing a (positive) course evaluation.
I’d like to take this opportunity to both make an allusion to the play I saw two weeks ago at Randolph-Macon College, and to share with you the essay Nick (aka sumidiot) recently shared with me (and everyone else who follows his shared items on Google Reader). The essay is on the importance of stupidity in scientific research. More precisely, the essay is about how you shouldn’t feel bad about feeling stupid while doing scientific research, because nobody else knows the answer either, and learning how to cope and how to work with these feelings of stupidity and inadequacy is all part of the research process. At least, that was the message I got out of the essay.
Anyway, I really liked the essay. And on an unrelated note, go check out the Carnival of Mathematics being hosted this week at sumidiot’s blog.
I started to cover the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus today. I think I displayed a Fundamental Lack of Enthusiasm as I delivered the lecture. I’m going to blame the fact that I taught an extra Calculus lecture on Monday for my officemate, who was out of town, so that by today my teaching stamina was at the point where it would normally be on a Friday.
The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is such a great theorem that I should be jumping up and down as I talk about it. How can I expect my students to be excited and in awe of it if I myself am not acting the part? My old officemate Nick found the following passage in Howard Eves’ Great Moments in Mathematics after 1650:
Surely no subject in early college mathematics is more exciting or more fun to teach than the Calculus. It is like being the ringmaster of a great three-ring circus. It has been said that one can recognize the students on a college campus who have studied the Calculus – they are the students with no eyebrows. In utter astonishment at the incredible applicability of the subject, the eyebrows of the calculus students have receded higher and higher and finally vanished over the backs of their heads.
Anyway, I’ll be talking about the FTC again on Friday. I’ve come home early this afternoon, so I’ll be sure to have enough time to rest up and be enthusiastic by then.
The University of Georgia has a 15 week semester. We are now in the second half of Week 13. At this point in the semester I have plenty of ideas of things I will/would do differently the next time I teach Calculus. The difficult thing is getting myself to actually execute or carry through on those ideas the next time around. Anyway, here are a few.
1. Have a clearer policy on cell phone use in class. As in, I expect you not to use your cell phone in class. Students seem to be quite brazen about their texting. This is the second semester in a row I’ve had texters sitting in the front row. C’mon, if you’re going to be doing this sort of thing, at least try to hide it! I haven’t said anything to the class about the courtesy of not texting, but I guess it’s never too late to start knocking heads.
2. Start working on optimization problems much earlier in the semester. Perhaps on day one. Actually, this was a piece of advice I received from a senior faculty member before this semester started, and now I see the wisdom of it. Perhaps it was my teaching mentor Will Kazez who pointed out to me that the ability to read and understand a word problem is probably the most useful skill my students could learn in this/any math class. Their future employers aren’t going to care if they can compute a derivative or evaluate an integral. Computers can do a much faster and better job. The real skill will come from being able to read and understand, say, a technical paper or research article, and then interpret it in a useful way.
Perhaps if we started working on setting up word problems on day one, then by the time the students learned enough Calculus in order to be able to actually solve the word problems, we could do some of the really interesting (i.e., hard) ones.
3. Provide more specific instructions and expectations for the Interview Project. This is an item I touched on before. I just wanted to mention it again.
4. Insist on students turning in homework assignments of higher than rough draft quality, with multiples pages stapled, ragged edges torn off, and work presented in a linear fashion (i.e., work is written from left to right, from top to bottom). It’s totally my fault for not insisting on this every time. I need to make a big deal about it and set some very strict standards from the very first assignment.
5. Work on getting students to use correct mathematical notation. Equals signs are all over the place. Students treat them like commas. Perhaps they don’t even realize that the things they wrote as being equal are not in fact equal. I need to find some way to get them to realize their errors.
You can’t understand the content of the course if you can’t read and write the language. And mathematical notation is the language of Calculus.
Sunday before last I bought two new pairs of pants at Sears. They were both the same brand. They were both marked as the same size. One was tan, and fit fine when I wore it last week. The other was green, and, as I discovered yesterday when I wore them to school, at least two inches too short. It’s hard to concentrate on work when every time you sit down your pants ride up to the top of your socks.
I got so fed up with the pants that in the middle of the school day I went home and then to Sears to change my pants and to exchange the defective pair. I briefly thought about skipping the part of going home and changing my pants first, and just going to Sears to exchange the pants I was wearing, a la Kramer (or was it Peterman?), but that didn’t seem practical. Besides, I probably would have slipped in a puddle and ruined the very pants I was trying to return.
