Teaching

This week, I’m teaching one of the parallel “Codes and Cryptography” classes at the All Girls/All Math camp at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It’s so much fun to be in a room full of budding mathematicians from all over the country, and it reminds me of what it felt like to love the idea of math before getting too deep into any particular specialization.

I’ve made a few resources for the class, which I’ll drop in this post as the week continues.

Obviously, the rock climbing links come first…:

Bouldering vs. Top-Roping (vs. Lead-Climbing)

Rock climbing and teaching math

And here are some relevant math links:

The Bletchley Circle on PBS:

http://www.pbs.org/program/bletchley-circle/

A quick review of the symmetric cryptography systems we talked about on Day 1:

http://animoto.com/play/x7rvb7VPhZZWbFKdzH3J0g

Here’s an article about a new kind of space race — the race to bounce perfectly secret codes off low-orbit satellites using quantum cryptography:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528671/the-space-based-quantum-cryptography-race/

For encrypting and decrypting messages, you can play with the web apps at http://www.cryptoclub.org.

And after the jump, there’s an except lifted from a blog post by Cathy O’Neil at mathbabe.org:

You know, in my first semester of graduate school, I celebrated the end of every week. “I made it one more week!” was the refrain for all the new grad students. My first semester as faculty? By the end of every week I was too tired to even form a coherent sentence. Maybe it’s because there isn’t exactly a whole class of newbie professors who see each other everyday, or maybe it’s because there’s always a full weekend’s worth of work to do, but I just didn’t work up the energy for celebrating on Fridays.

I had this grand plan that I would begin my days by leisurely blogging. Ha. The semester is flying by! I am barely on top of the things I absolutely need to do everyday, and even then, I occasionally find myself with half a lecture prepared and twenty minutes to finish the other half. Fortunately, I work well under pressure. Unfortunately, I don’t do anything else well under pressure. My job here is intense; the students are smart, motivated, committed, and genuinely kind and thoughtful.

I had my first pre-semester stress dream. I was teaching my first day of calc 1, and I had this really cool activity planned that would get students out of their seats and talking to one another, but it totally flopped. Not only that, but I couldn’t get the document projector to display the syllabus (which I had to borrow from a prepared student because I didn’t even have a copy of the syllabus), I barely managed to get the students to pay attention, and I forgot to assign the first homework assignment.