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Three More Years!

Reappointment

Writing it up

Writing up results is the worst part of math (in my opinion). It’s where you run into snags like, oh, hey, that case doesn’t work, or worse. No different for us. I’m less worried than my REU students because I think there’s a good chance the “problem” is not a math problem but instead an issue with how we formalized something. I left two weeks for writing, anticipating these hiccups, but it still seems too short.

From NPR News

Outrage Over Government’s Animal Experiments Leads To USDA Review http://n.pr/1BY5Y4q Some of the outrageous experiments in here seem even more offensive if you believe (as I do) that we have enough information to make a fairly good predictive model for some of these “empiric” questions. I find it morally objectionable that the government didn’t hire someone to sit down and do some math before condemning all these animals to horrific deaths.

One year: in the books

Well. Phew. The first year is over! I have so much to reflect on, but instead, here’s some new stuff on the horizon: Next year, I’ll be on the Honor Court. First real committee work, and I hope that it will let me see some of the best students at Hamilton upholding the (student-driven) ideals of the college. I’ll teach Modern Algebra for the first time, and I’m unspeakably excited.

The end of the first semester is almost here…

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.

One month gone

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.

Creative dissertation binding

It was awful, but I’m pretty sure this is a dream.

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.