Winter Break

So why has it taken me so long to catch up here? Because it's been taking me this long to start catching up with my life again. I'm not sure I'm quite ready to start the semester, and it started five weeks ago. Why don't I feel fully caught up yet? Let me tell you about my winter break, which is mostly good, but way too busy.

Once finals and grades were done (along with all the other stuff I had to do, like visit the dentist), I set off for a week to visit my folks back in Texas, which is always good. I got back on December 28, and was leaving again on January 1 to go to San Diego for the Joint Meetings of the AMS/MAA, where I was actually accepted to present. (Don't get too excited; it was just a ten minute talk.)

I left on the first as a snow storm was blowing into Erie, and feel glad that my flight got out. I actually had the miraculous good fortune on the flight from Detroit to San Diego to be sitting in an aisle seat with no one in the middle seat. And when I arrived in San Diego at close to ten at night, it was 75 degrees. (Hallelujah!) Picked up my rental car (they gave me a Prius, which I had thought about buying this summer), found my hotel and crashed. Of course, I was in San Diego about five days early, because what's the point of flying to a conference on the other side of the country if you're not going to take some time to enjoy it?

So on the next morning I took a couple hours to drive north and visit a little known tourist attraction for a couple of days:

(Yes! Score...) I had a hotel about a ten minute walk from the parks, which was great. My hotel was beautiful (and a bargain), and it even had an Indian restaurant with a buffet for lunch.

To my delight, all of the holiday decorations, events, and attractions were still running when I got there. The decorations were magnificent, and ubiquitous. (I must admit 'though that it's slightly weird to be walking into the park on a warm sunny day in January with "Sleigh Ride" welling up around you from the hidden speakers.)


I've always wanted to see some of the holiday attractions, like the overlay for "it's a small world" (one of my favorite rides anyway), seen below at night. (Occasionally, the whole thing would light up with projected images and play holiday themed music along with a light show. It was really cool.) It was good timing in another way, too; the ride is now shut down for about nine months of refurbishment.


I also got to see the Nightmare Before Christmas overlay at the Haunted Mansion.
(Which is amazing by the way. The Haunted Mansion was practically worth the price of admission itself.)

On my second night, I made a reservation for the Napa Rose, which is an amazing restaurant at the Grand Californian resort hotel at Disneyland. (This restaurant is even well respected by the Los Angeles food critics.) I had an extraordinary meal, which was essentially a four course chef's special, with each course paired with its own wine.

(Yes, I take pictures of exquisite meals. One of my colleagues found this amusing later in San Diego. On the other hand, I also realized that I was willing to spend more on this meal than I was willing to spend on a hotel room for the night, so you can see that food is a high priority for me.) I should also mention after four or five glasses of wine, all the lights and decorations in the parks are even more amazing. I highly recommend seeing Disneyland decorated for the holidays at night while slightly sloshed.

So I was a little sad to come to the third day, and after a morning at the parks, headed out to go back down to San Diego for the conference. On the way down, it started to rain. When I checked in at my hotel, they sprang an extra 20 dollar per day charge for having a car, and the hotel room was not as nice as the one I'd checked out of in Anaheim (but cost more). I was an unhappy camper. Why did I leave Disneyland anyway? (It probably didn't help that my feet were hurting from this point from walking so much the last few days, and I had to do a lot of walking to get around in San Diego too.) The rain sort of interrupted touring plans a colleague and I were talking about on the day before the conference started, too.

But by the end of the week, the sun came out and San Diego was at least pretty, as this shot of the convention center attests:

And with the aid of a Frommers, I found more exquisite food for myself and a colleague to enjoy:
(Actually, I had to sneak out for the sushi on my own. So few people seem to go for this.)

Oh, and the conference? It went fine. Saw some reasonable talks (and some not so reasonable), gave my talk without any real problems, went to my colleagues talk, and ran into several people I wasn't expecting to. (Most were from grad school, but I ran into one math major from college I hadn't seen in ages.) Then I finally flew back to Erie, got home around 11 pm on Thursday night, and realized: Oh crud. Classes start Monday.

So this is why, although I had a pretty great break for the most part, I'm still a little dazed and confused and not sure I'm ready to start the semester.

I also learned an important lesson from all of this: Disneyland is more fun than a math conference.

Starting already?

It shouldn't come as a surprise, that semester is starting, but I haven't much stopped moving since the semester ended. I was here a week getting everything ready to go, then flew off to Texas for a week, then flew to San Diego, rented a car and drove up to Disneyland Resort for a couple of days (how could I be that close and miss it?), then back down to San Diego for the joint Mathematics meetings of the AMS/MAA (including giving a talk), and just got back Thursday night.

And classes start tomorrow? Yikes. I'm not ready for this.

More about the trip soon, I hope. Assuming I survive my first week.

The Perversity of Self-Referential Teaching

When I taught my students version one of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (the one which tells you how to take derivatives of functions involving integrals), I said:

Isn't this easy? Don't you wish the whole test was going to be this? Well, I will go ahead and tell you that when I put one of these problems on the exam, half of you will forget and miss it.

I say this every time I teach the section, in the hopes that it might make the material stick. This time I went one step further and added:

That will be true despite the fact that I have just told you this.

I thought possibly that this statement might make at least a few more students decide to remember it. (It seemed to make an impression at least; they did laugh.)

Well I gave the exam this morning, and it turns out that in fact more than half the class forgot it. I think somewhere around 80% forgot it. Maybe next time I will try: "Everyone gets this problem every time, so don't bother to study this at all."

Spring Semester

I have a schedule for Spring now. I don't have any more 8 am classes--Yea! I'm also scheduled to teach three sections of math for elementary ed students--also Yea! And I'm teaching Discrete Math, which is worth a cautious and qualified Yea (?)!

Discrete was my favorite class in college, and it was also the "sexy" class that convinced many people to be math majors. It is the course where students learn to write proofs, and the topics tend to include things like set theory, formal logic, and combinatorics. (Of course, I got to take it with a realio trulio set theorist, so how cool is that?) The only problem is that since then I've been at two other schools where Discrete Math seems to be a major problem (including this one), rather than a joy. I have no idea why this is, and I wonder if I'm up to doing the job my professor did with my class. I hope so. I think it's a very cool course, even though it's not in the area I ended up in.

I'm not sure why, but I've already had two students try to get me to sign an override form so they can take Discrete Math even though they haven't taken the prerequisite yet. Hint to any students thinking about this: The answer is no.

In which I play with squeaky toys

The university is having College Bowl type of competition in which all the departments put together teams of students to compete on general knowledge questions. The Math/CS department put together a team a few weeks ago using a preliminary competition. Since I was the first person who didn't say "no" when asked, I played MC and read the questions (which someone else had downloaded from a College Bowl site.) [I received some kudos on my reading, by the way, because I didn't trip too badly over reading all the odd place and people names that fill the various literature, movie, geography, and history questions. I had to point out that this just meant I was good at reading confidently, not that I had any friggin' clue how to pronounce any of these things.] The students responded by squeezing a squeaky toy (since we don't have buzzers), then got to answer the question. We selected a team based on how people answered.

This afternoon, we had scheduled a practice round, where students would compete against a faculty team. (The faculty team won't otherwise compete in any way.) Since I again didn't say "No" when asked^*, I've ended up on the faculty team, so this afternoon I got to play with squeaky toys too. Of course, this means someone else had to be recruited to read questions, but that was apparently more appealing than having to show up on the team. I understand this, since I had the distinct impression I was going to look like a complete idiot. (There are plenty of things I know I ought to know as a generally educated person but don't; I just do my best to keep anyone from finding out about these.)

I spent the week studying by reading An Incomplete Education and setting my TiVo to record everything history related that I could find. I also looked for other random trivia that tends to show up in these things. (Did you know all 14 mountains more than 8,000 meters above sea level are all in Asia, either in the Himalayan mountain range or the Karakorum range? The first man to climb all 14 was Reinhold Messner of Italy. If you count height as measurement from base to top, the tallest mountain is actually Mauna Kea in Hawaii at over 10,000 meters, but that includes a portion beneath the ocean. The deepest point in the ocean is the Challenger Deep in the Marianas trench off the coast of Southeast Asia, which is 2 km deeper than Mt. Everest is tall.)

As it turned out, I managed not to look too foolish, and in fact one thing I found in Incomplete came up. (One of the 12 supreme court decisions the book listed as ones everyone should know.) So I feel like some studying paid off. But there was nothing about mountains.

--
^* "I'm just a girl who can't say ..."

Dementia

I think I'm going senile. (Or maybe it's just a side effect of being a math professor.) On Tuesday of last week, I forgot to go to a class. (It meets at a different time on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. What really happened is that I forgot it was Tuesday, and the class started half an hour earlier than I thought.)

Then on Wednesday of last week, I forgot to leave class. (At least I forgot to get my stuff. I must have let a student distract me out of the classroom, then forgot I left all my stuff spread out across the desk until I happened across it again four hours later.) Yesterday I discovered I left all of my stuff in the classroom again.

I told my colleague across the hall about this, and she asked me when I came back from class today if I had all my books. I laughed, then left my umbrella in the hallway after I got my door open.

January

So guess who had his proposal approved to speak at the national Joint Mathematics Meetings in January?

San Diego, here I come. (Hey, I wrote that dissertation. I may as well get some use out of it eventually.)