The End of an Era

As I'm no longer a graduate student, and I'm not really doing much math at all right now, I've decided that it is in fact time to give up this blog. I'm working on another one as we speak, and so if you're interested in it, give me a shout out and I'll send you a link!

Best wishes to you all,

- Induced Homomorphism

Closed for Summer Renovations

So tomorrow I'm leaving for a brief trip to Europe to visit a friend on my way to my summer digs in Africa. Unfortunately, I hear the internet over there is a wee bit slow, so I'm not planning on updating at all over the summer. So if you check this page every week (or day...or hour, you poor soul), stop! At least until August. I may or may not resume blogging here. I'm considering starting over with another blog since I'm not really a grad student anymore (thank God!). We'll see. Anywho, a wonderful summer to you all!

- Induced Homomorphism

Evil Cookies

You're walking down the street minding your own business, and all of a sudden there she is: a cute, little girl with a wagon and a half full of cookies.  You tell yourself that you could eat just one.  But one turns to four.  And four turns into the whole box.  And then you're just disgusted with yourself.

Luckily, I avoided that situation today.  I was clubbing with some friends last week and ended up dancing with a cute boy with a really toned body, and it's these moments that remind me both that I am pretty attractive but that I could do so much more if I avoided things like girl scout cookies, large quantities of ice cream, and other things I really don't need to be putting in my body.  I think it'll be easier to be healthier once I move, so that'll be excellent.

- Induced Homomorphism

Everything's Bigger in Texas

This past weekend I took part in a bit of a family reunion in Texas. And by "family reunion," I mean "carnival of dysfunction." I wouldn't even know where to start blogging about that mess, but I did find some excellent blogworthy material at First Monday Trade Days, where "one weekend every month, a peaceful, friendly East Texas town (population 5,100) turns into THE biggest open-air trade days in the world." Well, that's what they claim happens. In all actuality, one weekend every month, a small town turns into an incubator of fat people on motor scooters buying crap that helps them forget that there are 49 other states. Here are some highlights:

It was seventy five degrees and sunny - the perfect time to wear a plastic rain poncho!

Those Yankees never did get it right, did they?

Isn't a refurbished antique water pump the very first image that comes to mind when you think about Mom?

Because there's no way to get through a large crowd than plowing them over in the tank of scooters.

I may be fake, but my orgasms aren't!

I'm sending this one off to the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

I almost took a picture of the booth that sold Sam's Club sized bulk cat food, but that's more odd than absurd. Anyway, I've got a few more things I'm thinking about blogging about. I just have to do the eleventy billion other things on my list and then maybe I'll free up some time.

- Induced Homomorphism

In the Ghetto

I have made several friends over the years who are spoiled. One friend owns several pairs of shoes worth over $500 each. One friend's family used to own a jet. Many of my friends have high definition television sets. Now, I can admit that I've also been spoiled in several arenas, but there's one thing that always makes me laugh.

When you grew up, if you didn't have cable, did you ever have trouble getting a certain television station to show up properly? You'd mess with the antenna, and when that was insufficient you had to bust out with the aluminum foil. Some of my friends can relate to this - others can't remember a time without cable. Well, I lived in a trailer for a few years, and so I fall into the former category.

Right now, I don't have cable. Nobody in my house watches TV enough to warrant it. We don't even have a good TV - there's two old TVs in our living room, probably thirty years old each, and one of them has broken speakers. The other one works okay, but when I rushed home to watch Grey's Anatomy earlier tonight, I found out that our antenna is broken. It's one of those old antennas with the two little metal hooks that you would attach to screws on an old TV, only this TV isn't quite that old, so there's an adapter. Well, one of the two little hooks wouldn't fit into the adapter.

After several desperate minutes of tinkering with things, the best I got was taping the broken end to the wall and holding the antenna on top of the TV. This gave shoddy reception at best, and the audio was understandable. That is, the audio was understandable for the first ten minutes. Until I started to get interference. From a radio station. Yes, the fine doctors at Seattle Grace were competing for my attention against a smooth jazz station in New England. WTF??? Maybe the broken part of the antenna was messed up enough to pick up weird frequencies? Who knows?

Regardless, I sat in front of my TV for an entire hour, holding the antenna in one hand and trying to contort my body as best as I could to drain out the radio interference. I found that the best position was my hand holding the antenna on top of the TV and me kneeling on the ground, trying to keep my torso as low to the ground as possible. It was basically worth it, although I gave up on the scenes from next week because I was just so damn sore. ::sigh:: Maybe someday when I have a real job, I'll get cable.

- Induced Homomorphism

Teaching

Every week I have two recitations sections for my calculus students. The second one always goes better than the first one because by then I have a better idea of what the students are struggling with most and how to best explain the concepts to them. It could certainly be worse. For example, I can't imagine how things go for the poor students who end up with a non-native speaker as a TA. Math graduate students can be awkward enough, but putting in a language barrier can only make situations more uncomfortable. I'm generally doing a good job. There's certainly room for improvement, but seeing that it's only my first semester in front of an entire class, I feel a bit ahead of the curve.

So this week, I was trying to explain a concept in calculus. Basically, if you have the graph of a function and you want to find the area underneath it, you perform an operation called integration. There's an in-depth geometric explanation of what's going on that I can overly simplify here so that either you'll follow and understand what's going on, or you won't and you'll at least get an idea of how difficult the concept is for the students.


We can approximate the area under a curve by drawing in rectangles as seen in the figure. This is not going to give us the exact area because the curvature of the graph makes some rectangles contain more area than is under the graph in that position and some rectangles contain less. But if we were to look at another approximation, this time with twice as many rectangles having half the width, we would have less of an error from our estimation and we would have a better approximation. And the more and more rectangles we use with smaller and smaller widths, the better our approximation is. And what happens is we can take the limit as the number of rectangles goes to infinity and the width of a rectangle goes to zero, and the limit of the approximate areas we get will reach the actual area. In the course, things are much more complicated because there's a nasty equation to deal with and things are much more formal. But at the same time, I can draw pictures to explain things, so that certainly helps.

Anyway, you're probably thinking that this is really complicated. You may have even skipped the second half of that last paragraph. That's because this is very difficult material. And I was struggling so much to try and get the students to understand what's going on here (even though it's the professor's job, he can't explain things sufficiently for the students to understand things). So after explaining some parts of the process three or four times, I muttered to the silent students, "Please ask questions if you don't understand any parts of this. I know it's difficult material, and I'm trying my best to explain things." One of the students with whom I'm a bit friendly said, "No, I think I get it. Anyway, you're doing a much better job than the professor." Figuring she was just being nice, I asked her "Really?" I turned around and saw a sea of heads, all bobbing up and down in agreement.

It's really disheartening that the professor who's supposed to teach them this material is so bad at explaining things that they feel I'm doing a much better job, even when I feel I'm not up to my own standards. It feels like they're being cheated out of a good education, which is a terrible shame. All of these feelings help me know that I definitely want to teach, and hopefully with a few more years of experience, I'll be able to be the great teacher that I wish these students could have.

-Induced Homomorphism

86 Posts Later

I've finally come to terms with the fact that a PhD in mathematics is not what I want. It was really the realization that I care much less about studying abstract mathematics than I do about teaching. And although I was originally planning on staying in the program for another year or so to gain more teaching experience, my spring break trip really made me realize that spending another year of my life being in a place where I'm not happy to get a little bit of teaching experience isn't worth the happiness I'd be missing out on if I left.

So I'm leaving with my master's degree at the end of the semester, heading to Africa for a bit of an abbreviated trip, and then looking for teaching jobs back in the states. Closer to my friends. Where the weather is better. Damn, that sounds nice.

More details on the job search later.

- Induced Homomorphism