Good day, sunshine

It's been a great week. Now that I'm over the semester's hump (for me the period of complete and utter insane busyness ended about a week ago), I'm relaxed enough to enjoy the day-to-day interaction with my students.

There's nothing like a Thursday for that kind of deal, and today was a wonderful one: I had several awesome meetings with students. A few just wanted me to vet homework solutions (way to go, Karlie! Your answer was spot on! Gorgeous!), others had meetings with me to talk about their upcoming presentations in 280 or 462 (Pascal's fractal and Ramsey numbers! This stuff is awesome, and your presentations are gonna rock!), and another met with me so we could talk turkey about undergraduate research into poset representation of graph coloring games. (Tish, you are so going to clean up on this one...)

I've been in a good mood all week. It doesn't hurt that we're doing awesome stuff in all three of my classes: Riemann sums in Calc I, sizes of infinity in 280, and Galois groups in 462...what's not to like?

It's cheesed me off a little bit that it's taken me roughly 13 weeks to really get into the groove with this semester...and now it's almost over.

Well, I've nearly managed to survive yet another term, and I don't mind saying this one's been brutal. The four-prep schedule (one new, one a rerun but with a new text, and a third, also a rerun, but with a substantial new component) has been a bear: in some weeks it took all that I had just to take care of the bare essentials for each of my classes. I hope my weariness has not shown itself too starkly.

Ah, well. Water under the bridge, I trust.

For now, let's enjoy the sunshine and the last week or so we've got together. This goes especially to my graduating seniors, with some of whom I've enjoyed as many as six classes over the past four years. Nadia and Sylvester top that list...I'm going to miss you guys! It won't be the same department without either of you around.