I totally did not suck today. As a lecturer, I mean. In fact, I think my lack of suckage today actually makes up for all the sucking I did on Wednesday: the pinnacle of my failure Wednesday was a rambling, incoherent proof that the rank of any matrix equals the rank of its transpose. I got it from another textbook, and, while I liked it more than in the book my class is using, it was still less than optimal, even modulo my cracked-out delivery. Yesterday I sat down and wrote out my own, which I thought was much more illuminating, and pedagogically valuable: I went through a series of steps, reducing the problem at each stage to another, hopefully simpler problem, and on the way used the ideas of nonsingularity and dimension we've been doing in class. I liked it a lot...And they seemed much less confused today, so maybe they liked it, too. Or maybe they all secretly hate me and stick little pins into a voodoo doll crafted in my image. That might explain where this bruise on my calf came from. Either way...
And that's not all! I sat down and very professionally typed up their next extra credit assignment in LaTeX. I ask them to prove Fitting's Lemma, which is a really simple yet nontrivial statement about both the structure of matrices and representation theory. I've used it myself, in conjunction with the Casimir element of a Lie algebra's enveloping algebra, to break down a representation.
And I have some killer quasi-real-world-applicationy examples to give them Monday, to motivate the stuff we're going to do next.
And I realised this morning that the Bush administration can be summed up very succinctly with a reference to The Princess Bride: they got us involved in a land war in Asia.
(Here's a big shocker: when I took the 'Which Princess Bride character are you?' quiz, I was Vizzini. I'll bet you didn't see that one coming.)
Indeed it is the case that I am the man.
Posted by aloysius at May 07, 2004 10:47 AM | TrackBack |