Day 200!

Woo hoo!  I made it to day number 200, and I certainly have celebrated it with a bang.


The awesomeness began in finance today.  We got our tests back and I got a 97 on it.  Woo!  I missed points on the problem I knew I'd made a mistake on.  I also missed one point on another question where I had to describe the "Redington immunization."  But I was happy with my grade.


After finance I went to the GA meeting.  We talked about some good stuff.  Dr. Fischer gave us all some general advice that would be helpful.  The biggest thing I need to work on for next semester is writing on the board.  Since most of the students will only write what I write, I need to write more things and annotate them.  I also need to box the important equations and concepts, number things that happen in order, and write more linearly.  So maybe when I write a thought, use bullets or something to specify the beginning of a new idea.


During life con we worked through a couple of the problems from exam 3 that people had found to be difficult.  Then we looked at some of the fundamental concepts from the first chapter and tried to really grasp the theory instead of simply acknowledging it.  Everything I learn to be an actuary is contingent on the idea of conditional probability: knowing how likely something is to happen given that you know information about that event.  For instance, what is the probability that someone lives to age 60 given that they live to age 40?  How long will a car last given that it has 173,000 miles on it?


After class I came home, woke Kimmy up, got lunch, and started studying.  I kept working through the old finance exams.  I feel confident about the stuff from the first exam, so I worked through stuff from the second exam.  I began to read through the chapters from the second exam and finally began to understand a concept that had previously escaped me.  I always feel silly when that happens because it instantly becomes so obvious that I wonder why it had ever concerned me.  Then I did some work on the final for the class I'm teaching.  I'm really trying to do very basic, straight forward questions so that they don't get caught up on tiny details.  I know that it won't work out that way, but I'm trying.  For some of the extended response I may also ask questions along the way to help them get started, like having parts a-d of a question that all lead up to part e.


When I was done Kimmy and I had victory dinner.  It was amazing.  We were going to get Chinese, but when we got there the Little Caesar's next door smelled so good... that we got both.  And then ice cream on the way back.  It was absolutely fantastic.  Oh my word.  I have absolutely 0 regrets.


Then we watched Green Lantern.  It was fairly decent.  But I'm pretty tired now, so I'm going to go to bed.  Good night!