Day 680

These days are feeling super long!  It's silly.  My days pretty much alternate between doing nothing and being really busy.

Today was of the busy variety.

After some breakfast, I started writing my group's research paper.  I briefly considered splitting the paper up so each person did one part... but then I figured that it would read better if one person wrote the entire thing (instead of alternating between writing styles).  So I began writing it because I enjoy writing!

It's been going well.  I'm pretty much taking our presentation on Monday and turning it into a ten page paper with more details and pictures.  That's the plan, anyhow.  I have about two and a half weeks to write it, so I'm not worried at all.  I just need to get some more input from my other group members to see what they want included in the paper.

After I got to school, I did some grading then helped one of my students who stopped by my office for help.  Then it was off to listen to the other research groups talk about their work.  That was pretty interesting.  It's comforting to hear from other groups and actually feel like I, too, know what I'm doing.  Either that, or none of us have any idea what we're doing.

Then I went to go teach.  I felt like that went well.  I spent a really long time laying out this long structure for a specific type of problem, going through the nine different ways that a type of question could be asked.  Then I went through some practice exercises in the book to show how some of them were used.  It seemed to be pretty helpful.  The issue is that the text book expects the students to use their intuition to understand all of the different ways this problem could be represented.  After teaching for a few semesters, I realize that it just takes longer than one week to get comfortable with this material at the required level to think about it intuitively.

When I got back, I talked with Kimmy for a while, then sat around for a little bit before going to dinner with one of our friends.  That was fun. After dinner we came home and did more fun stuff!  I talked with Kimmy's mom about tax stuff, then talked/played a game with Jared.

And now I'm off to bed.  Good night.