I agree, although my best professor explicitly told us she was teaching us how to teach each other, and then let the class teach the class for the rest of the semester. Each class three of us had 20 minutes and a topic. Every 4th class we were on. She just organized it. Never learned so much in 3 months before that! By the end of it we all KNEW the subject.
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I feel your pain. Same thing here too, at RatBoy the Elder’s preschool. And they’re super-lice that are resistant to over-the-counter solutions. Great. The boys won’t mind-- it’s almost time for summer haircuts anyway-- but I’m not looking forward to dealing with it with the girls. They used coal oil as a treatment when I was a kid. I wonder where you get that now?
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I got them once as a kid. Apparently one of the parents knew their kids had them and sent them to school anyway…so that was nice. I remember that comb.
Anyway, we haven’t found any so far. If we do I’ll just shave his head 
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I’m in grad school, and of course I started out with the intention of keeping up with all the reading and really getting all I could out of it. 2 months in, I’m faking it based on glancing at the relevant portion of the book for the report.
Second semester, it was just a grind. Nothing was really hard, but it was meetings week after week. It got so tedious. I liked the material and the teachers, but it was hard to keep my energy up so consistently for so long.
I thought in this little break from the last semester to this one I’d catch my breath, but the dropped a project on us last minute that will count toward a grade in the Fall. I’m pretty pissed about it, not because the project itself - I like the project - but because I so needed a rest from the constant work.
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We have one of those businesses here that will lice bomb your kid’s head for you. I think it’s a great idea. Personally, combing lice and shampooing everything in your house is a task I’d love to hand off to another person.
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Oh, that’s totally the case, much of the time. The question is: if you were lured to the school because of the promise of having illustrious professors teach you, but instead were instructed by grad students, is that fraud?
The quality of the teaching is a totally different thing- high ed prizes content/domain knowledge, and there’s little-if-any emphasis put on the actual teaching. Most faculty I’ve dealt with view teaching as a burden or distraction from their important research/grants/etc.
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I’m glad that worked (and it’s a reasonable technique).
But were you happy to have spent $zillion on tuition for that treatment?
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Yes. It was a state school and so it cost me only 1/3 of a zillion. I was aghast when I learned how much my friends payed for school, and they didn’t seem to have half the opportunities, despite 3x the NAME on their degree . Than again, they got a lot more handholding from their ‘administration’, than I did. caveat emptor
And fwiw, she was a NASA scientist for decades, and an internationally famous scientist. I was lucky to get into her class as an undergrad. It wasn’t easy, in fact almost unheard of. There were three students that carpooled in from Harvard to take her class. I assume they paid a zillion each.
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Well done, then. I’ve long said that a good state school (paying in-state tuition) is the best bet these days. High chance of ROI.
I’ve attended both state public and private colleges/universities, and I’d agree with you: I liked the state experience better. I’ve consistently told potential students that you’re much better off saving money on undergrad and (maybe) investing more on grad school- but even then, increasingly, it’s what you’ve done that matters more than the name on the diploma (with certain rare exceptions).
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Our kid is in preschool, and they’ve had four outbreaks this year 
Fortunately he hasn’t been affected yet. Apparently group selfies are a great way of spreading them when kids get older…
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So you know, this is how it works:
Step 1: You carefully go through all the steps to rid your child of lice.
Step 2: Said child goes back to playing with best friend, whose parents don’t do the work.
Step 3: Your child gets lice yet again. And again. And again. No matter how many times you repeat step 1.
Gosh, I wonder how I know this? 
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[quote=“ActionAbe, post:1021, topic:67518”]
I had a similar issue in Calc III, where I was expected to do proofs.[/quote]
That’s interesting; the expectations on proofs don’t usually change during the Calc sequence, unless it is a matter of individual professors’ emphasis. In most programs I know - certainly everywhere I’ve taught - either you start proving things in Calc I, or you wait until the first post-Calc class to do it.
If you can prove a theorem, even a simple one, then the fraction of people in the world who are better than you in math is indistinguishable from 0.
[quote=“TobinL, post:1026, topic:67518”]
grokked vectors[/quote]
You shouldn’t grok vectors, the little points on the end can irritate your stomach lining[quote=“TobinL, post:1028, topic:67518”]
a really good text[/quote]
What I advise to students who are majoring in any field where they will actually be using math is to find a copy of the (2 volume) Calculus book by Tom Apostol, and keep it through their career. It covers not just Calc but also linear algebra, differential equations, and probability, and the exposition is beautiful. The reason it is not assigned more often in actual classes is that many the problems are quite hard. (Also, the order in which it teaches many topics is out of step with the official AP sequence, so it doesn’t mesh well with transfers or students using AP credit. For example, it does integrals before derivatives.) The higher topics coverage is not quite at the level of a post-Calculus stand-alone course, for example in linear algebra it does bases and linear transformations but not canonical forms, but it is still very useful.
[quote=“AcerPlatanoides, post:1031, topic:67518”]
I agree, although my best professor explicitly told us she was teaching us how to teach each other, and then let the class teach the class for the rest of the semester[/quote]
This is great, and works well for small classes where you don’t have a fixed body of material you must cover and the students are all at least decent. It doesn’t work if you have 1000 topics to race through at breakneck speed because the course is a prerequisite for other classes in 6 departments, or if you have a large class (I’ve taught as many as 400 in one lecture, and as few as 3).
Back to the thread topic: in order to keep my dog interested in food while she is ill I’ve been supplementing her dinner with various forms of fried ground meats. (She is eating better than I am.) Last night I was juggling too many tasks at once in the kitchen, and in order to stave off a massive turkey spill onto the floor I took a jump and ended up jamming my bug toe into a cabinet door, tearing up much of the nail and creating an impressive flow of blood. At least it is good to know that at my age I still have decent blood circulation to the extremities.
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Can I find one in the Yellow Pages under “toenail repair”?
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My monitor/TV died. It’s kind of … not a big thing. But it’s an unexpected expense and I can’t play Dragon Age until I get a new one. Which is a big thing because it’s the only fun thing I’ve had for like a month with all the other stuff I have going on.
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My old kitty’s kidney failure is getting worse. We are doing what we can for her but I don’t think we have much more than a few months left if that. We lost our other cat last summer to cancer and I’m not ready to lose another.
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It was, and you’re quite right. Only in hindsight do i see what I was in on there. The students were all pretty exceptional, actually, when I look back on it. Couple of them run academic departments various places now.Sort of wish I’d noticed then that I was being groomed a bit for academic research. I went rogue / private.
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Well, our old guy is now up in dog heaven. I really wish we hadn’t let him go on so long. Not that we could have predicted the rapidity of his decline in any case. I know this sounds weird, but the extent to which I got attached to him without meaning to makes me want to get a dog when I can afford it. It’s so weird to see his spot in front of the fireplace empty all day. It’s going to be weird for a while.
I’m sure nails serve a purpose, but I rarely notice mine except when they’ve been involved in a horrible accident.
Perhaps… they were really basic proofs though. I think the first one in calc III was prove the dot product of two vectors is commutative or somesuch. I couldn’t get it done because it didn’t “seem right” to me that you could just expand arbitrary vectors on both sides, do the operations, and show that RHS = LHS. It struck me as “too obvious” and I thought the instructor was looking for something way more profound. I didn’t think I was allowed to prove by demonstration in that way. I think I tried to prove commutativity from associativity, which is of course impossible. All my math professors seem to have commented to me that I tend to use too much “technology” or work too hard to relate disparate concepts.
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I’m really sorry to hear that. It is especially hard during Finals week.
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I’m sorry to hear that and hope you feel better sometime soon.
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