Teaching through the Invisible Wall (revisited)

A while ago, I wrote a blogpost called "Teaching though the Invisible Wall" which talked about my problems relating to my students. Having taught a few more groups of students, I have a slightly different perspective on how to relate to students.

My problems in "Teaching though the Invisible Wall": I was wondering whether it was the position of authority that barred me from my attempts to be accessible to the students. I tried to do those things that I wanted my teachers to do, such as eliminate silly games and focusing the techniques that were the most reliable. It did not seem to help.

This current class is different. They are eccentric: smart, diverse, and often sleep-deprived. Perhaps the members of this class are more like me than my previous classes. They seem to like me. At the beginning of the class, a few of the students seemed to think I could not be particularly intelligent because I was teaching SAT preparation. However, one of the students who so clearly looked a little askance at me the first day actually asked me why I was not a "real teacher" in a way that implied that it I was good enough to be whatever it was he deemed a "real teacher" to be. Maybe I have changed my style or grown acclimatized to students without realizing it.

Another possibility is that I have changed my style. I do not compare myself and my applications to those of my students, but I rather try to remember the things that they talk of so I can ask after them. Maybe it is not for a teacher to say "I know the stresses of being a student" but rather "your life is of interest." I am not sure. Perhaps the next class will prove some kind of a test case.

Moving with Dogs and Other Random Thoughts

I recently returned from my Alma Mater and taught my first of the new session of SAT prep classes. I really like this new class and I am very excited. On a slightly unrelated note, one of my students told me I look like Emily Mortimer, which was extremely flattering and totally random.

Emily Mortimer [1]

Anyway, sadly I have a cold. I have spent most of the day catching up with friends and being lazy. My mother sent me this comic on Moving with Dogs to read. Most of the rest of this blog is kind of dark and creepy, but this particular one was really funny.

Endnotes

1. From Google images from this website.

On My Way Home...

I had a lovely trip back to my Alma Mater. I am so incredibly proud of the friends of mine who finished their theses this semester. It was a lovely and wonderful weekend.

I am resuming my teaching tomorrow. It's a new class so there will be new fabulous moments and challenges. I am excited to continue working on my teaching skills because those communication skills are vastly important for every part of my life, and the ability to impart knowledge will come in handy in graduate school and in my life as a professor.

Teaching Well: An Art or Science?

I read an article a few mornings ago in the New York Times. The article was by Thomas Friedman on the crisis state of education in the United States. I found myself agreeing easily with the first half of the article. He contends that to close the achievement gap, students must learn "he ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate" (article). After this point, however, I found myself extremely bothered by the rest of his perspective, specifically two major pieces:

First, Thomas Friedman's proposed solution, that he claims has worked in some European countries is selecting only teachers from the top third of their graduating class. Intuitively this sounds good: smart teachers inspire smart students. Yet, if you think about this for a second, this rings false. Teaching SAT prep, I have realized that being smart and having the right answers is extremely important, but wins little ground in ensuring that students want to be there and that they sit down and absorb the information. What a teacher needs is enthusiasm for the subject, energy, charisma, patience, empathy, and serious critical thinking skills in order to ensure that (s)he can constantly engage the students' interest. None of these things can be measured in college grades.

Two anecdotes illustrate this point. One of my favorite teachers in high school was an English teacher that I had. He started off as a library assistant at the school, who sometimes substituted for different classes, and he was so well liked, the administration gave him a teaching position. He was well-read, eloquent, spoke at least three foreign languages, and was clearly intelligent. From a stray comment here or there, I had the feeling that he may not have graduated in the top third of his college class-- or maybe just barely. After college, he apprenticed as a stone mason in Italy and worked as one in the US for a while before deciding he wanted to teach. What made him beloved was his passion for literature and language and the fact that his experience was not limited to the books that he taught. He endeavored, above all to make students as enamored with the subject as he was. My second example is of a physics professor from my alma mater. Some years ago, he had been a student at my alma mater and was reputedly one of the most intelligent physics students we had with a GPA near if not at the top of his graduating class. Although students generally liked him because he was a nice, intelligent guy, a constant criticism that I heard from my physics-major friends was that "he doesn't understand that just because it was easy for him when he went here that it does not mean it's easy for us." Since he extremely intelligent but without proper empathy, he undertaught the material, assigned too much homework, and made his students feel inadequate. Even Cerinthus, who ended up with a very high score in this professor's class, constantly complained that the professor just did not understand how much work he was assigning and how he simply did not realize that his students could not absorb information as quickly as he did.

My point with these two anecdotes is obviously not to entirely disprove Friedman's solution, it is simply to demonstrate that there are problems with the idea that teaching well and having students enjoy their education can not be solved with numbers and figures (like only selecting teachers from the top 33% of the class). There must be other ways of enticing good teachers, such as paying off the student loans of those who become teachers or helping pay for PhD programs. I'm not sure. I just cannot believe that selecting teachers by statistics, rather than those characteristics I mentioned earlier, will not lead to a better school system.

Second, I was shocked to find that Friedman does not speak at all about the crisis of the humanities so frequently discussed by academics in the paper over the past few months. Although the sciences can certainly help students with critical thinking, and in some cased with collaboration, effective communication skills come from humanities (as well as humanities also furnishing critical thinking and often collaborative skills). If teachers have not been educated in the humanities themselves, they cannot effectively impart these skills to their students. An article I read back in September lends credence to this point. The article uses the example of a Massachusetts school which integrated humanities-style writing into every class in the entire curriculum, including math and science. The result was "In 2001 testing, more students passed the state tests after failing the year before than at any other school in Massachusetts. The gains continued. This year and last, Brockton outperformed 90 percent of Massachusetts high schools" (article). I could not believe that Friedman would neglect such an important issue.

Cerinthus Reports: The Secret Bakery

It has been a very long weekend so far. I spent 7 hours today teaching a mixed class of 6th graders and high school sophomores algebra and English. It was a long day. However, I shall write a short "Cerinthus Reports" and get back to more substantive posting tomorrow.

Sulpicia asks: are there any interesting quirks of nightlife in Florence?

Cerinthus answers: I really want to try one of Florence's secret bakeries.
This, of course, prompted me to ask, "isn't being a secret bakery a bad marketing strategy?" Apparently, there is some rule in Florence that food cannot be sold-- or maybe it is hot food cannot be sold-- after around 11pm. Secret bakeries fill this gap. They function illegally between around midnight and 4am or so. Apparently, a person finds the unmarked door and knocks. They then specify whether they want a pastry or bread. The door closes and opens again to exchange the item for the money.

The whole thing sounds pretty sketchy to me, but it also sounds like a wonderful quirk of Florence. I think I may have to try one when I some day get there?

I Can Read That, uh, I Think...

Until a few days ago, I had never been to the Getty Villa. With a combination of it being far away and requiring an appointment, even when I was in the same city, I never got around to it. Until this time. It was incredible.

Getty Villa picture from Wikimedia Commons [1]

The floor plan is based on the Villa dei Papyri in Herculaneum, which got its name for the well over 1,500 papyrus scrolls found there. The Getty Villa is stunningly beautiful. The Roman architecture is paired with wonderful landscaping, pools of water, and replica bronze statues and murals.

Inside, I found an incredible collection of Greek pottery and statues, as well as Roman and Etruscan artifacts. The first room that I went into was an incredible time-line of pottery in these three civilizations. I was with my parents, and I was able to point out and describe the different pots, especially since I have been studying this recently (see my blogpost). We then moved into another room that displayed a mixture of Attic pottery and Roman pottery. Some of the attic red figure vases were incredible.

A few of the vases had names scratched above the characters depicted upon them. I went over and said "I can read this" and then I froze for a second. The words were in capitals with no accents. My mind went blank even looking at words that I clearly recognized. Fear just was struck into my heart. The same thing happened when I looked at the Latin inscription on a young girl's sarcophagus. Although the Latin turned out to be really easy, I froze. I think this comes from a combination of pushing myself into a Greek class I was not entirely ready for when I started college and a sense of extreme pride that hates passionately being wrong. My first class, on the Bacchae, I would not have given up for the world. It was amazing. However, it taught me a combination of bad habits: always assuming I was behind the curve (which often prevented me from moving out of this position), spending a lot of time on the Perseus Project instead of with a paper dictionary and a grammar (which I began work toward fixing in my junior and senior year), and getting bothered and antsy when translating took too long instead of enjoying the process of reading.

I have promised myself that I will fix all of these before I go to graduate school. I hope I am going to make it! The applications are a nightmare.

Endnotes

1. Wikimedia Commons

The Problems with Free Books

This morning, my mother emailed me a thoroughly amusing article called "The Trouble with Google Books." The article deals with the errors and problems that Google books has, specifically with metadata (i.e. the data that allows you to find the book you are looking for, e.g. publication date, author, etc). Some of the pieces are particularly hilarious, such as attributing a book an the Mosiac Web browser to Sigmund Freud's distinguished co-authorship [1]. My biggest problem with google books was that it always omitted exactly those pages of a book that I needed most when I looked something up because some other enterprising classicist had checked it out of the library before I got there [2].

Although I have always been a massive lover of cheap books and used books (which is the only way I could have amassed the massive collection of books around my house and in boxes in the garage), receiving a Kindle (see my previous blogpost) I have become a zealot for free electronic books. Part of the time while Cerinthus was visiting, I stupidly spent showing him the wonders of ACLS Humanities E-Book Archive (because he still has access to our college's server). It is incredible. Although one can only download PDF pages in three pages bursts, there are some fabulous academic texts on every subject from archaeoastronomy to modern urban planning. If one compiles the books oneself, they're free (provided, of course, access to said archive through school or an academic institution). I also have spent a lot of time searching for books, especially classics books and found a number of different places (to many of which I link on Platonic Psychology). Some interesting ones are as follows:

• Project Gutenberg: An archive of out of print books and audiobooks. Has a pretty awesome variety of formats available, including MOBI documents for the kindle. They are now also compiling audiobooks, as well as adding works in their original languages, such as Greek and Latin (as well as German, French, etc)
• Internet Archive: Very much like Project Gutenberg, this archive includes a variety of out of print books in many different formats, including the Sanskrit Grammar that I included in my blogpost last night.
• Textkit: A selections of out of print materials for teaching Classical Greek and Latin.
• Free Books from Amazon: this is all in kindle format (but can be read with free kindle reading apps), but it includes out of print books, as well as government documents like the U.S. Budget, and a number of new studies on digital media and learning by MIT, like this one.
  

There are some more but this is a start and I would love to hear about more I have not found yet.

Harping on my education theme, again (sorry!), I think cheap used books and free ebooks are awesome. I believe, most certainly, that authors and the institutions who aid in dissemination their work should be paid and that they provide a vital service for society. However, the library near my house has a book section only twice the size of my bedroom. Thus far, I found no classics texts there I am interested in reading. The books are simply too expensive for a small local library. It seems to me that libraries are one of the great places that one can supplement or design their own education. It makes no sense that only university libraries have the necessary academic texts when cities and towns without universities are the ones could most use an extensive library. So I think that used book sites and free ebooks are great because they provide access to a whole range of materials not otherwise available.

Endnotes

1. This reminded me of when I asked a group of my SAT kids what they knew about Charles Dickens' writing, and I got three blank stares and a girl who told me that she had only read half of Alice in Wonderland and did not remember it very well. I was also shocked to learn that out of a 13 person class, not one person knew who Adam Smith was. On the other hand, every one of them can work a smartphone, an art which I have not yet mastered.
2. My junior year this was a particularly pernicious trend, which prevented me from ever getting a chance to read Genres in Dialogue for my Phaedrus paper. Luckily, I received a copy for my last birthday and I am enjoying it thoroughly.

Unconventional Education #2

Two of the reasons that I was so interested in Sugata Mitra's [1] TED Talk in my last blogpost are that I am now working as an educator and that I am a product of progressive education (in my formative elementary school years). From this, I understand the power of working in groups and students teaching themselves and each other.

I went to a progressive elementary school that was built on John Dewey's conception of experimental learning. We spent most of our time in school working in groups, block building, and wood working. We went on field trips to the source of each of the sites that we were studying. I remember vividly sitting through mass at a modern monastery when studying the life of medieval monks and getting up at 3am to go to one of the groups of vendors that supplies restaurants in order to see how the city worked. I gained a curiosity and a passion for learning there.


I picked the college that I did partially on the idea that it would be a return to these unconventional roots. Although it had grades, classes, and majors, like any traditional institution, there was a high premium put on working in groups for certain classes as well as an encouragement for self-competition rather than interpersonal competition. This was a lovely change from my traditional high school, and it fostered precisely the intellectual environment that I craved. In my senior year, I started a Heidegger seminar which met on Friday nights to discuss Being and Time. This class utilized a combination of technology (sometimes listening to Hubert Dryfus' lectures from his Philosophy 185 class, as well as individual in the group finding things online), and group work (the discussions every week) allowed us to gain an incredible amount of information out of the text. Emergence, in Mitra's words. We had very little outside intervention, except for a few visits from a wonderful German professor. I unfortunately was not able to read and participate in this as much as possible due to writing my thesis, but the Heidegger group was productive and wonderful and it was one of the great parts of my education.

The SAT prep that I teach involves some amount of group work in each class. Although often times the group work devolves into talking. The students in my class are tense about school, sports, and college applications, and many of them go to school together. However, the other day I witnessed a great moment. Two of the girls in my class, who have the most trouble with math were working together. One of the smartest, but also one of the tougher girls in my class, ended up in a group with them. When I came over to check on the group, she was helping them-- really explaining carefully how each of the math problems worked and encouraging them. I did not even have to help them out and I was able to focus on some of the other groups that were having trouble focusing. It underlined, for me, the true value of working together.

In some ways, that this self-generated learning is what I am trying to do this year. I am attempting to channel my curiosity in a way to further my own education and solidify those things I learned in the past in my mind. I am not, unfortunately, in a group of any kind (although there is an advanced calculus class at a local school I would absolutely love to take), but I am using the internet, the books I have around, and material from my old courses in order to try to create my own education. Part of the reason I write Platonic Psychology is that I provide a collection of resources for anyone who is out there looking, but more to provide me with a hypothetical group with whom I can interact. By articulating my thoughts to these theoretical people, I solidify my thoughts and allow them to grow (and hopefully generate emergence). So hopefully it will all work out.

Endnotes

1. I just discovered his blog and found it to be thoroughly charming.

Circumnavigating the Wall: Astrophysics, Cosmology, and Multivariable Calculus

From the time I was 10 or so I wanted to become an astrophysicist. I fell in love with looking at and reading about the solar system when I was four, but that was followed by a brief period where I wanted to join the CDC. By the time I was 13 I was voraciously reading any book I could understand about cosmology and quantum mechanics.

One summer, I did a program at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, One of the books that was assigned to me (that I never got around to reading) was the Archives of the Universe.

The book looks fabulous. It teaches about the history of astronomy through compiling selection from the revolutionary texts that changed the history of astronomy and the way that humankind views the universe. I did try to read it before, but I am embarrassed to say I had some difficulty with visualizing some of the mathematical moves made in Chapter 4: Measuring the Earth's Circumference. Recently I asked Cerinthus if he would read it with me, but unfortunately he had to leave for his adventure before we got the chance. The book is currently on my reading list, but I am not sure how long it will be before I get to it.

This image was taken by Alan, the leader of my summer program at PARI.

Teaching my SAT class reminds me how much I love theoretical math and science. Although I cannot get enough of both classics and the friends I made studying it, I sometimes wonder whether I should have continued down the other path. I just had trouble tolerating the way that Physics 100 was taught. I know that mechanics are radically important to physics, but I wanted to learn about the interactions of stars and galaxies, not the movement of a piece of wood attached to a spring. The only part of college physics that I really enjoyed was Special Relativity.

I also hit a wall in math. Although I took Introduction to Real Analysis and Introduction to Number Theory, both of which I adored, I could not understand my professor in Multivariable Calculus. I found single variable calculus in high school to be a breeze and it really made me love math. I recommend taking calculus to all of my students because it is such a fascinating subject. But I do not know whether it was my book or my professor, but I remember not being able to understand anything at all in my multivariable class and eventually dropped it. I plan on teaching myself both more math and more physics (and I would love book/website/etc recommendations, if anyone has any), but I sometimes long for a way to break back into the world of math and science.

Jury Duty: An Epic Saga

Today I had jury duty. I have been called a number of times, but due to being out of the state for school, I had never actually served. In fact, I have had a rather strange experience with jury summons in general. I postponed a number of times. The last time, the guy was really nasty to me on the phone and told me that being in school was no excuse. He then helped me set a date that worked for me. When I reported on that day-- at a court about 1.5 hours from my house rather than the close court which I requested-- the receptionist told me rather snottily that I had been put on a list that said I was unfit for service and I had to swear an affidavit to that effect. Realizing that the man who I had talked to had made some kind of mistake, I tried to reason with her and explain what had happened, at which point she barked at me that they did not need me and I needed to go away.

Consequently, today was my first time actually being called. It was a fascinating experience. I had to report at 8:30am this morning in order to start the process. Each juror filled out a form and turned it in. Then, the administrators checked the forms, brought people forward to make corrections to their forms, and then we waited. There seems to be an inordinate amount of waiting in this process. One of the three cases that is being tried today plead-- meaning that there was one civil case and one criminal case continuing, thus requiring a jury. I was called for the 60 juror panel from which the jurors for the criminal case will be selected. After moving buildings, once again, we waited.

We waited so long, in fact, they dismissed us for lunch. I spent lunch sitting outside the building watching the people cross back and forth across the plaza. It was quite an fascinating group. First, there are all the jurors, wearing their badges. Their clothing is varied, but mostly causal and nothing too showy. However, I spot a few interesting tattoos, such as a woman with writing all over her legs and a woman with paw-prints running over her left shoulder. Almost everyone is playing around on a computer or smartphone (although primarily smartphones). I feel more and more that I am behind a generation because I do not possess a smartphone or even a phone with internet enabled. Every single one of my students seems to have one. I walked into the last exam I was proctoring and one guy turns to the other, holding out his iPhone and says "I just liked your status."

Back at the jury, my mom told me to be slightly dressy-- and I am was about the dressiest juror at the court. Even the people who have money, e.g. the woman in the designer shoes with the iPad, the gigantic Coach purse, and some cosmetic surgery-- are wearing jeans or cargo pants. Aside from the jurors, there are the lawyers. They are dressed in suits. Most of them have pretty classy suits, but there are a few Rumpole [1] like lawyers in tweed that looks a little worse for the wear and most of them are middle aged, slightly overweight men. There were a few women I saw in fashionable suits and 4-inch heels who were young, and msot likely the prosecutors from the DA's office.

Finally there are the people with court business. These people can be distinguished by the often ill-fitting quality of their suits/dressy clothing and their conspicuous lack of brief-cases. They also tend to look odd being dressed up-- or be only approximating appropriate gear. In fact, there is a girl who very much reminded me of the girl, Sammy, from New Street Law that the young, annoying lawyer (Joe Stevens played by Lee Williams) defends. You remember-- the girl who showed a lot of legs and cleavage to try to get off. Well, there was a girl a lot like that wearing what was, I am sure, some of her fancier clothing-- a really tight and skimpy black party dress. There was also a woman wearing a long sundress like dress, but it was black and had some designer logo on it. Her breasts were pushed up to the point where they seemed to be exploding over the top of the dress and she wore those gigantic sunglasses that stars wear to hide their faces, over a probably rhinoplastied-nose under died-black hair. It was pretty funny. I wondered what reason she was at the court.

I was finally released from jury duty just before 3pm. The judge told us that he appreciated our patience and that the lawyers had struck some kind of deal so that the case was not going to jury trial. One of the lawyers looked like he could have been out of the Kennedy clan from the late 1960s. He looked like he was out of a photograph, sitting totally still, face turned toward the jury, but slightly down so that we could not see his expression in his eyes. The judge was cartoonishly slight, with a commanding presence and silver hair, but a voice so high it almost sounded like a woman.

After that, I went outside to wait for my mother. She was about 25 minutes away, so I sat down with my the Origins of Greek Thought, which I have almost finished. About ten minutes later, I heard someone speak to me and looked up. A Latino man, probably in his early 30s, asked if he could borrow my pen. He was immaculately dressed in what looked (to my untrained ,but by Project Runway, eye) to be wearing Italian couture, from a perfectly tailored pinstriped shirt and elegant olive slacks. He finished off the outfit with some brown dress shoes which were quite stylish. It was hot and it appeared as though he had left his jacket inside, although he carried a beautifully bound leather volume of some kind. He was walking with a young man, maybe in his mid-twenties, who was also Latino. However, their appearance could not have been more different. The younger man was much taller and broader and wore an oversized black t-shirt and baggy jeans. He had no visible tattoos or jewelry, but other than that he could have easily been a member of a gang (an idea I gained more from the appearance of his presumed lawyer than from the appearance of the young man himself). I handed over my pencil. The two conversed in Spanish for a moment, and the presumed-lawyer wrote something down on a piece of paper and handed it to the young man. Then, they parted with some strange handshake. I swear, I know it sounds like it was out of a movie, but it really happened.

Endnotes

1. Rumpole from the UK 80s TV show Rumpole of the Bailey.  This is one of my favorite television shows. Rumpole is a crusty British barrister who quotes massive amounts of Yeats and Wordsworth while defending the criminal underbelly. The show was taken from a series of books by John Mortimer.

Trying Not to Procrastinate

I have wasted a lot of time this summer. A lot of the time I think I am looking for direction. I was always a self-starter, but I had a lot of trouble finishing projects. Part of this comes from my visual processing disorder [1],which make it difficult to take in visual input for any period of time without taking adequate breaks.[2] Earlier this summer, however, my self-starter instinct seemed to have died. I constantly put books down after a few minute or pages, I spend hours watching inane television instead of getting to the books and articles I desperately wanted to read, I always came back to the same set of flashcards because I never used them consistently enough to lodge the words in my memory, etc.

When Cerinthus was here I was in the worst of my rut. I spent a large amount of time downloading books off the internet when I should have been spending time with him or even just reading one of the books I had downloaded. Then, to make matters worse, I came down with a horrible flu, which made me feel like I was looking at the world through a thick veil of incomprehension and I could not concentrate on anything.

It seems that I have finally managed to turn things around. Yesterday was my first day back at the gym. Finally I finished the first book on my reading list, Oswyn Murray's Early Greece. I plan on starting my next book tomorrow. On Saturday I proctor my next exam, so I need something to keep me occupied. I found The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 B.C. by Jeffery Hurwit in my garage today; it is one of the many books I still have not managed to unpack and bring upstairs. Since I plan to expand the second chapter of my thesis based on some encouraging data in Early Greece, I thought that Hurwit's book might provide even more fodder for my rewriting.






While I was reading Early Greece, I became so excited by different piece of Greek history that I had missed in my attempt to balance the academics of school and my personal life and health that I blogged about it. I have written two installments so far, Greek History Review #1 and #2 and my plan is to finish my third installment tomorrow which will be able to be found at my Platonic Psychology blog. I find that it is easier to remember the facts that I read when I write about them and I am more likely to put pen to paper (or in this case, finger to keyboard) when my writing is "published," insofar as blogging is publishing. I especially like it when I can add awesome pictures (see Greek History Review #2).

Endnotes

1.  Basic information about visual processing disorders can be found at LDonline.
2. For this reason, visual processing difficulties are often confused with ADHD. 

The Summer Flu and Indian Food

On Thursday I came down with the flu. Every morning I wake up feeling better, and every morning, an hour later, I feel like I've been run over by a train and spend the rest of the day trying to recover. My fever shot up today and i had to warn my boss I might not be able to make it to work tomorrow. It's terrible. I've spent all day-- my worst day so far-- in bed watching bad movies.

I feel truly terrible. Cerinthus is here for the last time before he goes to Europe for six months and I'm languishing in ill health while hes watches bad movies and plays computer games. What unfortunate timing.

One of the wonderful things that Cerinthus has done to take care of me was to order take out from our favorite Indian Place, Clay Oven. I got the extra spicy Chicken Tikka Masala, which helped my sinuses to drain and made me feel much better than I would have without it. It was wonderful. Garlic naan dipped in sauce that burns off the roof of one's mouth. It was perfect. I was alive again for about half an hour and then back to being a wraith.

Beside the inane movies that we have been watching, we have also been watching Sherlock with my parents. Sherlock is a new British series that does a modern updating of Sherlock Holmes. I am no particular fan of Sherlock Holmes on principle. The first episode of this show was awesome. Holmes is an obsessive high-functioning sociopath. He is unempathetic, erudite, charming, and brilliant-- but he's totally cold. Dr. John Watson is warm,  charming, and is a soldier at heart who cannot stay away from a thrill or danger. He breathes warmth and levity into the buddy duo that is the lifeblood of the show. I do, generally, have a (particularly unfortunate) penchant for the sociopathic genius, but in this case it's the duo that is bewitchingly charming. I guess it shows my own personal growth. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the characters between the first and second episodes. However, the third episode might be a little brighter.

Getting Paid to Read for Fun

I've been getting pretty behind on my reading, as is obvious from the dearth of books crossed off my reading list. This lack of progress comes from a combination of a number of factors. I have been busy preparing for teaching my own class at work. Cerinthus is here, which has impeded my progress. However, I would not give up having him here, especially since I will not be able to see him for another six months. Currently, I seem to have contracted a cold, which has been making me pretty lethargic and unable to think clearly enough to read some of the texts on my list.

Although I was sick yesterday, I had to proctor an exam. To begin with, I had to grade essays. The essays were of better quality than I was expecting. Some of the kids I'm teaching have the promise of being very intelligent and doing very well. I hope that I can help to guide them there. The rest of the time while I'm proctoring the exam, I am free to do as I please, provided that I make sure no one is cheating and that I call the time properly and read the script.

My most recent reading.

During this last session, I read How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space by Janna Levin. The book is a wonderful fusion between the personal life of a mathematician/cosmologist, the history of math, and lessons in cosmology and mathematical topology. Although the topics in the math are complex, they are explained clearly and deftly, as well as peppered with personal details that keep the reader engaged and never overwhelmed by the complex concepts. I highly recommend this to everyone with any interest in math or science.

In the book, Janna Levin comes across as an sweet, passionate, obsessive, quirky individual with sharp sense of humor and an easy, approachable writing style. She speaks of the loneliness that comes from working in mathematics-- at least the theoretical mathematics of academia. This worries me. Although I am a classicist now, theoretical math and physics was always my first love, my first passion. Some days I have dreams of going back there. Her book makes it seem as though the work is lonely but rewarding, but a living nightmare for the spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends/partners of the mathematician. Is classics going to be like this too? Am I going to ruin the life of Cerinthus and drive his career into the ground because I want to pursue a life in academia? I hope not.