Yesterday saw the beginning of my semester of teaching MATH 002 (Intermediate Algebra) here at KU. I didn't have to teach a full 50 minute class, however, for reasons involving the following: I am a part of what's called KAP (Kansas Algebra Program) which, you might say, is the analog of a writing center for math, except that the program actually teaches classes as well as providing extensive tutoring services. There are approximately 2200 students in the KAP program. This includes the class I teach as well as the standard MATH 101 course. I'm not sure how many sections there are of each class but there are about 22 students in each of the two sections I teach. In addition to this , for 2 1/2 hours per week I supervise the whole operation (Help room and testing center [the tests are given in large groups outside of class]), which is to say I make sure all the undergrad TAs and tutors are where they should be (all of whom know more about working in the program than I do--and I get paid more). I've only done this once so far (yesterday) and it was pretty lax, which will change once students actually start doing homework and taking exams.

So the reason I didn't teach a full class period was because yesterday (being the first class) my class along with many others were all in one group going over the syllabus with the program coordinator (my boss). I just went over some really basic operations as taking a sentence like "subtract twice a number from -15" and translating it into a mathematical expression like

-15 - 2x

And doing simple calculations like 9 + 2[(12 - 20)^2 + 10*2]. Amazingly some have trouble with even this.

On monday the real work begins. We'll start doing things like solving linear equations like

10 = 3x - 2

Which I can do in my head. x = 4

But one needs to go over with them the steps involved: Adding 2 to both sides of the equation and then dividing both sides by 3. The whole process is so simple but learning it one needs some vocabulary so that'll take me a chunck of the class to explain things like: what do I mean when I say add/subtract/divide/multiply both sides of the equation? what's a solution? what's a solution set? At least these are terms in the text book and from what I've seen of the tests the students are going to have to take they will need to know explicit definitions of these things.

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Today I finally called the cable/internet people to setup my connection. I'm tired of having to come all the way to school to check email. And because my apartment is in a deep valley the TV reception is not so good. The best of the two PBS stations comes in poorly and not at all today for some reason.

They're supposed to come tomorrow to hookup the connection and give me the cable modem and other hardware. I'm glad they could come on the weekend because my Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule is chocked full; Tuesdays, Thursday's aren't much better because I'll be doing class preparation (both for teaching and taking classes) all day even though I only have one class in the morning.

So far I'm looking forward to being busy. Perhaps it's still too early to tell, but I don't think I'm going to be too busy this semester. The class prep looks like it'll be easy--the hardest part is the teaching: yesterday I felt beat after each of my classes even though the material is easy; it felt like the students were vacuums sucking my energy. Furthermore I've been assigned a grader so I won't have to do grading. I'm definitely going to take advantage of that. So really my only work is prep, teaching, holding office hours (~3 hours/wk), supervising, and going to the three meetings per week that I must go to since I'm a GTA (two meetings for KAP, and one for all math GTAs).

The classes I'm taking look rather interesting, though I've heard from many people who have taken the classes that they are incredibly hard. Two of the classes are over subjects I've already done at Tabor, the other is completely new: Probability Theory. Sure I've had the useless sort of probability theory they teach in high school, but this is a completely different (and more interesting) level--much more work though. Right now I'm looking forward to it.

Sometime today I'm going to work on some math.