The first day(s) of class

Day 505 of 1000

I am sitting here in my hotel room in Prescott.  I had a very interesting day today.  The early days of a new job are always very interesting.  While I sat and programmed during the day, Kelly and Christian IM’d with reports about their first day(s) of class.  I say “day(s)” because both of them have either Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Thursday sequences.  Well, in the case of Kelly, her MWF classes are really only MW classes as she has all day off on Friday every week.  How much better does it get than that.  Lorena’s classes are MWF classes.  So, really, both Monday and Tuesday were first day of class day.

Everyone is pretty fired up, but I think probably pretty tired.  That is true for me in this new job.  I am really getting into the meat of things now and there are, as always, competing technical interests and competing egos.  The first day of class is always such a high energy thing that, even though it is exhilarating, it can wipe you out.  It has been fun today because of the intensity of the classes the kids are taking.

Kelly has two professors, one in Statistics and one in Agribusiness Marketing, who come from Texas A&M.  It is truly a small world.  She likes both of those professors a lot, but she is particularly inspired by the professor in her ugliest of all Statistics courses, Mathematical Statistics II.  She has two programming classes, Java and SAS, both with good instructors.  This will be, by far, her toughest semester so far, but if she stays on task, she will do great.  I really have never seen her this focused.  Probably the most interesting and exciting even of the day was here Intermediate Microeconomics lecture where  the aging, renowned professor told the class he was an unabashed free-market capitalist and if the did not like that, it was too bad.  After several housekeeping items, he spent the bulk of the class railing on communism and socialism.

Christian is very inspired with his classes, too.  His Electrical Engineering Circuits class is being taught by the head of the department.  His ugly, ugly Analysis class is taught by a professor famed for clear and even brilliant teaching, but insanely difficult exams.  He IM’ed me a note today that, with the exception of the final couple of weeks, they will only learn procedural programming techniques in his Java class.  He has been doing Object Oriented Programming for several years now, so that is somewhat of a disappointment.  Christian gave very high praise to his Modern Algebra teacher.  He said the professor was like his Western Civilization professor at Wake Tech both in enthusiasm and knowledge.  Being compared to Mr. Bagliani is high praise indeed.  Ben Mathias gave Christan good advice to take him as a History professor.  He also has a survey of Applied Mathematics class that is taught by four different professors.  He thinks it might not be as rigorously difficult as some of his other classes, but will be incredibly interesting because the whole point of the class is to get up and coming mathematicians excited about different, leading edge areas of mathematical practice.

Lorena’s classes sound very interesting, too.  Here Western Civ class is huge and very impersonal, but should be very interesting.  I loved that class.  It was the first one I ever took when I was a Senior in high school.  Her other class, though, is Biology and it looks like it is going to be excellent.  Both the students and the teachers sound excellent.  Lorena is a little skeptical,  but she tends to be that way at the beginning of the semester.  Last semester she had one very good professor and one really bad professor that made the entire semester very sketchy.  I am hoping this semester will be a really good one one to make up for last semester.