Classes have begun!
EB mentioned a while ago that she likes drinking tea and she’s really disappointed that they don’t have any tea. Thus, I asked the staff if they have tea bags anywhere, and somehow, they magically managed to procure some from somewhere! It was very nice. Even though I don’t drink tea much, I decided that, since I’d already asked for it, I might as well get some, as well.
My first class (I’m in Red) today was Geometry with Po. A lot of the returning MOPpers, as well as JM, the teacher for our second class, were shocked that Po would teach geometry. After all, he much prefers combinatorics. The geometry wasn’t angle chasing or complex bashing or triangle configurations or anything of the sort. It was more along the lines of Putnam geometry: more weird and more fun.
Po‘s classes are SO. MUCH. FUN. He’s hilarious. His teaching style is to ask us to spitball ideas at him that he wrote down until we reached a solution. He made a joke about how the fundamental rule of chalkboards is that the chalk is always short because people always reach for the longest piece, while the fundamental rule of whiteboards is that the markers never work because people will use a marker and, when it doesn’t work, put it back down and try the next marker.
For problem 2, MM said that because 1+1=2, you can use the triangle inequality to solve the problem. Thus, Po wrote down 1+1=2 on the board like it was all-important. Then, he told us about one IMO wherein the MAA people decided to send pdfs of the USAMOs to teachers instead of paper copies a week or two before competition time, which the teachers then printed out. In order to make sure there wouldn’t be some printing/technology issues on the day of, they sent a test pdf the day before, as well. That test pdf was entitled USAMO Test Paper with questions such as “Prove that 1+1=2” and “Find the area of a right triangle with bases so and so.” As those teachers had been told that the USAMO was a somewhat…unusual test, they thought maybe this was what it was supposed to be? As such, that year, MAA received many proofs of the statement “1+1=2.”
My second class was Bijections, taught by JM. JM and Po are good friends: when he walked in, JM hugged Po and started telling us all about how great Po is, so Po told us about how great JM is. He said that he learned everything he knows about teaching from JM.
The Bijections class wasn’t as fun as Po‘s class. We spent most of the time doing problems, but I feel like it wasn’t as challenging.
During Lunch (which had really nice sweet potato fries), I asked Po about what said at orientation about getting into places by accident. Essentially, CMU was going through financial issues at the time. The way the professorship system works is that there’s sort of a succession line of professors. So there’s a set number of professorship roles, and when one person leaves, someone else succeeds in that role. However, if at some point someone leaves and you don’t get someone else for the job, that line will be cut off and the math department will have one less professor from then on.
Thus, at that point, a professor had just retired but the budget for getting a successor was very small. They needed to get a professor who would be cheap, so they picked Po.
Also, Po says that everyone from my school (based on the four-person pool of information he has, which is actually a surprisingly large pool for a random school in Nevada) is very feisty 😛
Also, the dining system is such a mess. The ids won’t scan so we have to write our id numbers on a piece of paper. Also, getting food from the hot buffet takes eternities when there are fifty or sixty kiddos. Yesterday, they ran out of plates and then JW just stood there for ten minutes waiting for a plate. When she finally got served, I figured that maybe they’d finally gotten the plates, but Nooo, they just had the last plate left (which begs the question: why did JW stand there waiting then?!). Anyway, those poor children spent bajillions of time waiting for plates. Then, today, for the fries and burgers, the fries ran out just as I got to the front.
The third class, n variable inequalities, was taught by YL. It was quite interesting.
For dinner, we went to sushi today. There was this huge crowd of people who went. On my way back, I realized I was going to miss my improv class for Daily Challenge, so I joined the zoom meeting on my phone while we were walking by the lawn (the one with the huge statue).
Anyway. Good times, good times.