Measure Theory Interblog

My Economics classmate and I were talking about an assignment question that dealt with measure theory and countable sets. From our conversation, it soon became apparant that he’d thought that countable meant the same as finite - something that the math students had learned in second year. And he was in the Phd program for economics.

 From Ask Metafilter:

Has anyone else ever had the insane/completely useless … experience of having to memorize a certain number of digits of pi (52 in my case) for a middle school math class…? I had to do just that to pass my 6th grade math class.

I think that officially trumps any bad experiences I’ve ever had in a math course. Memorizing 52 digits is bad enough. Doing it in grade six is worse. Making it a necessary requirement to pass is downright cruel.

For the past several months, I’ve been thinking and looking into tutoring as a full time job. Since (judging from comments from students I tutor) I seem to be good at explaining things and I enjoy it (despite some of my postings), it looks like a good idea. I was browsing the books on Amazon and was surprised that there was actually a book about starting a tutoring business. The book didn’t allow previewing of what was inside, but the description sounded like it was just what I was looking for. It arrived last week and had lots about tutoring…elementary students. Not exactly what I was looking for. There’s lots of anecdotes that show me how to help people who are learning to read though. Two brief chapters near the end discuss tutoring university & college students. So, it wasn’t a complete loss.

On the advice of a friend, I was going to do something for my 100th post. I checked to see what post number I was on. 105. Making this post number 106. According to What’s Special About This Number?, 106 is the number of trees with 10 vertices. And if that doesn’t make this post worth celebrating, I don’t know what would.

On Tuesday I began tutoring a new student. In January, I started a projects course and I felt that the new semester would be more demanding, so I stopped tutoring half of my students (which is why I have less tutoring stories to post about). Also, I decided that I’d only tutoring from Thursday to Sunday. Well, a few of my students decided they were ok with the new material and didn’t need tutoring and some others decided that Thursday to Sunday didn’t fit well with their schedule, so they left. I ended up tutoring fewer students than I had expected. The Thursday to Sunday restriction came because that’s when our assignments were due. Of course, the profs changed and the assignment due dates changed with them in the new year. So, I decided to take on some new students. This student was about 10 years older than me. Which was a nice change of pace. I’ve only tutored one other student who was that much older than me. It’s difficult because the material is matrix algebra that I learned in high school. He uses a calculator to multiply decimals. It’s hard to walk the line between explaining the material well enough but at the same time not simplifying it to the point of being condescending. I do feel as though the course will be getting harder somewhat to the point where it won’t seem as basic to me and it won’t seem as utterly basic to me. We’re meeting once for 3 hours every week.

Finally all that graph theory is coming in handy. Listening to the recent Buzz Out Loud podcast, the hosts start talking about this website (Indexed) and they were trying to describe the shape. They thought it was “a parallelogram, or a rhombus or something”.  I emailed them to tell them it was just called a complete graph with 6 vertices. I figure that if I can apply something from every class I took to real life, then I am in good shape. Only about 29 other classes to go…

Today, I tutored the student who was forgetful about his textbook. He remembered his book today. So, we spent most of the hour going through what I had talked about sans-textbook and making sure I hadn’t missed any points. We got to the section and I noticed some familiar pen writing in the book. When  I asked about it, I found out that his copy had come from a friend of his who I had tutored the year before. A few pages later and we got to one of the funniest things I had forgotton about from last year. My student’s friend who I tutored last year bought his textbook used. In the middle of one of the sections on determinants, the previous owner had drawn the symbol for the Wu Tang Clan and written about 13 lines of illegible writing (presumably about how awesome the Wu Tang Clan were). The juxtaposition of the Wu Tang and Linear Algebra was pretty funny.

I just finished tutoring the guy who forgot his textbook last week. When he came, he sat down and put his books on the desk. I asked if he brought his textbook this week. And he said yes. I asked where it was and he pointed to a book on the desk — his solutions manual. Seems that he didn’t read the cover very well. Another tutoring session done from memory.

After my post last night, my blog is officially dominating the Google results for “circle H thing”

In class my friend saw a capital theta and asked the prof a question about the “circle H thing.” I too, didn’t know it was supposed to be a capital theta. My friend made a comic about it.

Click on it for a larger view