Measure Theory Interblog

(Note the downward trend)

I was browsing through my blog’s stats again. So, apparantly someone stumbled on my blog by searching for “measure theory is boring”. To that person I say - Yes. Yes, it is. I’m sorry you had to find out the hard way.

When I was in undergrad, there was one class where occasionally the assignment questions would have an H next to them. I thought H stood for hard. About two weeks before the class was done, I found out that it stood for Hint. As in “there’s a hint in the back of the book.”

Here’s my four tips for success on final exams:

1. Always wear a condom
2. Remember that the exam is more afraid of you than you are of it
3. If in doubt, guess the correct answer
4. Remember that your success on the exam is directly proportional to the number of pencils you bring. The optimal number is infinity. (Or, as my Macroeconomics professor used the other day, 2infinity - he got a lot of strange looks from the math students.)
5. Check with the prof and see if cheating is allowed - you might get lucky and it doesn’t hurt to ask!

I just spent 10 minutes trying to find some Economics jokes. Most of what I found were only “jokes” in the loosest sense of the word.

Example: Economists do it with models

That is BARELY funny. I’d only laugh if I just heard something ELSE that was funny and then I was still laughing when I read this new pseudo-joke. Or if someone had a gun to my head. And they were pretty well all like that.

Here’s another:

One night a policeman saw a macroeconomist looking for something buy a lightpole. He asked him is had had lost something there. The economist said, “I lost my keyes over in the alley.” The policeman asked him why he was looking by the lightpole. The economist responded, “it’s a lot easier to look over here.”

That rated about a half on the chucklemeter. I said “heh” and gave a half smirk. It’s true, but not really funny. And no one in the economics department gets my math jokes.

So, I was browsing Wikipedia and some random searches made me realize that there’s a whole page of math jokes! The really good stuff is in the discussion page. There was also an article from the American Mathematical Society (pdf). Economists don’t really have their own brand of humour. Or none that I’ve discovered as of yet.

A lot of people tell me that I’m a good tutor. But, before I mostly thought they were being polite. Or they hadn’t been tutored before and had nothing to compare me to. Or they meant “compared to my crappy prof, you make sense.” One of my students told me that he had a tutor a year or two before who had fallen asleep in the middle of a tutoring session. Not only that, but it was in the middle of a sentence that the tutor was saying. “…he just sort of trailed off.” So, I’m better than that guy at least. And then, I suggested a few of my students contact a friend for tutoring when I wasn’t sure I would be able to accommodate anymore extra appointments during the exam period. I met them after and they told me how bad she was. Apparently she arrived and just sat there expecting them to ask her questions. When, really, they were sufficiently lost that they didn’t even know how to formulate a coherent question. Three of my students told me it was very bad. So, at least now I know that I’m better than a few other tutors out there. Last year a few students even bought me Christmas gifts which was really sweet of them.

I was tutoring someone a few days ago. They had written “Jen $3″ on her hand. So, I told her “Jen wants to know about her three dollars, by the way…” “You tutor Jen?!?” “(smiling)…no. It’s on your hand.” “Bah!”

This semester, I was a teaching assistant for a third year economics course - mathematics for economists. Or economical mathematics, or something. The prof wanted me to attend the actual lectures so that I knew what was happened. But, they conflicted with my class, so I could only attend the first half and then leave in the middle. So, I’d usually get to see the introduction, or the motivation for what he was about to do, and then I’d have to leave. It was like every class was a cliffhanger than I never got to see resolved. Anyways, the prof assigned several homework questions and then added a few of his own (not from the textbook). The ones he made himself were to be solved using the “classroom version” of one of the textbook theorems. I missed the part of class where he mentioned the classroom version. And during the last 4 tutorial sessions, at least one person asked about these. So, I pretty much borrowed someone’s notes and winged it (wung it?). “Here’s how he said to do it…I don’t know why this works at all…Something he did in class, I guess…”

Someone just came up to me two minutes ago. He missed the review session. He wrote down the wrong day and wondered why the room was empty.  Anyways, he asked me that same question that everyone else asked. He seemed to be satisfied with my answer though.

Their exam is tonight. At the tutorials, some people were struggling with things they should have known from two years ago.

We had our last class of the year yesterday! Hurray!