I survived the first day of classes.
Now to get ready for that 8am lecture tomorrow.
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PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
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16 comments
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'Tis Himself, OM.
17 January 2012 at 6:25 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
One down and a whole bunch more to go.
Dhorvath, OM
17 January 2012 at 6:25 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
This sample size is too small to draw a conclusion.
Glen Davidson
17 January 2012 at 6:28 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Didn’t say anything bad about Muhammed, I suspect.
Glen Davidson
Denephew Ogvorbis, OM
17 January 2012 at 6:28 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Y’know, PZ, you are making it very difficult for me to submit your name for beatification (and eventual cannonization) as a saint. Y’see, saints have to be, well, er, dead, y’know? And you keep surviving your classes. How can we make you an athesit saint if you keep surviving?
Conga rats on your contiued survival.
a3kr0n
17 January 2012 at 6:29 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I’m going to take back what I said earlier about not wanting to be a teacher. I just spend nine hours at a computer building crap in SolidWorks, and I’m beginning to think teaching would rock.
Olav
17 January 2012 at 6:46 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Lecture are 8 in the morning? Madness.
ibyea
17 January 2012 at 7:04 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
If this is torture, it makes me feel even more sorry for high school teachers. They have to start class at 7:30 AM and teach 3 to 4 periods of classes every day while grading a gazillion assignments and tests.
rorschach
17 January 2012 at 7:21 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
The 2 subjects I struggled with in Med school were Obs&Gyne and biochemistry. 725am lecture start. I didn’t attend a single one.
shouldbeworking
17 January 2012 at 9:05 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Some of my chronic underachievers are now worried about the upcoming finals. One of them asked if I was offering after class tutorial sessions: no. He then asked if he could come in for extra help: yes, I am available every morning from 0630 to 0845 when his class starts. He was absent from class today and yesterday. And 30 classes before that.
crayzz
17 January 2012 at 10:11 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
You’re just starting classes now? I started on the 4th.
I don’t know what class you teach at 8am, but I think having calculus at 8am is worse.
Classical Cipher, Murmur Muris, OM
17 January 2012 at 11:45 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
…Ugh. That’s pretty dreadful.
My classes all start at or after 11am! It’s pretty awesome.
David Marjanović
18 January 2012 at 5:42 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
It is. :-)
PZ Myers
18 January 2012 at 5:55 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I do not want to see you all gloating.
There’s actually a reason it’s at 8am. We have a small number of faculty and limited offerings, and we also cooperate with the chemistry and physics faculty to make sure our students aren’t faced with too many conflicts; that means the essential core classes in all disciplines have their timing finely tuned to fit together well. New courses don’t have anywhere to fit in those prime 10:00-2:00 midday hours, and afternoons are packed with lots of labs, so proposing a brand new elective not only means you get all the work of developing it, but it’s going to have to prove itself in a marginal temporal niche first.
So, it’s all very Darwinian, and new courses have to go through a kind of peripatric adaptation before they can expand and sweep through and replace all the other courses, as will happen with my neuro, development, and now cancer biology courses.
PZ Myers
18 January 2012 at 5:58 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Oh, yeah, I also survived the 8am lecture today. I forgot to clean up the whiteboard when we left the classroom, though, and I heard rumors that my list of reasons you should not take my course made the next hour’s class laugh. Ooops. Will remember to erase the evidence in the future.
It also doesn’t look like I scared anyone away yet, either.
Ichthyic
18 January 2012 at 6:00 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I think having calculus at 8am is worse.
actually, I recall taking an advanced linear algebra class (that’s matrix-based mathematics; mostly for statistical analysis) in the afternoon, about a half hour after lunch…
I slept through half that class and ended up just taking it for cr/ncr
I think I actually WOULD have preferred it in the morning, right after a nice big cup of coffee…
Dhorvath, OM
18 January 2012 at 6:14 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Gotta second that, mid afternoon is the worst for my attention span.