Just so you know

January 17th, 2012 by PZ Myers

I survived the first day of classes.

Now to get ready for that 8am lecture tomorrow.

Posted in Personal | 16 comments

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16 comments on this post.

  1. 'Tis Himself, OM.:

    January 17th, 2012 at 6:25 pm

    survived the first day of classes.

    One down and a whole bunch more to go.

  2. Dhorvath, OM:

    January 17th, 2012 at 6:25 pm

    This sample size is too small to draw a conclusion.

  3. Glen Davidson:

    January 17th, 2012 at 6:28 pm

    Didn’t say anything bad about Muhammed, I suspect.

    Glen Davidson

  4. Denephew Ogvorbis, OM:

    January 17th, 2012 at 6:28 pm

    I survived the first day of classes.

    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.

  5. a3kr0n:

    January 17th, 2012 at 6:29 pm

    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.

  6. Olav:

    January 17th, 2012 at 6:46 pm

    Lecture are 8 in the morning? Madness.

  7. ibyea:

    January 17th, 2012 at 7:04 pm

    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.

  8. rorschach:

    January 17th, 2012 at 7:21 pm

    The 2 subjects I struggled with in Med school were Obs&Gyne and biochemistry. 725am lecture start. I didn’t attend a single one.

  9. shouldbeworking:

    January 17th, 2012 at 9:05 pm

    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.

  10. crayzz:

    January 17th, 2012 at 10:11 pm

    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.

  11. Classical Cipher, Murmur Muris, OM:

    January 17th, 2012 at 11:45 pm

    I don’t know what class you teach at 8am, but I think having calculus at 8am is worse.

    …Ugh. That’s pretty dreadful.

    My classes all start at or after 11am! It’s pretty awesome.

  12. David Marjanović:

    January 18th, 2012 at 5:42 pm

    My classes all start at or after 11am! It’s pretty awesome.

    It is. :-)

  13. PZ Myers:

    January 18th, 2012 at 5:55 pm

    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.

  14. PZ Myers:

    January 18th, 2012 at 5:58 pm

    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.

  15. Ichthyic:

    January 18th, 2012 at 6:00 pm

    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…

  16. Dhorvath, OM:

    January 18th, 2012 at 6:14 pm

    Gotta second that, mid afternoon is the worst for my attention span.