I've been away for the past while, busy with research and personal/relationship growth. Some of the latter is going to take me years to get to where I want to be, but at least I know where I'm going, even if I'm not entirely sure how to get there yet.

I finished a paper on my research, then cut it from 32 pages to 15 in half an hour to meet the conference page limit. I don't expect that paper to get accepted, but hopefully the reviewers will have some advice at least. I'm in an awkward spot where I'm not sure how to cut this into several papers, but a proper writeup with all the details and good examples needs about 40 pages. Maybe that's something worth publishing on the Arxiv as a supplement to a mch much shorter conference or journal paper.

It's been pretty cold out lately; the chickens are not a huge fan of this but they seem to be doing alright. At night they fluff all their feathers out so they look like little potatoes with beaks!

Unfortunately, most students haven't been taught mathematics well at any point in their lives. The week before the fall semester starts I teach an algebra review class to incoming freshmen, and I'm amazed at how poor some of their math skills are (for example, confused why 1/x + 1/y is not 1/(x + y), or reducing (5 + x) / (5 + y) to x / y).

It's a travesty that students can get this far in life without really understanding what's going on, but I don't think it's all their fault either.

Fortunately, they have you! Better late than never, as they say. So here's my advice on teaching mathematical rigor to people:

1. Be as excited as you can be. Rigorous argument is not necessarily the most enthralling of things, but people pick up on whether you care about something and that can make a big difference in their opinion of the topic.

2. Be patient. You've, perhaps subconsciously, spent years developing the understanding you have of the subject; they have not. That can change, but it won't happen right away.

3. Ask them questions. Building connections between ideas might come naturally to you, but it does not to everyone. Try to nudge them to see relationships between things, even if you/they don't fully explore that relationship and why it exists right away. Walk them through your process of seeing why a solution is right or wrong.

4. Think about what guides your intuition for problems and explain what you can of that process.

Gracie is the biggest bird and super independent, but she'll fall right alseep if you pick her up and pet her. Here's Gracie and me, sleeping:

Bertha knows she can fly out of the cage, but she'll only do it if I'm standing there to hold her. Other times, if she wants out, she'll lock eyes with you and do this little dance thing and if you put your hand down, she'll step up onto it. We eat breakfast together sometimes.

Hubski, is it selfish to feel frustrated because you're spending all your time doing things that help other people and therefore are accomplishing nothing that you need to do for yourself? Because, on reflection, the past year has been that way for me.

The windshield wipers on my daily driver stopped working for some reason, so for now I'm just hoping it doesn't rain when I have to drive somewhere.

One of my students cheated this week. On the one hand, I'm pissed because every time that happens it eats up several hours of my time meeting with people and running paperwork around campus. On the other, I'm getting pretty efficient at doing that, for better or for worse.

At least in two weeks a lot of this will be over and maybe I'll be able to get anything done.

Sorry for the rant.

Hey! Do you make or fix things? You should make a Shopski post! I love learning how to do new things, and seeing other people working on stuff motivates me to get off my butt as well.

It's currently been car-focused because that's what I've been working on, but I'd like to see a wider variety of posts.

On a semi-related note, I've been doing really well at checking things off my personal to-do list (hence a lot of shop time), but not so well at the things I told my advisor I'd do. Time management is tricky like that, I guess.