savageinfidel

All good things (and summers) come to an end - we're starting back up at Unknown University. For the first time in four years, I get to teach the undergraduate introductory course. For many faculty, this would be a bad thing (a lot of my colleagues simply don't like teaching the core course). However, I find it to be one of m favorite classes - it's easy, and I get to be an energetit and somewhat goofy evangelist for the Finance Department. While putting together my syllabus, I went looking for an appropriate quote or two (I usually stick a few in there, if only for my own amusement). I came across a perfect one for the Unknown Daughter. As I've mentioned before, she's extremely bright (I know, I'm biased). But she also hangs out with a great bunch of kids - she and her closest three girlfriends are all smart, creative, and nice. They now can have a group motto. The quote (attributed to Mark Twain) is: Knowledge is Power Power Corrupts Study Hard Be Ev...

I love living in the NorthEast - it's where I grew up, and there's just something about real winter that feels right. But I can do without 3-foot snowdifts in my driveway. Luckily I have neighbors with plows and snowblowers. The Unknown Daughter was at a friend's house for a birthday party/sleepover. No school for her tomorrow, so we get to see if we can get the neighborhoods to build a huge snowman. Good stuff.

The Unknown Daughter is also known by most of my family as "The Math Princess." She seems to get math concepts more quickly than almost anyone else at her grade level. Well, there is one one boy in her class who is just about at her level, but she has a better Rear Naked Choke than him (knowing what boys can be like, I started teaching her various martial arts techniques at age 4 - I figure if she cripples the first boyfriend, my work is largely done). She's really good at the rote learning/memorization/multiplication tables part of math, and that's important (hey - if you know your tables cold, many things seems to get easier). But what makes me happiest is that she really enjoys the math puzzles I give her. When she finally sees a pattern, she gets really excited. For example, when she realized that she could use the distributive law (i.e a(b+c) = ab + ac) to do mental math, she got really excited. So, I enjoyed this piece titled " A Mathematician's Lame...