MIT: my first week

Today marks my first full week at MIT. MIT had no classes last Monday (19 Sept), but I've been too swamped with work to post a blog. I only missed two weeks worth of one class (my sections for the other two classes started yesterday), but that class had a ton of assignments.

I never thought I would say this, but I am so glad to be back at MIT. The students are fantastic and crack me up. Last week, I overheard a student talk about how she and her friends used to have contests on who had the nerdiest math tattoo.

Even though I'm snowed with editing assignments and preparing talks (not to mention making grades, which seems rather silly to me), I have an excellent handle of what I am supposed to be doing at any given time. A much better sense of my schedule than I ever had at Virtual Text. And it's a good thing: it allows me to be efficient (having a daily planner helps as well).

But the best part of being back at MIT is to be part of the Humanities department, something I never heard about when I was a graduate student. Every Tuesday, there is a FREE lunch for the Humanities faculty and staff. Last week, I had a conversation about books. I wondered whether I was really at MIT. Today, I found myself sitting with a bunch of people from the Music and Theater departments. I ended up talking with an instructor on what it's like to teach music theory to MIT students as opposed to other students. He said MIT students were docile (they don't balk at assignments) and extremely hard-working. We'll see in my courses!

Yesterday was my first really full day of classes: three sections for two classes. About 5 hours total class time. I originally signed up for this schedule to completely free up my Wednesdays (I also don't teach on Fridays), but at such a price! By 1 pm, I had a huge headache, and I still had 2 sections to go. Things went well with my Powerpoint presentations for the first two sections (something I was worried about since I hadn't given one since my thesis defense 4 years ago), but for my last class, my computer could not talk with the LCD projector. Luckily, I had printed out my presentation for my class.

The one thing I would like to try to do is to get to know my students by name, and for them to get to know each other. All told, I have about 50 students. One of the music teachers at the faculty lunch today told me that she once taught a course where the students didn't know the names of their instructors! What she does now is to have a student (or a bunch of students) recite the names of all the other students at the beginning of each class. She says it works: the students can actually greet each other by name when they bump into each other on the street. Since my classes range from 11-19 students, I think this is a feasible strategy.

Must have dinner now, then put Nikita to bed, then back to work!