Today's Challenges

Woke up early this morning to load a bunch of images onto my iPod to project during class. I was going to be teaching about symmetry and was going to do a dual-projector thing. From the overhead projector, I was going to show translations, rotations, reflections, and glide reflections. From the iPod I had pictures of Penrose Tiles, the Pinwheel Pattern, and other images of note. Unfortunately, my iPod wouldn't project onto the screen! First time it's done that! I will have to find a time where the room is empty to see if my old presentations still work or whether the projector system now hates my iPod.

Fortunately, I've taught this topic enough times (and was too unprepared to sort my overheads ahead of time), so I had with me plenty of old-school overheads to teach without my iPod.

Best part of having a room with a whiteboard? By projecting onto the whiteboard, I can draw on the pictures without having to write on my overheads (even more useful when projecting from the laptop or the iPod).

My students made paper models of the Pinwheel Pattern.

Also challenging: when the autistic undergraduate camps out in my office to talk about math. He always talks about things that I don't understand at all. Banach spaces, Hilbert spaces, measure spaces. No clue. I'm waiting for him to get over analysis and to get into algebra.