The Best Part of a Shiny New Semester

Classes start next week!

And I'm not teaching anything!

But! But! But! The Topologist is teaching Giant Calculus for the first time ever! This is part of the math department's new initiative to "do more with less, and they now have tenured professors teaching Real Calculus in a lecture hall!

So I am full of helpful suggestions about how he should run his class and how he should use the online homework system.

Unfortunately, he does not appreciate the total brilliance of some of my ideas, so he is not doing things exactly my way, which is too bad. And yet, he has taken one of my crazy ideas and made it even crazier. When I teach Calculus 2 (Real Calculus), I start out with the basics of integration, and then I do sequences and series, and I end with Still More Integration. He is starting with sequences and series. This does mean that he will have to skip the Integral Test (the only reason that I did not start with sequences and series, as I didn't want to skip the Integral Test).

I highly recommend that you teach sequences and series as early in the semester as you possibly can. (This goes double-extra when you teach first-time freshmen in Calculus 2 in the fall.)

And I am taking biology this semester, and it will be awesome. On Monday I went to the university library and checked out a giant pile of books about genomics and bioinformatics and biological high performance computing and other awesome things. It is the university library that has me committed to working for the university for forever and ever.

The only thing that could possibly make the beginning of the semester even more awesome is if I were to go to a fancy stationery store and buy a large collection of amazing school supplies.