Swordsmanship

Linda and I hired a babysitter and went to see the new Zorro movie in the theater. We had a great time and laughed a lot.

When I took the babysitter home, Ellie cried. I'm not sure if she was tired from being played with a lot, or just being a bully. It could easily have been either.

After I came home, Ellie said, Wanna see my room? It's clean. Mom can walk in it. She wasn't kidding. It is clean. It is Ellie-is-at-Grandma's-and-Dad-cleaned clean. I don't know how the sitter managed to get Ellie (Can we mess things up so I can play?) to cooperate for that, but I was delighted. I grabbed the vacuum and went at it before Ellie could mess things up again.

Hard Holidays

We went to a pumpkin carving party last night. Parties are so hard for Linda. At least she has enough volume so she can talk now, but it is still like a sort of like forced shyness. She can't really search people out to talk to, so she has to wait for people to come over and talk to her.

So parties are usually measured as a few fun conversations with long boring stretches in between.

Those belligerent students

I was teaching Trigonometry on Thursday. I was really having fun, because class started with a proof. We proved the addition formula for cosine cos(a+b) = cos(a)cos(b) - sin(a)sin(b). It takes a few steps and at least one really good trick to prove.

I was nearly done, when this girl raised her hand. She was clearly frustrated as she said, Why are we doing this? I've read this section, and there are only two two boxes to memorize. Talk about not getting the point.

I gave a short talk about mathematicians. I explained that we hate magical formulas. We value knowing why things are true, even if in the end we are practical and memorize the formulas. It was a good talk, 5 or 10 minutes long. I was eloquent. At the end, a student in the back row said, Wow. Good speech.

And I still managed to finish class on time.