Limits, continuity, and moral support

James said probably three times during our tutoring session this morning, “That’s why I like teaching you. You get it! No wonder you got A’s in your other classes.” He said, “It takes other people quite a while to understand these things, but you get it.” Talk about a confidence booster! James is very, very helpful and he makes it all seem so much easier than I thought it was at first glance. And, as you can tell, he’s also very encouraging.

We studied limits and continuity this morning, which to me was the most confusing thing we've covered so far. He made it look like pie, and I can do it fairly well now.

All I have time for nowadays

I woke up at five o'clock this morning and calculated the position of a parachutist after 20 seconds of free fall from 10,000 feet given a certain air resistance. And that basically tells you what I'm doing after my first week of this crazygonuts seven week summer term.

Each problem takes me about 30-60 minutes to complete. I studied all Friday until about 5:00 pm and all Saturday until about 10:00 pm. Sunday was my first moment of relaxation (aside from date night on Friday and an insistence that we watch a movie Saturday night before bed).

Matt Lewis, my differential equations teacher, makes sense to me. He's down-to-earth, friendly, and pretty easy to follow. It's LOADS of homework, but it's mostly making sense.

My multivariable calculus teacher is harder to follow, but for that class I have a tutor named James Odei, who is from Ghana. I met with James for the first time on Friday and I can already tell he's going to clear up this semester of calculus for me.

Who knows when I'll be able to blog again, so I'll stand by that for now.

More flames, please

Calculus let out early, so I headed back to Lund Hall to talk with the math department about employment. Linda Skabelund, my advisor, had another student show me down the hall to talk to someone about getting on the list of graders for fall semester. It turns out that the list is probably not very long and I probably will have a good chance at being a grader, especially because math and stats majors are preferred over others. The only requirement is that I get an A- or better in the class I want to grade for. And then if I’m chosen, the professor and I arrange how it all works out. That’s in the fall, so it doesn’t solve my employment problem right away.

But I did tell Janice about my unemployment this morning, and another grad student overheard me. She said that a woman emailed her about tutoring a high school algebra student, and she said she'd respond with my contact info. We got on USU's website and she showed me how to sign up as a tutor. She said she had about three students, at $10 an hour (a standard rate), when she tutored. So...at least I have a few irons in the fire.