My hands shook. My stomach hurt. Now that it’s over, I feel drained and a little nauseous.

Lest you think ‘proctoring’ is more complex than it really is, here’s what I did. I handed out tests. I told the class how to deal with a typo in the final problem. I answered individual questions, most of which were very straightforward. I collected the tests when the hour and a half was up.

Oh, I also announced when we had 45 minutes left, then fifteen minutes left, then 5 minutes left.

It’s not really a taxing job.

And yet – I was a wreck.

I so very badly wanted my students (I call them mine and I’ve lectured all of twice) to do well. I needed them to have learned something from me. I wanted the time I’d spent with them, during office hours or class or over email, to have cleared up any lingering questions that remained for them.

I really really wanted them to nail it.

When I had any reason to think that one of them was having a hard time – asking me a questions I couldn’t answer because it would be cheating, or staring really sadly at their paper – I wanted to help. I wanted to say “I’m so sorry that I didn’t, somehow, make sure that this was clear to you”.

Grading the tests just now was even worse. I kept thinking ‘damn it, I KNOW you know this – you answered it in class or on the homework or …’. I want to email certain students and say, look, I see exactly what you did here. I know why you thought this was the right answer, and here’s the part of the problem statement that you missed. Why don’t you take another look.

Of course I can’t do that.

Crockett says this makes me a good teacher – wanting success for all of my students. I think that it makes me a person who is not capable of becoming a teacher. I can’t feel this wrung out all the time.

Maybe it gets easier – but is that a good thing? Should you bleed for your students, or not?

(The moral here? Actual teachers (people who do this for a living and not just as an assistant for tuition) are under appreciated and underpaid. You know me – always saying things that everyone already knows.)

It was…. um….

It definitely happened.

I don’t actually have a great sense of how it went. I left about to cry – but I cry a lot lately, so that’s not a great barometer. Hey, is there air outside? Does that mean anything? No.

We have this thing that we use in class called inkSurvey. It’s actually part of what I’m writing research project on – all 40 of the students are given tablets for the duration of each lecture and there’s a web based program where they’re able to interact with us anonymously. It’s a whole big thing.

Via inkSurvey, one of them wrote ‘be our teacher for the rest of the semester!!’. That gave me the happys, you guys.

And then?

I fucked up two problems in a row, on the board.

I don’t know. My brother and Crockett have assured me that a teacher saying ‘I don’t know’ is not an unacceptable occurrence, especially if it’s followed by ‘I’ll look at it and get back to you’. Plus, as any anxiety ridden slightly obsessive graduate student would do, I double checked what I couldn’t remember and wrote up solutions and put them on the class site when I got home. And also emailed everyone. And also spent three hours this afternoon helping with homework via email.

Basically, I think I’m a good TA.

Just – I wanted everyone to leave that class thinking ‘damn, that was awesome!’. And it didn’t happen.

P.S. It’s Crockett’s mom’s birthday! Happy birthday, mama Crockett. You’re one seriously kickass lady.

“I have a feeling that I’ll get 7′s again!”

That’s not actually how it works.

Say you’re on a game show. You get to pick one door out of three. One door has money behind it, the other two have men with squirt guns.

You pick a door. The chance of you picking the door with the money is easy, right? It’s 1/3. Three doors, one guess.

The game show host decides to fuck with you. She says that one of the other doors definitely has a dude with a squirt gun, and asks him to come on out.

Then she asks you if you want to stick with your original choice, or if you want to switch to the other door.

You’re down to two doors now, right? One with money and one with a squirt gun dude. You’ve already selected one.

Do you switch?

Intuitively, I would say no. Why would you switch? You picked a door, stick with it, yo! Gut instinct and a desire not to get squirted won’t lead you wrong!

Mathematically, yes. You switch.

Why? Because you started with a 1/3 chance. That means that you had two chances to pick the wrong door. Even though you know, after the first squirt gun fella reveals himself, that you didn’t pick that wrong door, it’s still more likely that you chose wrong. If you switch, you end up with a 2/3 chance of winning. If you don’t, you’re stuck with your original 1/3 chance.

I hope that one day you’ll use this.

And then you’ll send me ten percent of your winnings.

Co-teacher.

The first – the thing I am officially called (and paid to be, for that matter).

The second – the thing I am called in front of the Prob Stats class that I TA for.

There were quite a few reasons for the slightly elevated title (it was a decision made by my boss, not me). The most pressing was that I will be teaching a couple of lectures a month while she’s out of town, and they’re more likely to respect me if I’m not called a TA.

The first of those lectures is next week.

These students, who seemed so young the first week, now seem sort of … scary. They’re smart and stuff.

They ask hard questions.

If I were a TA, I could say ‘sorry, I’m just a TA’.

Obviously, calling me a teacher was a terrible idea.

Am I right?

Seriously. Not only did I write a poorly thought out blog post (I had a point but forgot it on the drive to school and typed something while in class just so I could hit publish), I also got a perfectly nice TA at Purdue in trouble for doing me a favor (not on purpose!) and made a pathetic showing of solving a problem on the board in Linear Vector Spaces. Like, my professor crossed it out and wrote ‘the works of Satan’ next to what I wrote down.*

Sometimes I do or say things and afterwards I think, man, if I had only thought about that before opening my mouth or taking that step, I would have seen the error of my ways. Then I mentally yell at myself – THINK, Emma, THINK.

There are days, though, that even if I had thought about it I would have done it anyway. The perfectly nice TA got in trouble for giving me permissions that only his prof should have been able to grant. The professor was going to give them to me, but the TA beat him to it – and I didn’t know that it was an issue, so I mentioned it to the prof. In retrospect, the best I could have done was talked less – I couldn’t have realized I shouldn’t say that specific thing. I certainly couldn’t have performed better at the board unless I’d gone back in time to the night before and studied matrix inversions – but I chatted to the class while I made my attempt and in retrospect that probably makes my failure more memorable.

Hmm. Maybe talking less overall is a good idea.

I should look into that.

* That is not a joke. He really really loves Dana Carvey’s Church Lady.

Did you? If you didn’t read it when it was published, you’ve missed a little. It’s been edited a bit and there’s now an apology at the beginning. However, the point is the same. Alyssa went on a date with someone she met online and that someone turned out to be a geek.

Like, quite a geek.

Like, he has his own Magic: The Gathering Pro Player card.

Apparently he’s a world champion. There’s a whole battle. Reddit is PISSED. How dare a girl blogger on a nerdy site say she didn’t want to go out with someone who played Magic? I came away from the original article thinking that the author was overplaying her hand. She went on a date with a nice guy who had a hobby that she found… what, distasteful? embarrassing? something. She tried to turn it into an online dating horror story, but she failed. Forbes called it ‘geek baiting’, and that may have been what Gawker was going for when the posted the article. Why else would a site aimed at geeks publish an article that was so openly disdainful? Even non-redditors are mad. Geek mom warns mamas not to let their babies grow up to date Alyssa.

I get why people are a little mad. She got kind of judgey.

The response she actually got, though, is absolutely insane.

Her article made her sound a little shallow and like she had nothing better to talk about.

It made Jon (the geek in question) sound like someone who likes games and, more interestingly, is super plus good at them.

She didn’t actually accuse him of anything he wasn’t proud of.

What the hell is everyone so pissed about?

P.S. If she was going to take issue with something about their date, how about the fact that he took her to a one man show based on the life of Jeffry Dahmer? Did he even ask first? What if she’s sensitive to cannibalism, dude?

I attended everything but the pizza party. When the pizza boxes opened and the other students descended on them with such rapidity that I’m pretty sure several of them accidentally ate parts of the cardboard boxes, I snuck out the back.

Yesterday, while sitting in my first class, I tweeted

@dollemma Guys, I found all the girls at my school! Turns out they were hiding in statistics courses.

My first class had 13 people in it, and 9 of them were women.

More than a few of them were women who had worked for awhile and then come back to school.

It’s basically like someone custom designed some friends for me and then shoved us all into a room together. “Here. You’re all 28 (cough*giveortake*cough) and you all like math and you are all going to be sitting here, three times a week, learning the same things. You’re welcome.”

Some of them already knew each other, and one was acting as social director for those who didn’t…

and I totally ignored them.

I was trying to explain why to Crockett, but I really have nothing. It may have been shyness, honestly, or it may just have been that I had other stuff to worry about on that first day of school.

Or, it may have been that I’m damn stingy with my time and have enough friends already, thankyouverymuch.

I could have had pizza with them. But I came home and had pizza with Crockett and my girls instead.

Antisocial for the win.

Me: Oh, did you hear that men who say they’re bisexual have not, in fact, been lying all this time?
Crockett: Did someone think they were?
Me: Apparently the scientists at Northwestern University were unsure.
Crockett: After they finished that study, did they turn their research towards bears and their woodland defecation?

Ahahahahaha.

I love having a smart man.

Har de har har, it’s HILARIOUS that a technology that we grew up with is tough for people who grew up with typewriters and books.

Crockett works for himself, and therefore has an office in our house. I (sort of) have an office too, but it’s in the guest room in the basement and there are spiders and no sunshine down there, so while Crockett is gone I’m working in his office. He has all sorts of neat toys.

This is an IM conversation we’re currently having.

Me: hi
Me: I know you told me last night, but how do I make the wireless keyboard and mouse work?
Crockett: turn on bluetooth on your laptop: Is there a weird-looking ‘B’ up in the menu?
Me: yesshhhh
Crockett: Or just go to ‘Bluetooth’ in system Preferences
Me: I found it
Me: is it automatic?
Crockett: no
Me: ok
Me: it’s on
Crockett: Choose “Set up bluetooth device…”
Me: ooooh I see
Me: this is magical
Crockett: (and make sure the keyboard and mouse are turned on)
Crockett: yes
Me: there are on buttons?
Me: I see no buttons
Me: well, aside from the obvious buttons

I’m not going to share the rest of the conversation with you, because there’s a part where I start banging on the mouse like a technically inept monkey. There are also several jokes about dongles that are only funny if you’re us (or 12 years old).

Let’s just say I see how it’s easy to lose track of new technologies*.

And that I hope any kids I might have are technically savvy. And patient.

* Yes, I KNOW bluetooth isn’t new technology. Shut up. No, seriously. Shut up.

About them: Here at Spilled Milk headquarters, we combine food and comedy in a bowl and stir it up until it explodes. Join your jovial (possibly too jovial) hosts, Molly and Matthew, for recipes, cooking tips, winning lotto numbers, and catfights. Spilled Milk has not been evaluated by theFDA and is not intended to treat any disease, but just between you and me, it probably cures chlamydia.

Chlamydia, people. This is comedy gold.

Lubec, Maine

As you can see from the sign, Lubec is as far east as you can get in the United States. Of course, Canada is just across the Quoddy Narrows.

I’m pretty sure this is the kind of place that rejects you if you aren’t 17th generation or if you accidentally say ‘Quoddy’ wrong.

I kind of want to move there and make friends with some old men and eat a lot of lobster rolls.

Hunting Arrows

Who knew that arrows following your mouse around a screen could be so purdy?

Emma’s unite:

I couldn’t find this image on his website, but according to alphadesigner.com, Emma and Maria are the names to beat. He’s got a bunch of other maps too.