I thought I went through it unscathed. None of my students pulled an April Fool’s Joke on me and I, in return, didn’t do anything to them. It was a merry unspoken reciprocity that we’ve come to love. And so, in my apparently flawed and puny little mind, I thought it was over.

Then I come home and read this and this… I believed the first — and was upset — and then I read the second, which I believed until the end. Then both made sense. Not okay, people, not okay. But the point is: April Fools, I LOATHE YOU, like Tartaglia loathed Cardano. But worse. More like how Cardano loathed Tartaglia.

Update: Dang. I was totally taken in a second time by the same website (see second link above). I’m such a loser. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. I was actually, and even I barely believe it, rickrolled. (Look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t know what that is).

I created an online mixtape, on one of the most graphically sleek sites I’ve seen in a long while [muxtape].

You can hear it by clicking below. For bonus points, try to figure out the common thread which binds these songs together.

Update: Many people also swear by mixwit, which has a nice interface too. And you can make multiple mix tapes.

Update: Answer to the question in the subject line in the comments.

I just spent 3 hours watching Leonard Susskind [Wikipedia page] deliver two lectures on Classical Mechanics via iTunesU. I started this over Winter Break (I watched 4 lectures), but I stopped because I didn’t have the proper time to devote. Once you stop, and enough time passes, you have to start all over [1]. Plus I hadn’t bought a pretty $15 notebook from Paris to take notes in.

But I started over, notebook in hand.

The end result of this is: I’m inspired. I love love love learning about trajectories, generalized coordinates, lagrangians, and principles of least action. Plus, there are some pretty neat digressions or mini-lectures I could use for my multivariable calc class next year.

I highly recommend it. You just need calculus (and some basic multivariable can’t hurt). It’s a bit hard to find on iTunes, but this link might take you to the first lecture. It’s his Stanford PHY 25 course taught in 2007 (October – December).

[1] It reminds me of borrowing the 1st season of LOST from my friend, who had the last seventh disc out on loan to a different friend. Once I finished the first six discs, I was hungry for the last. But still, the other friend refused to return it. And to this day, I have not seen the entire first season of LOST. Now, since so much time has lapsed, I will have to start the season all over again. (Double sigh.)

3 point

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and so on and so forth…

I’m going to be heading off to Paris on Sunday, taking a much-needed break from the daily grind. I might post something before I leave, but I’ll be gone until March 26th.There’s a good chance I’ll be bringing my lappy toppy with me, so you might get an update or two from the French capital, but in case you don’t hear from me, I’m (probably) a-okay

I got roped into chaperoning a school dance.

Okay, you caught me. I was hoping for the opportunity since I started teaching. Why? I want to act as sociologist, studying the behavior of my students in a setting as much outside of the educational context as I’m going to see them. (Yeah, being in NYC, I see my students on the subway at random times and places, but that’s not this…) Adults aren’t acknowledged, at least not at my school dances. I and all my friends ignored all our teachers at homecoming and prom. I know what it’s like to be on the other side of the teacher’s desk. Now I’m curious what it’s like on the other side of the dance floor…

One teacher said that after she chaperoned a dance at her previous school, she couldn’t look her students in the eyes for the rest of the year.

Wow.

I’ll report back with general observations, if I have any. Stay tuned.

Update: The night wasn’t scandalous, and chaperoning was just a lot of standing around. The few observations I had:

1. Old school Britney (“Toxic”) will get all students to the dance floor.
2. Old school Britney will get the chaperones who are assigned the dance area to dance. (Yes, that was me.)
3. Cutting off a poppy-electronic-song with a female vocalist (like many on the videogame Dance Dance Revolution) will cause howls of execration.
4. 4. Playing Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” is the closest you can get to having a “High School Musical” spontaneous song-and-dance-number moment.
5. You can earn bonus points with students if you find a tube of lip gloss at the end of the dance, and ask them: “Hey, this lip gloss belong to anyone? It be poppin'” [see this video for explanation]

Last week, I proctored the American Mathematics Competition (AMC10/12). Three students in mathclub showed up to take it, along with 4 other students.

When I was a student in high school, I loved these tests. Not only did the 25-question-test set my brain on fire, but the problems were actually do-able. I loved math competitions (e.g. the USAMTS, the New Jersey Math League contest). Not only did I enjoy those types of problems, but I enjoyed the competition aspect of it all. I liked that I was competing not just with myself, and others in my school, but also people nation-wide.

I didn’t excel much in high school. I mean, I got good grades, but I wasn’t an amazing writer, artist, computer programmer. But I did have math — that was mine. It was part and parcel of my identity.

After the test was collected and sealed, students tallied up their scores. [The scoring works as follows: 6 points for each correct answer, 1.5 for each unanswered question, 0 points for each wrong answer.]

Unfortunately for the mathclubbers, you need 100 points to move to the next round of the math competition (the American Invitational Math Exam — AIME), and none broke that barrier. So this year, our students are out of luck.

As a promise to the mathclubbers, I told them I would take the exam at home, under testing conditions (75 minutes, no breaks, no calculator). I got 16 questions right, no questions wrong, and left the rest blank. That gives me a score of 16*6+9*1.5=109.5, which would have qualified me for the AIME. In high school, I always scored around that level.

(And I was nervous that these high schoolers would school me on this test.)

The score is bittersweet. It meant that I still “have it” (“it” being the ability to do AMC problems). It also means that I have not grown smarter since high school.