Kate and SteelyKid have colds (well, they’re sharing the same cold), so SteelyKid is waking up a lot during the night. Since Kate needs rest as well, she put earplugs in last night (she’s a much lighter sleeper than I am), and I took baby-soothing duty. So I was up half the night.
I come in for my 9:15 class, turn on the projector so I can project my slides, and the projector is dead. A bunch of fiddling with it reveals that it’s not just a blown bulb (which happened Monday morning), but a broken projector. So, no lecture slides.
“All right,” I say, “I’ll just do a chalk-talk using my lecture slides as a basis.” So I fire up PowerPoint… which hangs. And takes the whole machine down with it, requiring a hard power-off.
So, I ended up doing an improvised chalk-talk lecture based on last year’s PowerPoints, which are still available on the Blackboard page for the old course. That went about as well as you might expect from that description.
As a bonus, today’s scheduled lecture was the one class period we have to spend on vectors, which means 1) it’s absolutely critical for every subsequent lecture, and 2) it requires a lot of drawings of arrows in three dimensions. Which I suck at, which is one of the reasons I use PowerPoint in the first place– so the figures will actually look like they’re supposed to, and not like the clumsy scrawl of a drunken chimpanzee.
I had been planning to try to play a little hoops today, as my ankle is feeling much better, and I got my fancy heavy-duty brace in the mail yesterday. The way this morning has gone, though, I’m a little afraid that I’ll get run over by a truck on the way to the gym, or a tree will fall on me, or something.
I think I may just go home, go back to bed, and play Angry Birds with the covers pulled up over my head. There’s no way that can end badly, right?
I have always loved the beginning of semester because everything is still possible and nothing has gone wrong yet. You know, there is pedagogical value in having the students watch you struggle to produce legible / acceptable diagrams since they will have to do it in assignments, tests and exams themselves. That is why I use a tablet PC, the students see what acceptable handwork looks like and I have a digital copy of the lecture to post to the course webpage. By the way, one of the benefits of creating genetic copies of ourselves is that they drag diseases into our homes that we are genetically and immunologically susceptible to catch ourselves. I would say you will likely have an interesting week ahead of you. You might want to prepare a canned lecture to get through a sick day.
I read the title to this post as “This Day Needs a Robot” and I thought, “That’s awesome. Everyday needs a robot.” I think that’s my new motto for 2011.
Hahahaha @2 I saw the same and must say, my thoughts exactly.
Some times it’s just an Angry Birds kind of day.
Just remember with angry birds, some days you’re the bird, some days you’re the pig.
When I was talking about vectors, and drawing them in 3D, I was REALLY wishing I had Iron Man’s display and interface with me….
On a more serious note, at some point I probably will try having all my students sitting there in a virtual world on their laptop so I can do real 3d displays that they can look at from their own angles.