Winter? Term

The winter term began today with the snow melting and winter jackets discarded. There were even a brave few who wore short sleeve tee shirts outside this afternoon.

My New Year's wish for myself was to have a dull and boring year. It has not happened. Things got interesting on the second but they have settled down again, so maybe it will be more dull and boring than interesting.

It has been a month since I attended classes, so the university was a bit unfamiliar in some ways. When I was walking to my locker, I could not remember my combination, but decided to just open the lock without thinking. That worked. Maybe I should try not thinking more often. I also forgot the room number of my first class of the day. I walked along a hallway of an older building looking at a bunch of identical doors trying to remember which one I wanted. At least one other student had the same problem, but he had not slept very much and had just arrived in town after a four hour flight.

I started two new classes today. Math and a writing course. There are about 130 students in the math class and only seven of us in the writing class, which is good, because it is an intensive course. Math got off to a good start. Our prof was trying to explain why you should switch doors on game shows where you select one door hoping to get a prize, then the host opens a door revealing no prize and asks you if you want to switch doors. It seems illogical to switch, but the odds of getting the prize go up if you switch. He could do something like that with our final exam. Do you feel lucky today? Calculate the probability of getting a better mark if you switch doors. Of coruse, probability is irrelevant when you lose.

My schedule is more workable this term. I have enough time between classes to get some work done. I got a good start today and plan on keeping it up.

My writing seems to have suffered from the long break. Writing is something that I have to do regularly. I am finding it hard to get into the flow of writing.