My job
Math Support Center... I've been working there for almost 2 years now. Basically, I have to sit in a room for 2 hours, a few days per week and any student who has any Maths related question can come and ask and I try to answer. As a general feeling, I like it; I like it quite a lot. Still, there are moments when it can get quite annoying.
During my first semester, the lack of social life (Raluca was basically my only friend in Bremen at the time, and she spent most of her time with her boyfriend at the moment; also I was single and most definitely looking :P), my desire to do a good job, and my small problem of not being able to refuse people resulted in my doing over-time almost every session. The whole year was more or less uneventful, except meeting a shy and scared freshman who became a good friend, and recently Raluca's boyfriend.
However, since the purpose of this entry is to bitch about my job, I won't go into the funny details of working with George. And this brings me to the second year at the MSC. I like a bit showing off and I take any opportunity not to do my own things (even if that means solving someone else's problems), so I am quite a good teacher. So I started having a lot of people at my sessions.
During the first semester, I was mostly working with students from the General Mathematics and Computational Science course. This is how I met 'the Tantenda brothers'; the two have very little in common: their name and lack of any mathematical skills or knowledge are the most important ones. For both of them I had to explain every little step of every problem 2 or 3 times. On numerous occasions I would finish explaining a problem for all the students there, then I'd ask if there were any questions; that's when one of them (usually the same one every time) would say 'Diana, I think I am lost'; 'Where?' I'd ask only to discover it that he had not understood anything after the first line.
Another habit of theirs is to ask several people the same question, or the same person the same question on several occasions. Last semester, I was solving a problem in which I used that for any natural number n, we know that n > n-1. Oh, the problems that caused! Raluca decided to do her homework in the same room where I was working, so that we can exchange an occasional laugh or (more often) so that she can make fun of me. After solving the problem on the board for most people, I started working one on one with the students that had particular questions. Tatenda knew Raluca was also a Maths student so he went to her for help, because he could not understand how I came to such an extraordinary result as the one written above. After trying to explain it in an abstract way, Raluca soon decided that was a lost cause, so she told him to subtract n from both members of the inequality, which results in 0 > -1, obviously true. Did that satisfy him? No! After 15 minutes or so, after Raluca left, he asked me again the same question. And later, he asked someone else the same question (it could have been me again - I don't remember clearly). This is one of the biggest challenges at the MSC... How to dumb it down sufficiently to explain something that seems obvious to you.
This semester, Tatenda gave up on his Trade Mark by then expression ('I'm lost'), and at least with me he now uses a variant of 'Excuse me, Diana, could you please come again?'; to a slightly perverted mind like mine, this is hilarious. Even after hearing it on numerous occasions, I still have trouble not bursting into laughter and telling him that there is no chance of me coming at least once in his presence, let alone 'again'. I have to admit that this is just my being evil, because it's just that he's not that familiar with English and he's trying to be polite, but it's still extremely funny.
Also, he was in the habit of calling me 'Di'. It is quite difficult to explain why it was annoying, seeing how my friends called me that when I was 13 and how I don't mind when some people call me that. I guess it's one hand the was he said it, the tone, sort of spitting the word. On the other hand, the only people that are allowed to call me that are close friends. I am not particularly interested in becoming his friend, the only time we spend together is at the MSC. So I think there should be some boundaries.
And speaking of boundaries, the students that come to the MSC had gotten into the bad habit of calling me whenever they needed help. Once, some guy asked me for help with his homework, during MSC hours; I was working with someone else, so I told him to wait. He left the room, saying he would return, but never did. Then, around 11 pm of that evening (a Saturday), he called me and asked me if I had time then or the following day to help him. I cannot even begin to understand what they think... They must think that I'm always on call, that I'm supposed to help them no matter when.
The most annoying thing about Tatenda is that in his attempt to learn, he searches the web a lot. So far, so good. However, he doesn't have enough experience to know where to look and comes up with these methods that no one has ever heard, or with completely stupid things. And then asks me to explain them to him, only after I spend 10, 15, 20 minutes explaining the method I know (which usually is the common one). On Monday, I wrote a formula on the board and then he told me that it's wrong, because on You Tube (yes! You Tube!) it was written differently. So I have to spend 15 minutes to convince him that the formula is correct. It wasn't even much of a proof, it was just computations and a tiny bit of set theory.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind explaining and proving theorems, though it can get boring. The problem is that the students don't even spend 5 minutes trying to think for themselves. Many times, I knew the text of the problems they had to solve better than them. The way they do things is on Monday or on Tuesday, they remember they have a homework due on Wednesday; so they just come to me (sometimes even without the assignment) and expect me to solve the problems. One even told me that he just wants to leave as soon as possible, when I took a small detour to explain the theory needed. They don't attend class, they don't bother to find someone that did, to take the notes and to try to understand what was taught. If a problems says something like 'Using the formula given in class', or 'the example given in class', they look at me with big dumb doe eyes when I tell them I need the notes to see what the professor was talking about and say 'But I didn't go to class'.
Another chapter in the funny/annoying part of my job is Didi (or I should probably type Dee Dee). Her name is Diana too and she's the sister of Raluca's ex. She's a freshman here, studying logistics, so she has to take some Mathematics for Engineers courses (they present mostly the basics of certain topics, with a focus on applying the results in practical problems, not on the theory). She thinks she's smart and that can understand things fast. To be honest, she's not dumb and compared to other I works with, she does get things quite quickly; having studied in a very good high school in Romania, she's used to a bit more abstract thinking and she does know a bit more. And she knows all this, which makes her arrogant. Once, we had to compute the inverse of a matrix. Since I suck at computations, I used Mathematica to compute it. I hope it's obvious for everyone that if no typos were made in introducing the data, the result is correct. She had gotten a different result. Her conclusion? Mathematica did it wrong!
Well... enough bitching for one night... Truth being told, I like the job. I like knowing that I am needed, I like the look on their faces when they understand, seeing the evolution of some of them and knowing that I helped. Also, the things I mentioned here give me constantly things to laugh about...
During my first semester, the lack of social life (Raluca was basically my only friend in Bremen at the time, and she spent most of her time with her boyfriend at the moment; also I was single and most definitely looking :P), my desire to do a good job, and my small problem of not being able to refuse people resulted in my doing over-time almost every session. The whole year was more or less uneventful, except meeting a shy and scared freshman who became a good friend, and recently Raluca's boyfriend.
However, since the purpose of this entry is to bitch about my job, I won't go into the funny details of working with George. And this brings me to the second year at the MSC. I like a bit showing off and I take any opportunity not to do my own things (even if that means solving someone else's problems), so I am quite a good teacher. So I started having a lot of people at my sessions.
During the first semester, I was mostly working with students from the General Mathematics and Computational Science course. This is how I met 'the Tantenda brothers'; the two have very little in common: their name and lack of any mathematical skills or knowledge are the most important ones. For both of them I had to explain every little step of every problem 2 or 3 times. On numerous occasions I would finish explaining a problem for all the students there, then I'd ask if there were any questions; that's when one of them (usually the same one every time) would say 'Diana, I think I am lost'; 'Where?' I'd ask only to discover it that he had not understood anything after the first line.
Another habit of theirs is to ask several people the same question, or the same person the same question on several occasions. Last semester, I was solving a problem in which I used that for any natural number n, we know that n > n-1. Oh, the problems that caused! Raluca decided to do her homework in the same room where I was working, so that we can exchange an occasional laugh or (more often) so that she can make fun of me. After solving the problem on the board for most people, I started working one on one with the students that had particular questions. Tatenda knew Raluca was also a Maths student so he went to her for help, because he could not understand how I came to such an extraordinary result as the one written above. After trying to explain it in an abstract way, Raluca soon decided that was a lost cause, so she told him to subtract n from both members of the inequality, which results in 0 > -1, obviously true. Did that satisfy him? No! After 15 minutes or so, after Raluca left, he asked me again the same question. And later, he asked someone else the same question (it could have been me again - I don't remember clearly). This is one of the biggest challenges at the MSC... How to dumb it down sufficiently to explain something that seems obvious to you.
This semester, Tatenda gave up on his Trade Mark by then expression ('I'm lost'), and at least with me he now uses a variant of 'Excuse me, Diana, could you please come again?'; to a slightly perverted mind like mine, this is hilarious. Even after hearing it on numerous occasions, I still have trouble not bursting into laughter and telling him that there is no chance of me coming at least once in his presence, let alone 'again'. I have to admit that this is just my being evil, because it's just that he's not that familiar with English and he's trying to be polite, but it's still extremely funny.
Also, he was in the habit of calling me 'Di'. It is quite difficult to explain why it was annoying, seeing how my friends called me that when I was 13 and how I don't mind when some people call me that. I guess it's one hand the was he said it, the tone, sort of spitting the word. On the other hand, the only people that are allowed to call me that are close friends. I am not particularly interested in becoming his friend, the only time we spend together is at the MSC. So I think there should be some boundaries.
And speaking of boundaries, the students that come to the MSC had gotten into the bad habit of calling me whenever they needed help. Once, some guy asked me for help with his homework, during MSC hours; I was working with someone else, so I told him to wait. He left the room, saying he would return, but never did. Then, around 11 pm of that evening (a Saturday), he called me and asked me if I had time then or the following day to help him. I cannot even begin to understand what they think... They must think that I'm always on call, that I'm supposed to help them no matter when.
The most annoying thing about Tatenda is that in his attempt to learn, he searches the web a lot. So far, so good. However, he doesn't have enough experience to know where to look and comes up with these methods that no one has ever heard, or with completely stupid things. And then asks me to explain them to him, only after I spend 10, 15, 20 minutes explaining the method I know (which usually is the common one). On Monday, I wrote a formula on the board and then he told me that it's wrong, because on You Tube (yes! You Tube!) it was written differently. So I have to spend 15 minutes to convince him that the formula is correct. It wasn't even much of a proof, it was just computations and a tiny bit of set theory.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mind explaining and proving theorems, though it can get boring. The problem is that the students don't even spend 5 minutes trying to think for themselves. Many times, I knew the text of the problems they had to solve better than them. The way they do things is on Monday or on Tuesday, they remember they have a homework due on Wednesday; so they just come to me (sometimes even without the assignment) and expect me to solve the problems. One even told me that he just wants to leave as soon as possible, when I took a small detour to explain the theory needed. They don't attend class, they don't bother to find someone that did, to take the notes and to try to understand what was taught. If a problems says something like 'Using the formula given in class', or 'the example given in class', they look at me with big dumb doe eyes when I tell them I need the notes to see what the professor was talking about and say 'But I didn't go to class'.
Another chapter in the funny/annoying part of my job is Didi (or I should probably type Dee Dee). Her name is Diana too and she's the sister of Raluca's ex. She's a freshman here, studying logistics, so she has to take some Mathematics for Engineers courses (they present mostly the basics of certain topics, with a focus on applying the results in practical problems, not on the theory). She thinks she's smart and that can understand things fast. To be honest, she's not dumb and compared to other I works with, she does get things quite quickly; having studied in a very good high school in Romania, she's used to a bit more abstract thinking and she does know a bit more. And she knows all this, which makes her arrogant. Once, we had to compute the inverse of a matrix. Since I suck at computations, I used Mathematica to compute it. I hope it's obvious for everyone that if no typos were made in introducing the data, the result is correct. She had gotten a different result. Her conclusion? Mathematica did it wrong!
Well... enough bitching for one night... Truth being told, I like the job. I like knowing that I am needed, I like the look on their faces when they understand, seeing the evolution of some of them and knowing that I helped. Also, the things I mentioned here give me constantly things to laugh about...