T minus 12 hours
Well, the students are all here, and I'm counting down the hours until Zanmi (pronounced "zommy" -- it's Haitian Creole) and I kick off THEO. For the first time since I started working at Lancaster, I did not have to go directly from the all-site meeting to the lecture hall in Kaufman for diagnostic testing. Yeah not-Math-Sequence! The site meeting still sucked, though -- more so than usual. I have mentioned previously that meals are being served in the ASFC. For this, they reserve the furthest one-third of the basketball courts. This, of course, is where opening/closing ceremonies and the talent show have been held since CTY got kicked out of Hensel, so that had to be moved. The opening ceremonies were instead held in the middle third of the basketball courts. This is far worse than before, acoustically. The stage was set up so that it faced in the longer direction, so students and staff were seated much further away than before. And with the stage being in the middle of the gym, the sound could wander off in both directions and get all muddied. We back-row staffers could comprehend about 30% of what anybody said, at best. Combine that with a series of skits on the "zero indifference" policy which would have been barely tolerable had we been able to hear them at all, and we were getting mighty restless. It almost made me feel sorry that Orientation was over; at least I could hear all the presentations in Stager.
We now have a 16th THEO student. The other day, Ari noticed that one of his potential Sequence students had just completed AB Calculus, according to her questionnaire. Sequence only covers Algebra I through Pre-Calculus, so she was two years two advanced to take anything. This was also her fifth summer at CTY (I don't know if Baby CTY was involved or not) and she took Sequence three of those summers. There was basically no way that she would be taking Sequence again, so Ari asked other math instructors if we'd be willing to take on an extra student. This girl, Ngoclan, happened to be in Zanmi's section of Sequence in 02.2, so we agreed that it might be nice to take her on, even if it meant adding to our burden. At registration, Ari told Ngoclan about the situation, and said she could choose among a handful of other math courses, including THEO. When she heard that Zanmi (whom she of course knew as Andy) was one of the instructors, she eagerly requested to do Number Theory. That made Zanmi's day. So now we have a fifth girl; that's probably a good thing. But we also have a fourth female RA now; that's out of control. We now have MORE RAs overall than the Math Sequence folks.
Ngoclan isn't the only familiar face in our class. One of our students, Erik Youngdahl, was in my Sequence class in 01.2, and Zanmi's Crypto class in 03.2. He's a bright kid, if a bit awkward, but I also think he's the type who, when we introduce ourselves as Zanmi and Tortoise, would say, "That's not true; you're Andy and Nathan," and make a big deal about it. I didn't really want to start things off that way. But at registration today, I had a two-hour shift at the S-Z check-in station, and of course he showed up during my shift. He clearly recognized my face, and was trying to remember how he knew me; my "Tortoise" nametag was not helping him in this regard. "Are you Nathan?" he finally asked. "No, but I'm a friend of Nathan," I said. "Nathan's not here this year, but he told me about you. He said some good things about you." "Okay..." "I can understand your confusion; we do look a bit alike. Same height, similar build..." "Okay...nice to meet you..." I think that I managed to not only convince him that I was not the Nathan he knew, but also confuse the heck out of him. For THEO, that's a good start.
Erik was not the only one confused by my nametag. One parent, after receiving their registration packet from me, looked at my tag, which in full said "Tortoise/THEO/Instructor". She asked me, "Is your name Tortoise, or Theo?" For all the jokes the Number Theory instructors make on the course code (theology, theocracy...), that one had never really occured to me.
-TT
We now have a 16th THEO student. The other day, Ari noticed that one of his potential Sequence students had just completed AB Calculus, according to her questionnaire. Sequence only covers Algebra I through Pre-Calculus, so she was two years two advanced to take anything. This was also her fifth summer at CTY (I don't know if Baby CTY was involved or not) and she took Sequence three of those summers. There was basically no way that she would be taking Sequence again, so Ari asked other math instructors if we'd be willing to take on an extra student. This girl, Ngoclan, happened to be in Zanmi's section of Sequence in 02.2, so we agreed that it might be nice to take her on, even if it meant adding to our burden. At registration, Ari told Ngoclan about the situation, and said she could choose among a handful of other math courses, including THEO. When she heard that Zanmi (whom she of course knew as Andy) was one of the instructors, she eagerly requested to do Number Theory. That made Zanmi's day. So now we have a fifth girl; that's probably a good thing. But we also have a fourth female RA now; that's out of control. We now have MORE RAs overall than the Math Sequence folks.
Ngoclan isn't the only familiar face in our class. One of our students, Erik Youngdahl, was in my Sequence class in 01.2, and Zanmi's Crypto class in 03.2. He's a bright kid, if a bit awkward, but I also think he's the type who, when we introduce ourselves as Zanmi and Tortoise, would say, "That's not true; you're Andy and Nathan," and make a big deal about it. I didn't really want to start things off that way. But at registration today, I had a two-hour shift at the S-Z check-in station, and of course he showed up during my shift. He clearly recognized my face, and was trying to remember how he knew me; my "Tortoise" nametag was not helping him in this regard. "Are you Nathan?" he finally asked. "No, but I'm a friend of Nathan," I said. "Nathan's not here this year, but he told me about you. He said some good things about you." "Okay..." "I can understand your confusion; we do look a bit alike. Same height, similar build..." "Okay...nice to meet you..." I think that I managed to not only convince him that I was not the Nathan he knew, but also confuse the heck out of him. For THEO, that's a good start.
Erik was not the only one confused by my nametag. One parent, after receiving their registration packet from me, looked at my tag, which in full said "Tortoise/THEO/Instructor". She asked me, "Is your name Tortoise, or Theo?" For all the jokes the Number Theory instructors make on the course code (theology, theocracy...), that one had never really occured to me.
-TT