Tag Archives: Plans

Semester Moments Assorted

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Phew! As I solve the eleventh hour queries of students troubled with what is gobbled up through the course of a semester, I found few challenging ones that observed my attention. Curse or thank the mediocrity of those instant guides that are popularly used every examination season; I have learnt a point or two more within my subject, not because they had better lessons, but they had problems confounded in such manner that they forced me to explore more. So, here we go with the three questions:

Question One: Why do we select the point of intersection that is closest to the horizontal axis when we solve games using graphical method?

Question Two: In a transportation problem, why do we form a circuit when we want to identify how much the allocation should be modified and where?

Question Three: If we talk of Six sigma, is it really about accommodating six standard deviations in the process or should it be about reducing the absolute standard deviation?

Goodness me, there is some talent out there.

That is not all I had this semester. There were a couple of embarrassing moments that is attributed to the efforts to try and over teach (not so desirable) and to the efforts of trying to explain the fundamentals more than required (no so needed, I find now). The first moment, I missed computing the standard deviation and got the problem wrong, and it took me a second after stepping out of the class to identify what mistake I committed. But the twenty minutes I struggled in the class remains an experience. On the second moment, I explained game theory very convincingly through out only spoiling one last procedure. I had forgotten substituting calculated values in the original equations to find out the whole range of values required.

If you think these were silly, I am assuming (actually I shouldn’t hope) the students caught more than what I had known myself committing in lectures.

If I were to mention one significant learning from this semester of teaching, I would say it, but it would not be ground-breaking. I figured out that supplying material to students prior to the class is as effective as supplying no material. The later can at least save me some time and energy.

What would I be doing next semester? I am eagerly planning things.

A day well-planned

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Early in the morning today marked the official beginning of a week full of holidays. And the first activity–you may have already guessed it–I made a list of to-do’s for the day and for the week ahead. Broadly, the idea was to get the house reasonably organized, so that I could focus on my thesis write up and finish a meaty chunk of it. It was a well-crafted plan with details of what should be done, precisely.

As it turns out, I wake up late because it is a rare and long holiday I get. And then I realize there are too many things that make me want to go to work instead of staying home. After paying due respects to mutilated clothes that rested in the bin for a week, we moved out to a buggy hotel for our breakfast. Our journalist uncle meets us there. On the way back to our house, he joins us–and what pleasure in learning Adobe Photoshop when he teaches. I picked up a couple of points about how to work on black and white pictures without losing much detail. That was fun, but it was already past lunch time by then!

After a very delayed lunch (or perhaps an evening snack), I take my soulmate for a style check at Jawed Habib’s in Vizag. Twenty minutes after we entered there, we walked out, and I had a gorgeous young lady by my side–a completely refreshing look of my soulmate. And then, my crazy brain needed some food for thought, and we walked into a book exhibition. I bought four books: one, that is entertaining for a read, two, that is useful to improve my writing skills, three, which can satiate my research interests, and four, which I should be reading in my newly wed life. Carrying those books and walking into a theater expecting to have tickets available for ‘Bodyguard’ ended as an effort in vain; for the theater was not screening the movie. A brief stint on the side of the beach road was a reasonable substitute to the movie plan, and then… here I am, back to blogging.

Well! As you can see, my day was rather well-planned. I planned, but it did not work. Someone else (perhaps God!) had different plans for making my day entertaining, and that might have worked (There are other ways I could have explained why my planning did not work, but I am happy for now with this ‘God’s Plan’ option.

Let me guess! That is how your day has also been. Right?