for those who like my teaching anecdotes

[aryanhwy]

Here's a good one.

Last Thursday a student apologized and said he wouldn't be able to make it to seminar next week. Fine with me, he knows what we're covering and if he has any questions he can come to office hours.

He showed up this afternoon with a stack of questions that we worked through, and as he left I said "see you Thursday," and then caught myself "oh, wait, you're gone then, right?" And he a bit shamefacedly admitted that he was going to be around, but his girlfriend was visiting from Italy. Then he mentioned that she's in finance, and he'd passed on a joke I'd made last seminar about people working in finances (namely, they are probably utterly uncaring about Gödel's incompleteness results), and was wondering if maybe instead of him skipping class she could come along with him? If there's be enough room for one more?

Outwardly I laughed and said of course she'd be welcome and there's plenty of spare seats in the room, and inwardly I am trying to sum up all the kinds of awesome this is, that one of my students thinks "inviting my girlfriend along to class" is a wholly commensurate alternative to "skipping class to spend time with my girlfriend".

This entire year has been just utterly surreal with the amount of romance and flirtation going on in connection with my logic classes. Whoever would've thought?

Comments

[kareina.livejournal.com]

That is so cool! I hope she says yes to joining the lesson.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I hope so too!

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

I see a paper: "On the aphrodisiac properties of diagonalization lemmas"...

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I could work in one of my husband's favorite jokes/pick-up lines:

"What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice?"

.....

[I'll give you the option of answering before giving the punchline away.]

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

Hey! I work in finance and... um... never mind.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

And you care nothing about the incompleteness of basic arithmetic? It doesn't keep you awake at night knowing that there are true statements that are provably unprovable?

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

It keeps me awake at night knowing that there are bank statements that are provably unbalanced to SCA branch reports. Does that count?

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

It's close. :)