I haven’t forgotten about you.  I haven’t forgotten about myself.  I’ve just been living life, I suppose.

Let’s see… grad school updates.  Last semester I “graduated” with a Master’s degree in mathematics.  “Graduated” is in “quotes” because I’m still here, in the same school, in the same program, in the same office, taking the same classes.  I completed the MS degree, but it doesn’t end there.  It’s PhD or bust, my friends!

The statistics course I taught last semester went fabulously.  My students seemed to like me, I definitely liked them, and their grades were quite good.  Of course a few complained that it was “too hard” but you’ll always have the people who aren’t college-ready taking college classes, especially in a large public university.  Honestly, I made the quizzes and exams for that class myself, and I made them as easy as I possibly could have without feeling like I was compromising the quality of the education.  All in all, it went great.

Technically, I guess I’m more than halfway through my PhD program now.  It should take 10 semesters to complete the degree (if you start with “only” a BS instead of an MS), and I’m now three weeks into my sixth semester.  And I feel like I’m really making progress.  I’ve passed both of the qualifying exams that are required.  I’m halfway through the third of four required courses, and I’m halfway through the second of three flexible-but-required courses.  I’m making progress on my research.  The paper I co-wrote based on my undergrad research is dangerously close to actually being published (yay!) and if all goes well, I should have results and be ready to (co-)write a paper about my current research this summer.

This semester I’m teaching Business Calculus.  So far it’s going well – I introduced limits this week.  They seem to be grasping everything pretty well, but I guess I’ll have a better idea of where they’re actually at after the first exam, which is tomorrow.  I was expecting them to be much whinier than they actually have been so far, so I’m pleasantly surprised.  I hope that keeps up.

I’m also grading for an upper level math class again – the same one I did last spring.  There seem to be fewer students this time, so maybe it’ll take less time to grade.  I’m not as infuriated with them as I was last spring.  That will come with time, I assume.  They’re already seriously botching problems that are supposedly way below their level.  But they’re all messing up different things in different ways, so it’s not as depressing as last semester when I would see the same idiotic freshmen-level mistake 25 times in a row from seniors.

Anyway, everything else in my life is a clusterfuck right now, but at least I have control over my job and my schoolwork and I’m marginally successful with those.  And part of maintaining that marginal success requires me to get back to work now.  I promise I’ll update again soon with something more interesting, and not wait 3 months again to do it.