Depanning and Charging Math

Two of my classes this semester include specific periods where graduate students come to answer questions about the exercises we have to complete. We call these classes a charge or a dépannage. This semester, both of these guys aren’t very good. The department decided to give these teaching hours to new graduate students, who don’t really have any idea on how to teach. Last year, I had two really great students who were great in class. This semester, it’s pretty paltry. The reason is that the department wanted to give these new students a chance, even though the professors had requested specific students, which would have been really good.

Thankfully, the student for Analysis III (metric spaces, compact spaces, topology, etc) is still decent. We shall call him S. Even though S is hard to understand, he does explain the problems and is willing to help us out. Since my linguistic ability is quite adaptable, I have no problems understanding him. He seems to have a good grasp of the subject matter and I actually enjoy going to those classes. By far, Analysis III is my favorite math class. It’s probably the class that I like the most out of all of the classes I’ve ever taken. I dream of Analysis, of open boules and series that converge towards their limits and are excluded from these boules.

Our other graduate student is a bit of a joke. Nope, that’s probably saying too much. We shall refer to him as Y. Y isn’t that bad, but out of 17 students, 3 elected to stay for this period. Then again, the same number stayed for the other period with the other student, but the quality definitely went down.

Still, it’s possible to learn. The one thing is that he makes a lot of mistakes on the black board on stuff that he’s supposed to get right, which is kind of annoying. Strangely enough, I did manage to learn something. Elo learned something as well, even though the graduate student frustrated her.