Positive Things

My JTCC teaching feels good. Esh got a job at his School as a grader for a professor (tough for first years), and October's class looks like it's going to work.

We helped Esh with Tax forms last night by phone, they can be hard to understand. Because of that not everyone reports their income, but Esh will.

As Will Smith say in Independence Day: "we got to work on our communication skills." I'm working on mine.

For some, it's almost time to sign up for selective service--go USA, but hopefully it will not be needed. But you still got to sign up -- or go to Jail!

Feeling Good

Today was my first semester-length class (teaching) at JTCC. It felt really good to be back in the college environment and and classroom. It is very different than the short courses I have been doing and it felt great.

Thanks to October for the suggestion!

Backwards In Time

I have always been fascinated by the concept, mathematics and physics of time travel. I would love to believe we can do it. However, I hit on a show stopper.

Antimatter particles are the same (mathematically) as particles traveling backwards in time. Therefore, if we were to travel back in time, our particles would become antiparticles. The "anti us" would undoubtedly meet up with regular particles and we all know what would happen -- blam!

Google Olympics

Second class

I'll be pretty busy but it should be fun. JTCC asked last minute if I'd teach an Algebra I class also. So this semester I have two semester length classes: Introduction to Mathematics and Algebra I. Semester teaching is not a financially advantageous as the short training I do but part of doing this is to get back in to teaching math because all the short courses are computer related.

The Joy of computing and Microsoft

I needed to swap two columns in a listview. No big deal, one line of code:

listView1.Columns(1).DisplayIndex = 0

Well. That was with Microsoft's .NET Framework 2.0. I needed Framework 1.1. In 1.1 I had to figure out a way to do it. Microsoft did not provide a way. Not a lot of code but low level and not obvious:



Public Declare Function SendMessagelong Lib "user32" Alias "SendMessageA" _
(ByVal hWnd As Integer, ByVal wMsg As Integer, _
ByVal wParam As Integer, ByVal lParam As Integer) As Integer
Private Const LVM_FIRST = &H1000
Private Const LVM_GETCOLUMNORDERARRAY = (LVM_FIRST + 59)
Private Const LVM_SETCOLUMNORDERARRAY = (LVM_FIRST + 58)

Dim success As Long
Dim i As Integer
Dim colCount As Long
Dim colArray(2) As Long

colCount = Me.listView1.Columns.Count
ReDim colArray(0,colCount) As Long
success = SendMessage(Me.Handle.ToInt32, LVM_GETCOLUMNORDERARRAY, colCount, colArray(0))



If success <> 0 Then

colArray(0) = 1
colArray(1) = 2
colArray(2) = 3


success = SendMessage(Me.listView1.Handle.ToInt32, LVM_SETCOLUMNORDERARRAY, colCount, colArray(0))

Me.listView1.Refresh()
End If

Introduction to Math

My precalculus and several others do not have enough people to make. But the college asked me to teach an Introduction to Mathematics class. They thought they would have to sell me on it, since I like higher level math but I jumped at the chance and said yes.

It's not about how much I know, it's about sharing information and the helping others get it. The challenge of multiple way of presenting something to meet everyones needs.

The joy of teaching!

Topics:

Arithmetic, Calculators, Sets of numbers, Basic algebra, Percents, Sets and logic, Basic statistics,
and Problem solving.

Precalculus

I have not accepted the class but I was offered a precalculus (and possibly a second one) as an Adjunct as JTCC. I'll wait a week or so before deciding.

We will cover cool stuff like linear, non-linear and higher degree polynomials, complex numbers, matrices and much more.