Spring 2013 Impressions

Since I’m in the habit of posting about classes I take at the beginning and end of the semester, and often find something interesting when I look at them later, some quick impressions for courses I’m involved in for the Spring 2013 semester.

Teaching: CS275: Discrete Mathematics
I did this last semester, but under a different primary instructor. I again have pretty much free reign over the recitation period for an hour a week, but this time I do get to do a little bit of new material instead of just examples, and the suggestions on this I should cover are shorter and less specific. I’m more comfortable with the material having done it recently, and my classes seem a little more lively, so it should be a little more fun this time around. That said, doing the same lesson twice back-to-back is slightly more demanding than with a gap, and it is very easy to forget what you did with each group. I’m balancing being a little less organized in the first section with tending to run out of time in the 2nd, so I think they’re getting similar coverage, although the second section is probably having more fun.

Taking: GS650: Preparing Future Faculty
This is a two credit hour, once a week evening course for graduate students who think they might end up in academia. I’m building up a pile of technology-related degrees, have a deep well of contempt for the tech industry, and like teaching, so that sounds right. It actually seems like it will be more useful to me than I expected, in addition to being mostly composed of reading the appropriate news streams, listening to experts talk, and reflecting on both, which is basically what I do with myself anyway.

Taking: LIN511: Introduction to Computational Linguistics
I can talk about how I’m taking this because I thought it would be good for me to look at the other kind of language tools, and how my interest in the cognitive science aspects of computer systems covers it, but I’m really just taking it because it sounded interesting, no one told me I couldn’t (and in fact all the appropriate people encouraged it), and why else have I ever done anything, ever? There is one other CS student in there, and about 34 mixed graduate and undergraduate linguistics students, so my perspective is certainly the minority perspective, although the instructor came to linguistics from computing (and is hilariously British). I came in expecting to need to self-teach a lot of linguistics material, but talking to my classmates, they seem to be having to work as much on the linguistics aspects as I am, and having trouble with the computer parts, so I guess I’m ahead? So far the bulk of the assigned material has been structured manipulation of character srings (Using DATR, which is basically a generic string class system implemented in an ancient dialect of Prolog…), which is for me mostly a good exercise in remembering the OO way that many CS folks view the world. It is interesting, and I’m not suffering, so we’ll call committing to this whim a good choice.

I’m also still not rid of my MS project. I’m deeply tired of it at this point. I’m working to arrange the thing I would like to be working on as a PhD while I continue to try to clear out the parts of the MS project that have never worked, hopefully it will be reasonably fast and graceful.