The other day Sharayah and I were outside and the windows to our
apartment were open. We saw Puma looking out at us through the screen,
and he seemed a little bothered. So, of course, we came over and taunted
him. It turns out, if you run the end of a stick along the screen he's
just dumb enough to think he can grab it or eat it. This actually went
on for several minutes without him ever understanding that even if he
was fast enough to catch it, he couldn't get his mouth on it. We also
found some berries and set them at the bottom of the window, and he
couldn't figure out why he couldn't eat them. It was pretty great. At
some point, though, he started getting upset that he couldn't get to us.
We walked back and forth between windows from two different rooms, and
he always ran to join us, whining as though we had him in a cage. See,
to Puma, a cage is any place where he is and we are not. Perhaps more
accurately, it's any place where he is and Sharayah is not. Sometimes in
Tulsa he would think we had left the apartment (since we had an
upstairs) and he'd start yowling the most sad, pathetic cries you've
ever heard. He'll do the same thing here if we ever have a closed door
between us and him. No matter the size of the room, if we're not in it,
it's a cage. Apparently this doesn't just apply to rooms, but the entire
apartment. Puma can curl up on a 1 square foot spot on the floor, and
he lives in an 1100 square foot cage.
Sharayah made a tasty potato soup today. I helped peel
the potatoes for her. It was pretty tough because they were those little
red potatoes, so there isn't much room to grip them while you peel. On
the other hand, the little ones are easier to wash. I told her that they
were small potatoes compared to regular potatoes. It wasn't my idea,
but I poured my soup over a Kaiser roll to get some sort of biscuits and
gravy style effect. I don't know about all that, but it was pretty good
so I'll probably do it again. I think the effect was more like bread
and soup, but that's probably better anyway.
Thanksgiving
is almost here. I'll be going with family (wife, parents, siblings) to
Williamsburg, actually to the same place where Sharayah and I stayed
this past summer. Hopefully the trees will still have some leaves,
because seeing them in all their fall color glory has to be amazing,
judging by what they looked like with green leaves. We'll have the place
starting from the Saturday before Thanksgiving, so it's pretty tempting
to skip the last two days of school before break and just take the
whole week off down there. Maybe someone can bring a laptop and Skype
the lectures to me. That would actually be pretty cool. Either way I'm
expecting some fun and finally some time to relax for a couple days.
Also food.
So it looks like next semester my TA
assignment will be to teach math education for future k-8 teachers. I'm
thinking that their method of randomly assigning TAs to different
classes is a bad idea. I'm not saying it's not an important class, but I have no interest in math at that level. If I end up teaching, it'll be at a university.
My only consolation is that it does seem to be a well planned and
organized course. I don't agree that it's a good use of my abilities to
teach it, but it's a good course for people who actually want to teach
math to children. There's a lot of stress on trying to obtain a deeper
understanding of numbers and operations, so that when they try to teach
the problem solving techniques, it's not just a set of steps, it's based
on an understanding of what the problem is really asking at a
fundamental level. At any rate, hopefully it will only be for a semester
and then I can teach something more interesting. I will probably teach
some level of Calculus over the summer, which is a little uninteresting
because I've TAed it so many times, but at least it's subject matter
that I enjoy.
the darkness around me
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