What is the first word you spoke aloud?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the first word you spoke aloud?

• cheese
• cat
• mommy
• app
• photosynthesis
• 为什么 
• 역ㅯ
• 丈子
• 日本語
• clock
• 仍叮
• ni
• yo
• 丈马

Apologies if I mis-transcribed the non-Latin characters. I'm pretty sure that "app" was a joke, but I am suspicious that this is not outside the realm of possibility.

This post's theme word is pullulate, "to sprout or breed," or "to swarm or teem," or "to increase rapidly." The pullulating family featured many ullulating infants.

If you were a superhero/villain, what would your catchphrase be?

I take attendance by having students answer a question.

If you were a superhero/villain, what would your catchphrase be?

Halfhearted heroism:

• I tried :P
• I feel like I need to say something but I don't really know (<-- about="" an="" anticlimax...="" li="" talk="">
• You stop that!
• Save me.
• Life is so complicated. (<-- a="" and="" arriving="" at="" chaos="" himself="" i="" imagine="" just="" li="" madness.="" of="" ongoing="" scene="" superman="" surveying="" the="" to="" tutting="" wreckage="">
• "And have a good day!"
• No.
• Ugh, I guess I'll help you if I have to.
• "I'm not that kind of superhero; please stop asking me to fly."
• eh, maybe tomorrow

Mathy (and I'm not sure what the accompanying costume or scenario is):

• min flow
• P = NP
• "If a vertex cover is polynomial time reducible to..."
• I am a CS major

Onomatopoeia:

• Give me the meatloaf, pow!
• beep boop
• meep
• swagsauce swagu
• Bananana
• pow
• Gotcha!

Entertaining:

• "CATCHPHRASE!!"
• Student X wrote: "ITS helpdesk, this is X how can I help you"
• "I'mma let you finish... but Beyoncé had one of the best music videos of all time!"

The winner was a repeat-offender-for-sarcasm, whose catchphrase, "a pun so infuriating it distracts my enemies," leaves a lot to the imagination while still conveying the right smug tone for a catchphrase. And not really committing to heroism or villainy. (Although some might argue that the entire punnish approach puts it squarely in "villainy".)

This post's theme word is desuetude, "a state of disuse." He heaved himself out of the recliner and said, in a voice cracking from desuetude, "If humanity needs me again, I can come out of retirement and be Superman. Again." then sighed melodramatically.

Find my car: the photo series

It's still weird and novel to me to have a car, specifically associated with me, for my own personal transport needs. I find it especially striking that the car is like an indicator, an anchor of my physical location; to a first-order approximation, it says, "Lila is nearby."

"... and easily findable."

I find myself taking these photos to document the bizarre idea that keeps repeating in my mind: "I know what that is, that's my car. That's my car. That's my car."


This post's theme word is chatoyant (adj), "having a changeable luster like that of a cat's eye at night", or (n), "a chatoyant gemstone, such as a cat's eye." My car is not chatoyant, but it is nevertheless easily distinguished from other vehicles and the surrounding environment.

Pride in teaching

SCENE 1: to the victor the spoils, to the curious the puzzles

Interior hallway, mid-day. LILA is walking purposefully to a meeting.

STUDENT 1: Will you be around later? I think I solved that puzzle you told me but I want to check and see if you can break it with more counterexamples.

STUDENT 2: How are you giving out secret puzzles? This seems unfair.

LILA: Anyone can come ask me for puzzles, I have a lot of problems I want to solve. Come to my office hours!

SCENE 2: wherein educational goals are satisfied

The scene is set: office hours, Friday afternoon. The campus is quiet as students flee for the weekend. Only the truly education-seeking students remain, winnowed down to their scholarly core.

ENTER a student.

STUDENT: I am confused about topic X which we learned two weeks ago. I remember it was confusing then and I'm not sure what to ask you, but I'm confused.

LILA: [quick explanation of topic X, reframed in terms of what we've done in the past two weeks]

STUDENT: Oh, it seems so simple now! I have no idea how I was ever confused, this is totally straightforward and easy.

LILA explodes in delight and absolute teaching fulfillment. Bystanders are scalded by beams of pure joy, campus security must be called, paramedics are deployed, the area is cordoned off and several students are rushed to emergency medical services.

Humanity i love you because

I take attendance by having students answer a question. This week (and most of last) the questions have been expressions of dark emotions; this week in particular has been expressed as poetry references. The final highfalutin' poetry reference was today:

Humanity i love you because

... which on the surface seems sort of positive and upbeat (unlike the earlier ones).

Many students took it in a positive direction:

• there is so much potential
• sometimes good things happen?
• you're so funny and adorable
• Pokemon comes out today 😍
• I was loved first
• just cuz
• they gave me phones
• we are all part of it
• everyone who I like is one of you
• we are kind
• most people are nice-ish

... while others were, seemingly unintentionally, much truer to e. e. cummings' original tone:

• of the Anthropic Principle
• wait, no, i take that back
• all of Earth is Stockholm, and I have a syndrome.
• i have no choice.

Today's prizes go to the students who pushed back on the poetry theme, including "nope don't know this one", "don't get it", "what???", "poetry is not my forte", and the pretty amusing answers:

• Let me count the ways no that's not it

... which is pretty funny, and equalled for entertainment value by:

• tl;dr this week: 2 pretentious 5 me

... which is not a typo, that is actually written on the attendance sheet. Note that the author was not brave enough to attach a name, so it was just written down the margin. Still pretty funny, esp. the usage of '5'.

Gold stars to the Shakespeare reference, though. Gold stars!

This post's theme word is macher (n), "a person of influence, one who gets things done" or "a self-important overbearing person." Our professor began the semester as a good macher, and gradually transformed into an unbearable macher by the end.

And what rough beast

I take attendance by having students answer a question. This week's pop-quiz on dark poetry continues, as for afternoon labs I asked:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

... which I figured left itself open to some interesting answers, even if students didn't recognize the reference or felt overwhelmed by the current political situation falling apart.

Silly answers:

• the second one
• man bear pig
• Jabberwocky
• any beast
• the flamin' hot cheeto

CS-themed answers:

• computer scientists
• the ghost of the traveling salesman
• Lila

Yep:

• I still don't know
• literature is for NERDS
• ..??
• what book is this!
• idk lol

Today's clear winner goes to the most extremely specific and literal response to, namely: "pregnant Jewish woman who's jetlagged from the flight back." Take that, Yeats --- this student answered your rhetorical question!

This post's theme word is orgulous, "haughty". The usually-silly questions have been recast as a confused flurry of orgulous literary references.

What are the roots that clutch

I take attendance by having students answer a question. This week's emotionally-dark-poetry theme continues, as I explored my students' ongoing liberal arts education by asking:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?

A couple students answered, "hope."

Several other students answered in a more literal direction:

• a tree!
• BST?
• an AVL tree
• weeds...?
• Evil Trees (of Rowan and Rin)
• the roots of trash trees?
• some kind of moss probably

Most students expressed confusion and lack of understanding, for example "I just don't know", "I'm confused", "I give up.", "I'm a CS major for a reason...", and "Sorry, bad liberal arts student!"

From this I have learned two things. Firstly, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is not as widely recognizable as I assumed, and secondly and less-surprisingly, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land does not make for a good joke setup.

Ah, well.

This post's theme word is lobolly (n), "a thick gruel", or "mire; mudhole," or "an assistant to a ship's surgeon," or "a pine tree with long needles and strong wood (Pinus taeda)," or "an evergreen, loblolly-bay (Gordonia lasianthus)." The lobolly stuck in a lobolly full of lobolly used lobolly branches to climb up to refuge in his lobolly-house, perched on the side of the stony cliff.

Walkout

The students organized a walkout today, coincidentally right in the middle of my lecture. It was fine, as I was well-warned and the walking-out students left respectfully. (I gave them a preplanned lecture-pause in which to pack up their things and exit.) I didn't feel personally disrespected --- how could I? they're taking a political action having to do with the national election. If they had walked out because they didn't like the algorithm I was presenting, that would have been a different matter.

About half the class walked out.

One interesting after-effect of the walkout is that one of the non-walkout students posted complete lecture notes on the course messageboard. (Hooray for students helping each other to study and learn.) This is the first time I've seen the notes taken from one of my lectures, and I was amused to find out how much of my ongoing colorful aloud monologue made it into the notes, interspersed with and surrounding and annotating the mathematics that I wrote on the board.

This post's theme word is epanalepsis (n), "a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is repeated after intervening text. Example: "The king is dead, long live the king!"" The protest was very positive, with pleasant parlance and paucity of epanalepsis.

Sinkhole in the adjunct faculty lounge

The season has rolled around again, just as you thought that maybe your soul had renewed slightly, your skills increased, your experience enriched, your knowledge expanded... but no: here we stand again, upon a heaping mound of the corpses of our colleagues' academic careers, desperately seeking future employment.

"About the sinkhole in the adjunct faculty lounge, and other mid-semester announcements" strikes the tone perfectly.

For the record, I think computer science departments treat their employees well, because computer science departments comprise genuine and nice human beings (and also because qualified computer scientists are able to seek well-compensated employment elsewhere).

This post's theme word is sprattle (noun), "a scramble or struggle" or (verb intr.) "to scramble or struggle." Though I sprattle day and night, yet the sprattle never ends.

What happens to a dream deferred?

I take attendance by having students answer a question. (The questions/answers from the rest of last week were too melancholy, dark, bitter, and depressing to bear repeating in this semipermanent venue.) Today I echoed Langston Hughes in asking:

What happens to a dream deferred?

To their liberal-arts-education credit, many students were exactly on-point:

• it shrivels like a raisin in the sun
• shrivels up like a raisin in the sun?
• it shrivels up like a raisin
• or does it explode

The hopeful:

• deferred and rejected usually, but a second choice school hasn't killed anyone. probably.
• 2020
• fight or flight --> you go 100% to get it
• do something to make the dream come sooner
• Delayed but queued.
• It generates art, hope, and wonder for further than a dream achieved.
• It's still alive at the bottom of your heart.
• It will stick around and be fulfilled.
• It waits to be realized anew.
• It gets passed on.*
• It grows & inspires & drives everyone to action.

The not optimistic:

• it vanishes
• usually bad things, I'm really afraid to defer anything important; this meager existence is too short, man.
• gone, gone
• you don't want to know... :(
• gets a 9-5 office job, wants to travel but never does. gets a dog
• It dies a slow death.

The literal or extremely abstract:

• you dream it later
• Certainly science will never give us an answer.
• you wake up, then get to dream again later
• it becomes a ghost
• keep on sleeping keep on dreaming
• it gets caught in a dreamcatcher
• it goes to dream heaven
• It comes back night after night, tormenting you.
• It haunts the dreamer and drives a certain mania until the dream is reached.
• it will haunt you

The... rest of the answers:

• It goes into a black box.
• Tape storage.

Today's Prize for Uncategorizability goes to "the same thing that happens to all your dreams". Vague and yet descriptive enough that it lets the reader find whatever answer the reader seeks. A perfectly dithering response for a divided populace.


This post's theme word is today's Word of the Day, kakistocracy: "government by the least qualified or worst persons." We have recovered from our shock enough to teach and etymologize as usual, but the themes are indisputably colored by recent kakistocratic events.


*Depending on your interpretation of "passed on", could be good (the dream is passed to another dreamer) or bad (the dream is passed over and never dreamed again).