The kids are all right

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying my job has gotten easy. It's still hard and stressful and I'm still not very good at it. (Speaking of don't get me wrong, insert usual disclaimer about how I'm not looking for sympathy, I just like to complain, etc.) But it is getting a little easier, and in particular it's getting easier to make the students laugh. I just have to give up on trying to be remotely clever ever and focus on things that are silly or goofy or accidentally sound like I'm talking about fat asses.

The other day I had two consecutive slides with graphs of two slightly differently shaped bell curves, so that if I clicked back and forth between them it kind of looked like the plot was pulsating. They cracked up. Today I had this example of how the number of shark attacks per day and daily ice cream sales are correlated (as in correlation is not causation) and that cracked them up a lot more than it seemed like it should have. Later I told them I was going to skip a proof because I didn't feel like doing it (I didn't) and that cracked them up, too.

There is a problem with these cheap laughs, though, and that is that once they start laughing about something it's hard to get them to stop. And they laugh loudly. They really are like little kids. Is 20ish still in the age range where the brain hasn't fully finished developing? I think it might be.

Holy crap. As much as I sometimes hate them, I do also kind of like the students. And if they are basically children, which they kind of are, that means that I like some children. A lot of them, actually. Yikes.