03:10:16 Thursday January 08 2004
Ha! I got some things accomplished today. I believe that I am finally pulling out of the semester break funk that I have been in. Besides the work that I get paid for I have finally started writing up some lecture notes for the 490 course that I am teaching this semester.

You see, I really love teaching. I strongly believe that it is one of the most important jobs there is. People in the east tend to have the proper concept of teacher (or rather Sensei). If someone entrusts you with their children's education it is both a great honor and a great responsibility. Society as a whole would benefit immeasurably if we decided that teachers were a group that deserved to be respected and paid as much as doctors and lawyers. Then our best and brightest minds would go into teaching and within a few generations we would have reaped several hundred times our initial outlay.

I used to work for the Computer Science Department teaching C and C++ programming. At first I was pretty bad. Lehman sat in on my first class and was horrified. However, I have always believed teaching was important so I devoted myself to improving, and improve I did. Before long I had outstripped the other TAs and was promoted to course administrator. This is where things got hairy. Hairy like a sasquatch with hirsuitism. At this level I frequently had to go to the assistant head of the department and lobby for sufficient funds to run the course. I don't know how much you know about the way the academic system works, but a graduate student has about as much political pull in a department as he has gravitational pull on Jupiter. Needless to say I quickly expended all of my political capital.

Last semester I did not teach at all. I took a programming job with RCS. It is great. I get to work with people as geeky as myself and do something that I am good at. However, I miss teaching. So beginning next week I will be teaching a 490 experimental course for 3 to 4 students. Naturally, this work is gratis. The course will cover a variety of topics in computer music. It is not about listening to music or about how to use a particular piece of software. It is about how computers acquire, store, process, manipulate, and output sound. It is as much a course in information theory and digital signal processing as anything else. I am just happy to be teaching again and this time I am working outside of the beaurocracy so I do not expect the same difficulties as last time.