All Done (Mostly)

I still need to write a teaching philosophy statement, but other than that, I'm all done with my first semester of grad school. Woot.

The analysis exam was not as dire as I had anticipated. We had to do 6 problems out of 9, and I finished 5.5 problems. I don't think my answers were completely correct, but the fact that I'll be getting graded out of 90+ points is very cheering. I got a 55% on the midterm and I don't think I'll have less than a 75% on this exam, so that's a large improvement. Given that our professor has told us not to worry about grades (including telling one woman who did much worse than I did on the midterm specifically not to worry about her grade), I'm expecting a B in this class.

The logic final (our only exam in that class) was today. As expected, it consisted of basic skills from the class rather than proofs or things that required us to have memorized a lot of the theorems and tricky things from the assignments. Given that I needed less than 50% credit on it to have an A in the course, I'm fairly secure in that A.

I also think I'll have an A in probability and in my math pedagogy class. That gives me a good GPA for the semester and means that I passed all of my courses (meaning that I got at least a B), which is really what counts. So: woot!

I need to do better in analysis next semester, though. The main key in that class seems to be working through the exercises in the book, so I'm going to plan to do that. Another student in the class and I are planning to work together to read the sections and work on the problems before the material is taught in class, so that if we have questions we'll know what they are in advance. We'll see how that works out, but hopefully I'll have time; I think my course load will be easier this coming semester. (I will need to make time whether I have time or not.)

Now I have a month off. I feel weird about it already. The next semester doesn't start until mid-January. (Yes, this is where you people with real jobs can want to kick my ass. Believe me, I get it.)

Coming up next semester: statistics, the second half of real analysis, and an introductory topology course.