Italian Food and Calculus

A typical day in Italian food class goes something like this:

1. For the first 30 minutes or so I am alert. I write down about half a page of notes which I will never read again in the same time it has taken the girl next to me to complete three full pages. Her handwriting is smaller than mine.
2. My mind wanders and I start to doze off. It's gradual at first and I know that today will be different. Today I will be awake through the full two hours.
   
3. I am asleep.
4. Cassandra concocts some unruly way to awaken me. Today her method was a quick strike to my nose with a pen. She says next week she is going to rip my arm hair off using tape. This must be avoided at all costs.
5. I yell. Or at least I think I do. Every morning I wake up in a pool of sweat after nightmares foreboding the day that my reaction is loud enough for people to actually hear.
6. I sit up straight and do not fall asleep again for the rest of the lecture. Note that this does not entail actually paying attention. Today I was asked a question about something the professor had just said. I was not aware that the professor had said anything.

Now today was a bit different than normal because today our second two-page response paper was due. Nobody proofread mine and I liked what I had written far less than what I had written for the first one, so I was a bit nervous about turning it in. But it's difficult to imagine a better way to erase my apprehension than catching a glimpse of the work of a certain S. Han, who had adorned the upper half of his/her paper with the gutsiest title I have ever witnessed: TITLE. And who was submitting this for a grade.

TITLE is even pretty gutsy as far as filler titles go (usually I use POOP)


There's a chalk ad on that cement wall halfway up the hill to De Neve where someone misspelled Kerckhoff as "Kerchoff". who wants to go carrot-mark in a K and a smiley face with me?



Dear multivariable calculus,

Why do you hate me?

z = cos(x + y + z)
δz/δx = -sin(x+y+z) * (1 + δz/δx)
δz/δx = -sin(x+y+z) - sin(x+y+z)(δz/δx)
δz/δx = -sin(x+y+z) / (1 + sin(x+y+z))
δz/δx (π/4, π/4, 0) = -1/2

I told you I could do it correctly :[

Vehemently,
Alex