Now I know

Math 33B: This class is regarded as one of the more difficult of the 30-series, but so far it's been considerably more tolerable than I anticipated. It's amazing how much of a difference that having a professor who actually pauses once in a while and asks "Does this make sense?" can make (even when the majority of the class is afraid to say no). And I actually like the textbook - a nice divergence from the one for 33A, which offered minimal explanations for abstract ideas, completely unhelpful and unrepresentative examples, and somehow managed to make even the easiest concepts appear daunting.

Math 61: It's called "Introduction to Discrete Structures" but I have decided that a better title would be miscellany. Every class we end up going off on tangents from our already disjoint material. However, it has proved to be interesting so far - we are formally taught things that we otherwise wouldn't have thought twice about, like sets. To my dismay, the topic for the past week or two has been combinatorics, which invokes nightmares from high school. Specifically, the memory of one of two math tests in high school that I didn't get an A on - the test on combinatorics and probability from Alegbra 2. Today's midterm was ridiculously easy - unfortunate because I rely so heavily on grading curves, and I've already thought of a few irritating mistakes.

The professor is amazing - here is some evidence:

• While giving an example about relations: "xRy if x has major Y. Let X be the set {Amy, John, Sam} and Y be the set {Econ, Math, Art History}. Art history majors. You've all seen some of those. They help subsidize the rest of us."
• While discussing unary operators: "You know, unary. Like 'ooone', if you mispronounce it. Like people who ride a unicycle. I ride a unicycle. It's a lot harder."
• While introducing combinations: "n choose k is equal to n!/(k!(n-k)!). This is really important. Now I'm going to draw a box around it because it's so important. Now I'm going to draw a halo around it. Now I'm going to draw some stars because that's how important it is."
• After erasing the formula for C(n,k) to make room for an example: "Oops, I shouldn't have erased that. It's imporant."

Geography 5: Think of the most stereotypical geography/environmental science professor you can imagine and that is my professor - one of those surfer-with-a-PhD kind of guys. He is so loaded with good quotes that it is basically impossible to write any of them down. I've found his lecture style to be amusing - every day he basically shares with us a few lists - lists of biomes, lists of megafauna, lists of countries by population density, lists of endemic vegetables - and yet each lecture inevitably transforms into a lengthy discussion of sex and drugs. Even once when his father was in attendance. I have a midterm on Thursday and have yet to remove the textbook from its plastic.

Music History 5: Undoubtedly the worst class I have taken so far at UCLA. Imagine this: Mondays and Wednesdays at 9AM, 500 people trudge into Schoenberg auditorium. The professor spends 30 minutes explaining to the class how to resolve some technical issue people have been experiencing with Moodle, the online portal where most of our work is done. Then she spends another 20 minutes explaining some aspect of our research project that somebody inevitably misunderstood. The lecture commences and she spends about 30 minutes explaining some inanely simple topic in music - AABA forms, 4/4 time, backbeats. Each lecture contains only about 10 minutes of actual history of rock - the rest is frivolous at best. You wouldn't believe how many Youtube videos she has shown us...