In tennis on Monday we moved back to 3/4 court. Our prof introduced a grip change which brought about an interesting discovery for me. Up to now we had be using a grip called the "Continental." Because now we are further back from the net and we have had a little more practice, we need to have a little more power so our prof showed us the "Eastern Forehand" and "Eastern Backhand" which will become our standard grips. While we wait for the ball to come to us, we hold our racket in the Continental grip until we know if we will need forehand or backhand. Then we rotate the racket to the appropriate grip. However, when I found out what exactly the Eastern Forehand grip was, I realized that I have been using that grip instead of the Continental. At first I thought, "No problem. We are going to be using the Eastern Forehand grip from now on anyway." However, when it came time to serve, I realized I had been serving using the wrong grip as well. I tried the way I was supposed to and it didn't go so well. I'm going to talk to me prof on Wednesday to see if it really matters what grip I use. If it does, I'll have to retrain myself. :( On Monday we also learned the "split step." We take a little hop off our feet just as our opponent hits the ball so that by the time the ball gets to us we are already moving. Our prof says we are "breaking inertia" but I don't really understand how that would work. Inertia is resistance to acceleration and is determined by your mass so how can you break it? Any of you physics types have any idea?
I just finished marking 58 Business Calc assignments for the class I am TAing. I have to mark five questions for each assignment. Some of the questions are harder to mark than others. It is also hard to judge how much work the person has to show. Do I take marks off when they drop limit notation but haven't evaluated the limit? I marked harder last week than this week but it also seemed like a lot more people were getting the concepts for this week's assignment.
I am starting to get excited for the Lifeline sponsor retreat this weekend. I am trying to get ahead on my assignments so that I don't have to cram a lot of work into Sunday night.
I have another presentation on Monday, which I am not excited for. I have to present the teaching methods and philosophies of Maria Montessori to a small group. We had a quick in class brainstorming session but I am still not quite sure what I am going to do with it. Tomorrow the first two groups are presenting on Comenius and Dewey so I'll maybe get some ideas from them.
Last Saturday I went to a programming practice contest at SFU. It was not at all what I was expecting. For one thing, I found out from my carpool partner on the way there that it wasn't a group contest like the real one is going to be but an individual contest. I hadn't brought any reference material or taken a look at the text editor or anything. Luckily, I was able to share reference material with my carpool partner who sat next to me and gave me. He helped me find the text editor and figure out how to operate the terminal and submit programs during the warm-up contest. I didn't get any programs correct but I figured out how to do two and had them working on my screen even though they didn't work when I submitted them. One of them couldn't take big enough numbers and the other one may have had a typo or something like that. It was a good experience. I hadn't forgotten as much C++ as I thought I had.
I was disappointed to find out on Sunday morning that there was no Sunday school for young adults (actually none for anyone between grad and 30). I hope Cam gets something figured out. John Stobbe is going to be teaching it next week so that should be interesting.
3 comments:
You are thinking too technically about "breaking inertia". :) You aren't breaking it like you break a lamp... it's an expression. Maybe not a scientifically correct one, but a linguistically correct one. Breaking inertia means that you have stopped standing in one spot. In this case, inertia refers to the tendency for objects to stay the way they are, so as soon as you move, you've figuratively broken that (you're moving and you would have tended to stand still before). You haven't really broken inertia itself, but you have broken the standing still part. I hope that makes sense.
That sort of makes sense except that as I understand it, inertia is resistance to acceleration, not resistance to movement, although that would be affected if you start at rest. Your resistance to acceleration hasn't changed has it?
You guys are crazy science smart. That stuff hurts my brain. As for linguistically correct, I wonder if your professor considered the type of morpheme chosen to modify the root. As far as I can tell, it's inflectional, meaning it must be bound. As for inertia, I think that's simply a single free morpheme. I'm not sure about the origins or composition of the word though, so there may be suffixes/prefixes that I missed in my consideration. Now I'm curious...
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