By grace, I ended up find a job much more quickly than I expected. While staring into the emptiness of my summer, I received an email from the math department recruiting instructors and teaching assistants for the Center for Talented Youth (CTY). I had some reservations about applying for a position that would require me to pack my bags and travel 7 hours the very next day, but besides the burden of making last minute travel plans, I didn't have any other conflicts. Luckily, I'm that guy that never has any plans, so disappearing for 3 weeks posed no problems for me at all. Thus, I went ahead and applied. I got the job as a teaching assistant for a cryptology course. I accepted the offer, which turned out to be a great decision.

Traveling to Saratoga by Amtrak proved to be rather uneventful. Besides some trouble with my ID card, orientation went off without a hitch. I really ended up falling in love with the town of Saratoga and Skidmore College. I have no idea about the academics at Skidmore, but let's talk about the gym. For a small college of less than 3,000 students, they have 4 platforms. That's double the number that the University of Pennsylvania has despite having nearly 25,000 students. Moreover, while the dining hall wasn't great, it was more than adequate for my needs. With an all-you-can-eat buffet 3 times per day, gains were made. In Saratoga, I finally achieved my goal of cleaning 2 plates (225 pounds). It did come at the cost of gaining 6 pounds, so I probably need to cut a bit now that I'm back in Philly.

Lake George at then end of our hike

Now, on the instructional side, being a teaching assistant wasn't too much work. There were 7 hours of class per day, 5 days per week. I had to attend all those hours except for 2 per week, so it ended up being 33 hours per week in the classroom. For a teaching assistant, most of that time is spent taking notes on classroom activity and assisting students with worksheets and projects. For 8 of the hours in the evening, I had to manage the classroom by myself, but most of that time was monitoring activities. I did end up giving two lectures, which provided a nice change of pace.

Now, the students in my class ranged in age from 12 to 16. Classroom management and discipline was easily the most difficult part. Eventually, I just learned to tolerate some amount of noise and distraction as long as the students got their work done. Another difficulty was scaling lectures to the wide range of abilities. I usually try to present the math in a pretty general manner, which means a lot of variables and symbols. In this way, once you solve a problem once, you've solved them all. This made some of the younger students uncomfortable, however. I suppose from their perspective math is all about numbers. I did provide numerical examples, but I guess that I could have focused more on this.

In the end, I actually learned a lot, too. I've already mentioned a couple things about classroom management and pedagogy, but some of the material was actually new to me. In particular, I found it especially cool that the cracking of the Enigma involves a clever application of the symmetric group from abstract algebra.

Another view of Lake George

Of course, the best part of this little adventure was the people. Everyone that I met was really interesting. People came from a variety of backgrounds, but we were all united by the camaraderie of teaching together. I had a ton of fun going to bars, hiking, playing tennis and soccer, and sharing meals with everyone. Thanks to all the staff for making it a great time.

Finally, the location of the camp made it ideal for stopping by and seeing some old friends in NYC on the way back. We were able to hike the Kaaterskill Falls and go for a little swim. NYC ended up just being one long Pokéwalk thanks to Pokémon Go.

The Kaaterskill Falls. Photo credits: Ahodges7 from Wikipedia

By the way, my days in Philly are numbered, and it's likely I won't be making too many trips back here from Seattle. Therefore, you should reach out to me if you want to get together before I leave.