At age 69, I was ready to settle down after accomplishing most of my lifetime goals. For example, growing up in bland, suburban Westchester, it was my boyhood dream to live in Manhattan's sophisticated East Village. I now have an apartment there, and spend the evenings of my golden years walking to restaurants, bookstores, and movie theaters.
In 1986 I became he first person in history to bicycle solo across the Sinai Desert, riding from Cairo to Tel Aviv in 30 days. The trip involved extreme bicycle mechanics, and I had to talk my way out of some dicey situations. I carried a maximum of about four gallons of water.
I took care of my parents in their old age, and my children in their childhood. One went off to Yale, and the other is finishing up his doctorate in Mathematical Logic at the University of Notre Dame. Now I'm free.
I've always dreamed of being a Math teacher, but I thought it would never happen. (I'm not a great mathematician.) Then three days before the start of the Spring 2025 semster, I got a form letter from the Fordham administration asking for someone to teach "Structures of Computer Science". Could I retool my mind in 72 hours for a new career?
So far, it's been a little rocky for two reasons. First, the topics in the syllabus have nothing to do with each other. The only thing they have in common is the absence of the two key ideas of Calculus: the concepts of limits and continuity. Second, the course purports to cover the Mathematics of computer programming. But in fact, programmers in the real world would have little use for most of the material in the textbook, with the exception of DeMorgan's Laws. A better syllabus on the Mathematics of programming would concentrate on algorithms (searching and sorting) and data structures (trees and graphs), big-O notation, and logarithms to the base 2. But who would register for a course in logarithms?
This Math course is also supposed to teach students how to build a website. I'm going to use this goal as a vehicle for teaching them the rudiments of Linux (files and directories, downloading and editing files, etc.), which is where most of the jobs are these days. How will the students react?