The Last Chapter

"Welcome to the last chapter of the last lesson in your academic math careers!" That's what the prof said when he opened the PowerPoint on Simulating Normal Random Variables yesterday. Worthy of celebration but I think we all were stunned into silence. This prof doesn't exactly engender frivolity... and I'll just leave it at that! Of course those of us in the accounting field will be using the concepts but, theoretically anyway, it won't be a "math class." Yippee!

Business Math II has been a lot harder than I thought. There are so many concepts and so many derivations of them that I can hardly keep track of what we're talking about and when to apply certain concepts. Test 2 is tomorrow, so I guess I need to figure it all out today!

There's still quite a bit to do before finishing the semester. Our online grade sheet shows 11 individual and group grades still awaiting a score. Two more homework assignments, a quiz, a test, a final, a written report, and an oral presentation - all by 3pm next Wednesday!

In my Native America class I still have a 5-7 page paper to write (my topic is Indian Legends & Lore) and a final next Wednesday. Very interesting class and a wonderful and personable prof. It's been difficult to juggle two classes in this condensed Summer Session, but I'm not sorry I did it this way. I really needed to get both classes out of the way before Fall.

Looking back, I can hardly believe that this time last year I had not even started my FIRST math class!! I've covered basically four semesters of math in less than a year's time! I still have a Statistics course looming in Spring 2009, but it's not officially a math class... I hope!

After next Wednesday I get a whole week and a half off before diving into Fall semester. Assuming, of course, I survive this week!

Deep breath!

This one's going to be a doozy... I can already tell. Two accelerated classes, lots of homework, lots of reading. Not much time to come up for air - but I'll make it.

Many Nations of Native America. Five books, four assignments, two exams, one essay, and lots to learn. But it will be fun; just seven students in class and the prof (Sunny Lybarger) seems really interesting. Getting her PhD in Philosophy/American Indian Art, she's Comanche (at least part) and very knowledgeable on the subject matter. We're covering three tribal areas and some general stuff about law, policy, and education. First is the Northwest Coast Indians including the Makah tribe and the whaling debate, then the Tohono O'odham here in southern Az, and the Anishinaabe (or Ojibwe, or Algonkin) tribe in the northeast U.S. and Canada.  We'll be covering both contemporary and historical issues; holding a "potlatch" (which has something to do with food!), and an in-class debate on the whaling issue.

Business Mathematics II. Six quizzes, six group homework assignments, six individual homework assignments, two oral reports, two exams and a final. Yikes. But, like Business Math I, this is about "real" stuff like demand, revenue, cost, profit, variances, differentiation, and distributions. In our first oral report we are to choose a new product that our "company" invented that is about to hit the market. We will have some givens: raw material costs, development outlays, demand compilations from test markets, etc., and will find a reasonable price for our product in the $200-$300 range. We'll use a quadratic function to determine maximum profit given the demand and adjust from there. Should be fun!

I'm glad I had a relative easy first summer semester and a wonderful week off for family reunion. I didn't really need a life this summer anyway, did I?!

Am I getting better at this?

For a few rarified moments I actually have the highest grade in my Business Math class! And not just the highest grade in MY class, but in all three Business Math classes Alison is teaching. I'm enjoying it while I can because our Final Exam grade will probably take care of this anomaly posthaste!

Alison Schafer has been the coolest "teach" yet in Math. While I loved my previous two profs (crazy-fun Jessica Knapp, and sweet-patient Laurie Varecka), this one is goofy and actually makes probability, random variables and cumulative distributive functions interesting!

Yes, math can be fun. Here's two actual quiz questions (she makes her own quizzes... can you tell?!):

1. James Bond is heading to the Tropicana Night Club in Las Vegas to track down Dr. MathDoom. He is arranging transportation and needs to know how big of a vehicle he needs to plan for in order to hold the number of girls he'll be bringing home with him for coffee at the end of the night. The table shows the number of girls and the probabilities from the past of that many happening. Based on this data, how many girls does James Bond expect to go home with? Compute this showing the proper notation and your work.

2. You are entered into the "Who's the Biggest Bling Daddy" contest. There are three other contestants: P. Diddy, Paris Hilton's dog, and Will Ferrell. The bookies are saying the odds of you winning are 28%. Paris Hilton's Dog has a 0.32 probability of winning. The other two contestants have equal probabilities. You've just found out that Paris Hilton's dog is disqualified for not being human! What is the new probability that you will win, given that her dog is no longer in the competition? Write the proper mathematical notation for this probability.

She claims she stayed up until 1 in the morning playing Grand Theft Auto in order to create the database of 100 stolen cars which we used for the Excel DCOUNT function on the midterm exam!

I feel I did pretty good on the final exam, but I've been wrong about that feeling too many times to trust it now! However, going into the last day of class (Monday), it feels pretty good to see a 97% next to my code name!

Not "too cool!"

The five others in my math presentation group and I were discussing whether the UA Library presentation room would be taken up by the Freshman Orientation occurring this month on campus. I said something about it being strange it was a whole year ago that I went through that orientation. One of the guys looked at me weird and asked, "Did you stay for the WHOLE thing?" As a matter of fact, I did. You only get once to be a college freshman and you may as well get the full treatment! Turns out he left part-way through because he was either bored or couldn't be bothered. Maybe that's one of the differences between his generation and mine. We've figured out at age 50+ that we're not "too cool" for stuff!

Business Math

I can't decide if this class is easy or hard! The concepts weren't covered in either of my algebra classes, but they're so closely tied to REAL BUSINESS SITUATIONS that they seem refreshingly ordinary and not so much foreign language-y. Basic probability and conditional probability actually make sense - at least so far. And I know enough Microsoft Excel that the DCOUNT stuff was almost simple.

Tomorrow's our first quiz so I guess I'll find out then whether or not I've grasped the essentials.

The only hard part is having two focuses. We need to learn the math plus create a PowerPoint presentation on stuff we won't learn until later this week! We are assigned to groups of 6 and have just a week to put together something cohesive to present next Tuesday.

Some poor fictional soul has defaulted on his $7,300,000 business loan and we (as banking officers) need to decide whether to foreclose now or give him more time. Foreclosure will mean the bank is settling for a nominal sum and will never recoup its total investment. More time means he either eventually pays back the entire loan (best case) or goes bankrupt and the bank receives nothing. Data from over 8,000 similar bank customers will give us the probability ratios and we'll learn how to plug in the known factors to assess the value of each scenario. So we basically know what we're shooting for, but we won't really know how to get there until two days before the presentation!

That's the way it is with accelerated courses. Things overlap and you have a persistent feeling you'll never catch up.

But there's no "real" homework to turn in, no textbook to speak of, and we'll be done in five weeks time. Dare I say it? It's almost FUN!