Woke up pretty late, and realized I had missed a review session I was supposed to help give yesterday! The scheduling had failed silently, without a notification from the other TA giving the session. I had been pretty sure that I was supposed to give a review session that did not in fact exist, from 1:30-4 today. The sessions weren’t on the internal calendar–I found out because I looked at the announcements to the students! I was pretty mad at myself for not looking at those announcements earlier. This totally threw off my morning. I gave Mom a call to get some perspective. Good ol’ Mom helped me realize that our internal scheduling for 2800 is a fiasco. Sometimes meetings are announced hours in advance, and info is spread mostly through messages in slack as opposed to our poorly maintained internal calendar. It’s kind of ridiculous. Anyway, I got my perspective back and did a few pull ups and Limed to Gates. Leah was feeling poorly so it was up to me to captain the discussion leaders meeting. I didn’t have to do much, just to announce that sections were cancelled for the upcoming week (something which as of yet had not been posted anywhere official). Grading the worksheets was a struggle–students haven’t yet internalized that writing more lines can make their proofs worse (another connection between proofs and programs!). But Pat and I got our section worksheets done, and I headed home. At the meeting, I agreed to help out with the 4-7 review session, which was convenient since Leah had been supposed to be at that session as well.
At home, I dug into the Kleene algebra homework again and drank my last delicious cup of chai. Drove this time up the hill to the review session. Got there and Cosmo, the other TA, was running late. I finally located the prelim review guide which had been posted on Piazza but not on slack or google drive (wtf??) and frantically read through it. As I was reading, a student who looked half out of his mind with stress came up to me and told me that due to constraints, he was taking the exam not on Tuesday, but in 90 minutes. I told him to take a deep breath, that he would do fine, and that I had to try to help everyone at the review session, not just him. When 4 hit, Cosmo was still not there. I had no idea what to do, but I bravely went and solicited questions from the students. One of them volunteered some problems from a collection of past prelim problems, which I of course hadn’t seen in advance. I went through each of the problem numbers in turn, getting a show of hands to gauge interest in seeing a solution. There were two problems that were most interesting, and three more that had more than just a few hands. Sight unseen, I flipped to the number of the most interesting problem.