Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Verdict is in, high school students are noisy

Although today was better than yesterday the high school students that I am having to share my office with are extremely noisy. Besides their intrinsic loudness there is also the fact that they have power tools to play with. Fortunately the power tool fun is mostly in the lab adjacent to my office but the walls are thin. Although I do feel slightly interested in what they are doing really that only serves to make them all the more annoying.

Sad to say it but I am afraid to do my real work for fear that they would see it and comprehend it. For some reason I feel the need to project a sense that whatever it is that I am doing must be complex and arcane. I don't want to actually do my physics homework since they might look over my shoulder and discover that my physics is mostly just algebra, integrals, curls, and divergences and the like (all definitely accessible at a high school level). For similar reasons I don't want to do anything else that might be sufficiently simple to be comprehended by those around me. But reading and understanding the complex stuff takes more concentration and work than I can easily muster in the midst of such mayhem. I only hope that the students won't stay so late that they will still be hanging around my office late at night. I walked to the library so that I could read my number theory books in peace but hopefully this next six weeks just translates to the loss of the use of my office only between the hours of 3 and 6 or so not from 3:00 on.

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