Having just gotten back from working for CTY and visiting the parents for the last couple weeks, I thought I would write a bit about my CTY experience.

Since I have had virtually no experience working with the age group CTY is targeted at (that is, 7th-10th grade, ages 12-16 roughly), I was rather unsure what to expect. I was hired to be a teaching assistant for a mathematical logic course, which really is supposed to be fast-paced symbolic logic with some mathematical connections from what I understood, so I was confident in the material I would have to explain. The real worry for me was trying to keep everyone interested. Granted, theoretically each of them had chosen the class — no one was taking it to fulfill a requirement or anything. However, as it turned out, that wasn’t exactly the case. Several of the kids were in the class by parental decision, and a couple more had not quite understood the course description, but things seemed to turn out rather well.

CTY is structured so that the kids are in class for about 7 hours a day, 5 days a week for three weeks. Effectively, this works out to a rough correspondence of a day in CTY-land to a week of a college course, meaning that about a semester’s worth of material is covered in three weeks. Although a large majority of the class I was responsible for kept interested and up-to-date on the assigned work quite well, there were others that were a challenge. If I am able to go back in the future, trying to build techniques for keeping people interested is something I will need to focus on a bit more.

Overall, working for CTY was a really good experience for me. I had the opportunity to lecture for a couple days and gained a lot of classroom management experience (in addition to recognizing a number of things on which I need to improve). I am very excited to be able to work there again, though next summer may prove quite difficult since it is the summer during which a lot of portfolio work tends to get done, historically.

Now that I am back in Irvine, I am trying to get down to work on finishing up the two papers that I did not get to complete during the last school year — namely one on Reichenbach’s notion of the a priori and one on some aspects of game theory, deception, and value of information. Hopefully I will be able to finish both before the start of fall quarter.

Edit: I’ve also started reading Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, so I should have some thoughts about that to post soon as well.

So I don’t have anything particularly philosophical to write about since I am still in the trenches on papers, but I thought I would give a small personal update.

Soon (as in, within the next week) I will be interviewing for an instructor job teaching mathematical logic to 7th+ graders for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth at their site in Hong Kong for three weeks this summer. Although it would be a ton of work getting prepared to actually be the instructor for the class, I think it would be a lot of fun to get to teach an accelerated logic sequence to a group of bright, motivated students. The course is supposed to cover about a week of sentential logic, a week of quantifier-predicate logic and a week of elementary set theory.

If that falls through, there is still the possibility of working for the Philosophy of Science Association doing a website re-design. I have not heard anything back from that in a little while, so I’m not getting my hopes up. If all else fails, I suppose I’ll be trying to find a local job.