With my co-op assignment complete, it was time to finish up my course requirements with four straight school quarters (my longest consecutive stretch). For the third time, I had a roommate named John. He was an excellent student, a senior who had earned an A in every single class. His heavy-rotation CDs were Violator by Depeche Mode, Mixed Up by The Cure and Use Your Illusion I & II by Guns N' Roses.
As I mentioned in an earlier chapter (about a mattress mishap), this was the same room I had in Summer '89. If you zoom in to this composite photo of the Fall '91 version of the room, next to said mattress you'll see a green object, just above the face of Ernest P. Worrell. That object is a dictionary, purchased years earlier at the behest of my 4th grade gifted class teacher, Ms. Ross. I remember her saying "you'll be able to use this dictionary all the way through college," and it was very satisfying to fulfill her prophecy. Though I haven't cracked that dictionary in decades, I still have it.
With no American Cyanamid paychecks forthcoming, I took a job as a teaching assistant to fatten my checking account. I was nervous on the first day - I remember standing outside the classroom door, working up the courage to enter and face the 38 freshmen in my Calculus II "recitation" section (which complemented the lectures given by the professor). The initial session went well, and I became a confident instructor as the quarter progressed. I would start each class by taking a fresh piece of chalk and breaking it in half (a practical ritual which produced a writing implement suited to my deliberate, grinding strokes on the board). The teaching assistants weren't expected to attend the lectures, and I didn't really know much about the professor's style; my strategy was essentially to teach the class in parallel with the lectures, to give the students an alternate presentation of the course material. This lesson plan from the midpoint of the quarter showcases some elements of the "bag of tricks" that students needed to add to their repertoire (e.g. "integration by parts").
This quarter's classes: Creative Decisions & Design, Engineering Psychology, Fluid Flow & Convection, Statistics & Applications, and Engineering Economy (leave it to Georgia Tech to put an engineering spin on psychology and economics).
Creative Decisions & Design was an eclectic class (patent searches, game theory, and reliability are among the topics mentioned in the syllabus) that included three group design projects; my team's submissions for the first two projects are seen in the image below. The first project's objective was to use copier paper (and nothing else) to build a structure that would perch on a tennis ball on the ground; the structure was not allowed to touch the ground. Points were earned by maximizing length and minimizing weight; our concept took inspiration from a suspension bridge (our score was middle-of-the-pack). The objective of the second project was to use energy from burning candles (supplied by the instructor) to move an item of your choosing; maximum points were earned if you achieved a displacement of one meter in a time of thirty seconds. I got my parents to mail me the family's Angel Chimes holiday decoration; by removing the ornamental bits and keeping the "engine" (which uses candle power to create rotary motion), it was easy to nail the one-meter travel distance (we built a 100cm paper beam and put an obstacle in its way to stop its rotation at 180 degrees), but we weren't able to dial in the candle power needed to produce the desired spin rate.
