Making bad choices, large and small

I’ve been making some bad choices recently. The most extreme was the all nighter on Friday night to finish some papers. I’m clearly too old for all nighters [1]. That’s a large bad choice.

Here’s a small one. Tonight, I decided to do some work in my office. But when I do work in my office, students see me and ask questions. Some of the questions were a lot of fun. For example, I enjoyed helping students think through an inductive proof [2], even though I gave some bad advice along the way [3]. And I even enjoyed helping a slew of CSC 151 students with an assortment of problems.

But, well, when I’m helping students individually, I’m not getting my other work done. So, while I had fun helping students, I did not get Friday’s CSC 151 reading written, nor did I get my Tuesday morning classes prepped, nor did I get all of the course Web site cleanup done.

Oh well. Back to working from home.

When I added the pithy summary to the index page, I found myself writing the following.

Helping students rather than writing stuff. Is that really such a bad choice?

I thought it belonged in this musing.

[1] All nighters are not a good idea for anyone. But bad planning sometimes leads to the need for them, at least in my case.

[2] Have you factored out the common term?

[3] Instead of looking at f(n-1) to compute f(n), why not use f(n-2)?

Version 1.0 released 2017-09-04.

Version 1.0.1 of 2017-09-06.