Assalamu alaikum

Alhumdulilah, it is Friday!!

It has been a long week... I didn't get all my preparation done for class on the weekend, so I was squeezing in time where ever I could find it. It made for a couple of late nights studying the material, so I was sleepy while teaching class. Not a fun experience...

At my day job, a strike has been announced. All the employees will be reassigned to cover the work that the union employees usually do. Also, they will have to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week! I am sorta happy that I am a contractor. We get to man the offices, and pick up the workload of all the missing employees. InshaAllah, it will make my job more secure. I hope everything gets worked out, and back to business as usual quickly!

Nothing new at home, our baby is growing so quickly! It is amazing how fast they get bigger. He is taking his first steps without holding on to someone. He has also decided that walking is better than crawling. He would rather walk around the edges of a room to get somewhere, than to crawl across the center of it :) Still he is so cute! My older kids get really excited to see him doing new things and growing, it is up-lifting for all of the family.

Assalamu Alaikum

Alhumdulillah, I will get my poor little car back today with a nice new makeover! No more stinky dodge neon :) Also, my kids got back safely last night, and they had a good time. Class went well, even though I snowed a lot of people under, and finally it's FRIDAY!! (need I say more??)

Anyway, some elaboration...

My kids are on spring break, and so they spent 4 days in Chicago with their grandparents. They went to several museums, and were fascinated by the Museum of Natural History, along with the Science Museum. They got to stay in a hotel with a pool and go swimming every day. The hotel also had complimentary breakfast bar with a waffle machine. They loved adding stuff (nuts, chocolate or fruit) to their little portion of batter and making their own waffles. They had a good time and learned new things over spring break. My parents enjoyed their time running after two boys, and we enjoyed a quiet house with only baby to keep us busy. (which he does a very good job at!)

Wheee!!! Class was fun. I got to do Binomial Distribution, Poisson Distribution and Hypergeometric Distribution and elaborate on how and when they are used. They were comfortable with Binomail and Poisson distribution, but when we got to hypergeometric; Many students had a pained lost and confused look on their face! The formula has 3 combinations amounting to 9 factorials and fractions in both the numerator and denominator. So I got to review factorials, and shortcuts to simplify, someone asked why a zero exponent meant the answer was one and I got to talk about the mathematical side of this class, my favorite part. For some reason when I offer to derive these nice beautiful formulas they start whimpering and crawling under the table?!? When I was hired, I was advised that this is a business class, and not a graduate statistics class so I should simplify the math and focus on the uses of statistics to managers, and not the actual proofs of the theorems. We did three examples of Hypergeometric distribution using state lotteries and potential winning combinations. Some of them were surprised to see the results when we started discussing the chances of winning (somewhere around 1 in 25 million).

Woohoo! I got my book yesterday for teaching undergraduate statistics this summer! More books to read!