crazy lecture

I just came from the best calculus lecture ever. My professor is normally a pretty wacky guy, and his appearance just lends itself to goofiness anyway since he’s about 7 feet tall and skinny as a rail. He’s also Swedish and talks with a neat accent. Well today, being Halloween (happy Halloween, BTW!), I was in mid-conversation with a classmate when I just froze because I saw him running through the hall toward our door. He was wearing a long, white lab coat and those fake glasses with the big nose, fuzzy mustache, and eyebrows attached. He zoomed in the door, flung his hat and briefcase in various directions, then begin hastily going over Laplace transformations. Throughout the lecture, he grabbed chalk and erasers as he needed them, and when he was done with them, he just tossed them any which way. At one point, I was yawning and suddenly a cloud of chalk dusk flew up at my feet because one of the erasers had landed on me. When he got excited about derivatives part way through the class, he climbed on top of a table and cheered about them.

We have quizzes once a week, always on Friday. Today, however, he pulled out a quiz for us, explaining that we had to have something scary on Halloween. The note at the top said, “No calculators, books, cell phones or brains allowed.” For the date, he had “Fall 3² * 223″. Each question had the number of points it was worth marked; most were worth 2 or 3 points and dealt with the Taylor series. However, one was worth 0 points and asked, “What is the capital of Zimbabwe?” Gosh, he’s zany. My other professors today are going to be normal acting, though they may give us candy.