Groan

"Some days, you bite the dog and other days, the dog bites you." I think that is a saying, though I may not be getting it exactly right. Today is one of the latter days. We spent the week on cost functions in Micro I for the grad students, and it felt like swimming through tar - both for them and for me. I had the darndest time working out how technology affected cost over time. Even though, in the end, a firm with constant returns to scale sees its costs change from what it cost to produce in the first year to what it costs in some other year equal to that first year's total cost deflated by the technology function, there was one step of algebraic substitution that I just couldn't understand. Even though the intuition was obvious, I couldn't figure out one thing - neither mathematically nor intuitively. It was very frustrating. And the whole deliberation on cost functions has been like that to some degree. It's weeks like these where I feel like I need about 1 and a half more hours of preparation before I should teach. I usually spend 3 hours prepping the one hour and 15 minute grad course, and about an hour on the undergrad course. And it's definitely getting better, but I can still very easily get lost in the mathematics, and really lose sight of the overall insight the math is bringing to some problem. Not to mention that there is just so much to cover in this course, and I often feel like I'm just flying through the material, even though I actually spent 4-5 hours on a single chapter (which is almost 2 weeks). Teaching at the grad level, when you yourself feel like you're only barely ahead of the students, is nerve-wracking. Thankfully, unlike other doctors, I cannot be sued for malpractice, otherwise I'd really be frightened.