Is There Such Thing as Coincidence?

Here's a little revelation that we had last weekend over green beer.

Come summertime, 3 of us in my close circle of friends from the Tdot will be living far from home.

I will be living in Edmonton.
LMD will be living in London.
Cleavers already lives in Toronto.

All 3 of us will be living a great distance from our families.

My family is *effectively from Toronto.
LMD's family is *effectively from Edmonton.
Cleaver's family is *effectively from London.

(*Effectively in this instance refers to the fact that the closest international airport is in said city).

Each of us will therefore be able to visit one person when we go home, and the other when they go home. How weird is that... especially considering the great distance across the world that we will be moving?

How the View of the World Changes

I know that many of you who are reading this are going to know what I'm talking about: as soon as you learn that you are going to be teaching a certain class, the way that you view the world changes. How can you incorporate things that you know or see into your curriculum? How are you going to set up your course? If you were a student, what material would you want to know and how would be the best way to learn it?

This has now happened to me. Now, I've always had in the back in my mind the knowledge that I will eventually be teaching S & P. So that's taken care of: lots of examples and personal anecdotes for that one. But it turns out that one of the courses that I will be responsible for is Research Methods. Seeing as I haven't taken a research methods course since 1994/95, I only have a fuzzy recall about the actual content that one learns at this point of education. So for the past several weeks, I've been wondering: what am I going to teach?

Yesterday, after a conversation with Kevin, I have an idea. Well, Kevin gave me the idea, when he was hollering praises of Latex.

"Latex is awesome," he said. "I wish someone had forced me to learn it as an undergrad".

Thus my first course requirement was born: all students must submit documents as latex pdfs. This may seem like an unreasonable request, however, taking into consideration that:
a) Latex is freeware and available for all platforms
b) The learning curve of Latex can be steepened by supplying pre-formed templates, and
c) Many other sciences (eg. Physics, Computer Sciences) require all documents to be written in Latex,
I think this is a brilliant. It also eliminates all of the problems that people have with different formats of paper (how to adhere to APA formatting, for example), because it is built into the latex template.

Latex is also a great program because it teaches logic. A WORD PROCESSING program that teaches LOGIC.

Brilliant.