I have accepted the fact that this will be an off-kilter semester. On the one hand, my sinus infection and my more recent case of the infamous H1N1 variant of the Influenza A have really thrown a wrench in my ability to keep up with work, which I'm sure will have an impact on my academic performance.

On the other hand, I have two classes I really enjoy and two that I could live without. As anyone who has ever read this blog probably knows, one of those two dreadful courses is my econometrics course. It's a subject I'm very interested in, but the professor is so awful he could make a class about eating pound cake painful.

I've also come to develop some negative feelings toward my intermediate macroeconomics course. I'm almost positive I received a low B on the first midterm, though that's really all my fault. In the first place, I had what can only be described as a fear-of-lack-of-time-induced panic attack about halfway through the exam that robbed me of my ability to do perform fairly basic mathematical operations, like the ability to take a derivative. Nor did it help my ability to remember various macroeconomic "relationships." In the second place, rather than focus my time on understanding the fairly basic models set forth Mankiw's macro textbook, which is the assigned text for the class, I spent my time deciphering Robert Solow's much more complicated, but fundamentally different, original growth model. Knowing how households affect the economy's long run growth path really doesn't help on an exam where the model doesn't even distinguish between laborers and the rest of population. I suppose one must learn to walk before learning to run, but the depth (or lack thereof) of the models in Mankiw's text make it feel more like being required to learn how to babble before learning to speak.

More than that, though, I've come to the more general conclusion that macroeconomics really has very little value, especially when compared to microeconomics. Even the most complicated, most cutting-edge, most whiz-bang macroeconomic models are still pretty terrible at prediction, which, to me, seems like the whole point of coming up with a model.

I continue to enjoy real analysis, despite the insane workload. I find I have a strong preference for the more abstract sorts of work I do in real analysis than the sorts of calculations that I did in most earlier math courses. Computation has never been my strongest suit; it's better left to computers.

Likewise, my history course on the French Enlightenment is a treat. We're just starting Rousseau's Emile, the first book of which contains so much erroneous science it makes my head spin. I have to keep reminding myself that at the time of Emile's publication many people dismissed Pasteur's famous germ theory. Of course, the book is about education anyway, so it doesn't make a tremendous amount of difference.

Looking forward, the one highlight of this otherwise bipolar semester is my trip to Cambridge, England for debate in just a few weeks. I'm sure many, many photos will go up on Flickr.