Six weeks to go...

This felt like a grand revelation when it drifted through my mind today. I'm not sure why. Things are going well, though I've got a little bit of fatigue kicking in. Yes, I know that I had spring break last week. Just for fun, I looked back at my previous posts to see my spring break comments:

2008: My spring break has been more work-ful than I had hoped, but going in three days is better than five.
2009: I'm hoping to get all my notes together for the rest of the semester.
2010: I'm feeling that end-of-year slump coming on. Yes, last week was Spring break, but it doesn't matter.
2011: Things continue to be busy, but I did get to relax a little bit this week. I worked four half-days on campus and another half-day at home.

This is a 2010-ish spring break feeling. Things are going well, but I can feel things dragging.

The math search came to a close this week, and we made our offer to the candidate. This is good for me, as it will be nice to have a math colleague floating around the building again. I know that he's going to need some time to transition, but that's okay. My responsibilities are going to change (again) as I'm going to have to take more of a mentoring position than I've done in the past. But I'm looking forward to it.

A couple other projects got pushed through recently. We're re-numbering our remedial math classes so that we fail fewer students without changing the modular delivery. Instead of awarding two "A"s (at the end of module 3 and 6), we'll be awarding three "A"s (at the end of modules 2, 4, and 6). We've also got an incentive program set up where students who move all the way through all three classes in 6 modules gets the equivalent of a free class plus some bookstore vouchers. This will hopefully add to the number of things driving students forward.

I'm starting to look ahead at summer projects this week. The chief among these is my tenure application. There is a slightly ominous feel to the words in the promotion and tenure document: "All full time tenure track faculty must apply for tenure no later than the beginning of their sixth academic year." It seems like it's hitting me a little harder than it should. This might be because I'm in that slump and it feels like it's "another thing" that just landed on my plate... or it might be because I'm about to condense the last five years of my professional life into a single document that will have a significant impact the rest of my professional life.

There's a sense in which I feel very comfortable that I should get through this without too much difficulty. I've worked hard at what I believe and have been told are all the right things, and have accomplished the goals that were laid out in front of me by myself and others at the institution. But this is still a high stakes event. If I do not receive tenure, I will have one more year at NSC, and then I'll need to find a job somewhere else. It sounds harsh, but that's how the academic world works. This is also a long and slow process. I file my papers by August 15 this year, and then I don't find out until sometime in the Spring.

As for my other summer projects, I've got three different things, all related to remediation. One project is a behind-the-scenes move, as I need to create a full rubric for all of the tests. This will help promote uniformity of grading and fairness. The second is to create short lecture videos for the classes. The idea behind this is that we want to extend the learning opportunities to beyond just the classroom setting. The third is to go through the process of revising my current textbook and extending it to cover the entire remediation. This is because it bothers me that the elementary/intermediate algebra textbook costs about $175. This last project has Fall 2013 as its target.

Moving away from school stuff, we've got the Senior Pastor candidate coming through this week at church. I'm excited to meet him, and I'm looking forward to what he's going to do. I'm mostly hopeful that he will be able to establish a clear vision and a sense of leadership. From what I've heard, I like the types of things he's bringing, such as aligning small group curriculum with the sermons (a novel concept!). But I really see his primary work being a teaching/mentoring process for the elders. He's got more or less a blank slate of people looking for a leader to follow, and I hope he can give them a structure that will help them be successful as leaders.

In the meantime, our small group is going to continue on our own path of studies. We're starting "Celebration of Discipline" by Richard Foster. This will be a good change of pace. I remember reading it (or at least parts of it) in grad school at some point. I've gotten through about 3/4 of it, and I should hopefully finish this weekend. Then I get to go back and lead our small group through it with the help of the study guide that the Foster put together.

EOS CCA FTC / NSC ABC / IRS / PSC

Another couple weeks have floated by. I feel like I've been slightly adrift over the last month or so as I came off the busy period into a resting period, and the pendulum is starting to swing back towards being busy. Strangely (or perhaps not), I feel better when I'm busier. I just don't like the level of busy to go overboard to the point where I'm fatigued. Hopefully, the rest of the semester will find the right balance.

My year-long credit battle rolls on. I thought that it would have been cleared up by this point, but it's not. I've gone through another round of calling the initial creditor and confirming it was fraud and then contacting the credit bureau and discovering that nothing has changed. It appears that the broken link is the collection agency EOS CCA. I confirmed this by calling them and finding that they are still considering the debt to be in active collections.

So I filed a report with the FTC, and we'll see where things go from here. In the meantime, AT&T is sending me another copy of the letter than they sent out over a year ago, and I'm going to forward this (along with the previous two letters from AT&T) to Experian with a letter explaining the situation and the fact that I've filed a complaint with the FTC. I'm not sure if their processes allow them to remove the report (as I believe that they are limited to contact with the collection agency), but it's worth a shot. It's not like things could get "worse" somehow from sending them another letter.

I've got a couple new projects going on at NSC. The first is a student math project. It starts with a simple logic puzzle:

Three different numbers are chosen at random, and one is written on each of three slips of paper. The slips are then placed face down on the table. The objective is to choose the slip upon which is written the largest number. Here are the rules: You can turn over any slip of paper and look at the amount written on it. If for any reason you think this is the largest, you're done; you keep it. Otherwise you discard it and turn over a second slip. Again, if you think this is the one with the biggest number, you keep that one and the game is over. If you don't, you discard that one too. And then you're stuck with the third. The chance of getting the highest number is one in three. Or is it? Is there a strategy by which you can improve the odds?


Once this problem is solved, it opens the door for all sorts of interesting problems. What if you knew that the slips of paper must contain an integer between 1 and 10? Or what if you get four slips of paper instead of three? I've got a few of my students playing around with variations of this, and with a little luck I might be able to get them out to the Joint Meetings in San Diego next year.

Another project that I've got going on right now is the development of a web-based program to encourage students to practice their basic arithmetic. I might have talked about the "Arithmetic Boot Camp" application that I was working on a while ago (as in, two or three years ago). If I didn't, it's basically just a timed test program designed to bring out the competitive nature of students, so that they would race against each other and try to have the best times.

I'm actually not doing any of the programming this time. We actually got some money from Verizon (yes, the phone company) to pay someone to do the programming for us. We actually got a total of $11,000 from them. The money will be split between the programming project and a general expense fund for things related to the math remediation program.

It's still in the development stage, but it's good enough for people to be playing around with it. Here's the link: decasoft.com. If you're so inclined, you can register yourself with just an ID and a password and play around. (Don't use a password that you use for important things! This is internet safety 101. Low level programs get low level passwords.) I know it's poorly organized and a little buggy, so just stick to the addition level 1 program for now. The aim is to get the fastest time possible. Good luck!

My taxes are filed for the year. I'm getting a refund similar to last year's, which is nice. I also got to claim my first royalty checks for the math textbook that I wrote last year. I'm actually in the process of reorganizing the textbook and expanding it so that it fits better with the modules that we've established. Also, I really want to get away from that crazy $175 textbook. The in-house textbook only costs the students about $25-30. I've got a stack of projects to get rolling this summer, and reworking the textbook is one of them.

Lastly, we're hopefully going to get the pastoral search committee's candidate in the next couple weeks. Apparently, he had some sort of health thing he wanted to deal with before deciding if he would come out here, and he got through that. I'm looking forward to things moving forward, as I'm getting quite annoyed with the game of sermon roulette that we play from week to week. The last guy actually scared me a little bit. He ended both sermons with a special message from God. It's the sort of thing that makes me shudder a little bit. Both times, it was awkward, and the second one was long and a little embarrassing. But soon (I hope), this will all be over and maybe the church can get back itself back on track. It's been a long time since I've had what feels like a "normal" church experience. The week to week inconsistencies and the general lack of vision and direction is really taking its toll.