The year of snake is coming! In my memory, I'm standing in my grandparents' home in San Francisco, where there was a Chinese calendar with various descriptions of what the Zodiac signs mean. After walking up the stairs to the front door, you turned left into the living room and the right into the dining room, and the calendar is right there on that corner. But it's been so long that I could be jumbling together all sorts of memories, and that calendar may not have actually existed, or perhaps it existed but it was really on another wall (perhaps in the kitchen where my memory is putting some sort of cork board on the wall), or even that the calendar existed, but my memory has put it in entirely the wrong place (it was not even at grandma and grandpa's house at all!). There's one thing I know for certain, and it's that I have absolutely no idea what characteristics the Chinese Zodiac associates with the year of the snake.
The semester is 20% over. No, I'm not counting. I had to think for a bit to realize that we just finished week 3. The semester has been going pretty well. My classes are small again. My upper division classes are less than 10 (which is a little below where they were last year), but the surprise is that my College Algebra course is very small. I've only got about 8 students in that class, but the College Algebra class that meets right before mine is sitting at around 30. I don't really have a good reason for why it happened this way. Maybe I have a reputation for being a tough instructor, and everyone's scared? Or perhaps it's just at a bad time for the students this semester. Either way, I'm not concerned.
The textbook project is coming along. The main text is completely done, and I'm in the process of writing problems. After I write the problems, I need to write a forward/introduction for each textbook, and then finally send it back to the student workers for a complete proof-reading. This will be the last chance to check that all the problems match up correctly, and to find all of the sign errors and other small mistakes that happen when writing up the algebra. The target deadline is the end of March (though the official deadline is closer to the beginning of May). That's after Spring Break, and I'm expecting to do a huge push during that week to finish everything. From there, I have to write new instructor notebooks, new exams, and do several other things that are necessary to make the class work, and these are just a few of the reasons why I don't want to wait until the official deadline.
We're moving forward with trying to implement WebWork, which is the free online math homework program. This is a project that (fortunately) doesn't need to be moved on right away. It is also something that we've received permission to implement more student labor to develop it. I actually think that this will be a fantastic project for both us and the students. But I'll think about that one a couple months from now.
On Friday, I went to Reno for a one day conference. I don't like getting up at 4:30 in the morning to get on a plane, and I'm glad that I don't have to do these very often. I presented a 45 minute talk on our remedial math data for one of the breakout sessions. I think it went pretty well. The main speakers were okay, but none of them blew me away with new ideas or great insights.
And I've been recommended. It's not official, so that's all I have to say about that for now.
Our church is starting 40 Days in the Word, a Rick Warren campaign built around devotional forms of Bible study. I think it will be a good thing for the church. It looks like our small groups will grow slightly, but I think the real benefit will be to have more opportunities to identify and build experiences for our current leaders.
That's about it for now.
