Well, it's not quite the middle of the semester. It's more like the one-third point of the semester. But that's close enough.
Things on campus have been busy, but good. We ground through a bunch of interviews and were ready to make an offer, but while that offer was working its way up the chain of command, the candidate emailed me to say that she was going to accept an offer somewhere else. I talked to the dean, and he immediately got on the phone to try to talk to her to see if we would be in consideration if we made her an offer. As of this moment, I do not know what's going to happen. If she doesn't accept, we'll have to reconvene the committee to see what our next plan of action will be. I'm hoping that we can steal our first choice away from whatever other position she's thinking of taking, but if her number one choice was someone else, we're not likely going to be able to close that deal. So it's a wait-and-see moment for us.
The third grade curriculum project is moving again. After a long delay, we've found a school that is interested in working with us and is using the particular curriculum that we have decided was the most likely to be successful. Strangely (or not), the most common math curriculum in the Clark County School District is one that we looked at and decided was pretty awful. That created a bit of a problem because we weren't sure if we would be able to build the support mechanisms we were hoping to build if we had to work with that other curriculum. But someone in the School of Education did some legwork and got us connected to this school. They're excited; we're excited. So we've got a meeting next week with them to start the collaboration.
Something else that has popped up will be at the end of the month. There will be some middle school children coming through on a tour. I've been asked to prepare a 30-minute demo (for me to run twice). A nice little twist to this demo is that it's going to be a physics demo. I've got a couple ideas that I'm toying with in order to better engage the younger students. The theme will be something like "Falling Objects" and I'm going to try to have about 3 active demonstrations of various concepts and weave my way through it all with discussions. Once everything is set, I'll have more to say. I've got another week to work on it.
I've been spending some time looking into a online math remediation program that the state might potentially adopt. There are some new things out there, and some of them look okay. I think this is an interesting area in education, and that a lot of people are trying things. But I don't think I've seen something that feels like it's a great answer to the problem. Everything is just okay. Well, that's not quite true. There's a lot of bad stuff out there (like the third grade curriculum options).
Over the last month, I had a couple new ideas for activities that would be good math projects that can (hopefully) be worked into a classroom environment. The first was the Coke taste test that I did at the Super Bowl party (and alluded to in my previous post). The setup was to pour four tastings of Coke, two cane sugar and two corn syrup. The taster's job is to match up the Cokes. It was pretty fun and easy to set up. With the small sample size that I had, it seems that there's no difference for most people. But there was one person who thought the difference was absolutely clear (and got it right). It might be interesting to combine this with a super-taster testing.
The second idea was to use either Madden or NBA2K games to simulate seasons and then try to have students predict the outcomes of the playoffs, or find discover other artifacts of the game. For example, is there a home field advantage? (We know it exists in reality, but does that carry over into the game?) Can we use the data from the game to create a power ranking that we can use to predict head-to-head wins and losses? I've even thought about setting it up like a sports betting operation, where some students are the bookies and other students are the bettors. There are lots of possibilities, but all of it will require quite a bit of background work.
Things at church are rolling along. We made the jump to two services, and it seems that both services are sufficiently well attended. I haven't seen the first service yet, but when I work the sound booth in a couple weeks I'll get to see it for myself. I'm starting to work on a short training for our small group leaders. It's actually a split project between Daniel and myself. I'm going to do more of a teaching and he's going to be leading a discussion on what I taught. The main goal is to bring a clearer vision for what it means for our small groups to be successful. We're taking a page from Andy Stanley and defining "spiritual maturity" through the deepening of three realms of relationships. The first is our relationship with God, the second is our relationships in our small groups, and the third is our relationships with non-Christians. It's a simple yet robust framework, which is a great type of framework to have.
Our Oaxaca team is coming along. Our first meeting was primarily about setting the detail of travel dates, making sure everyone had their passport paperwork in process (or ready to go), and getting the fundraising rolling. That trip is coming up quickly (one month from now). This upcoming training meetings will be more about team building.
I also have a meeting with Pastor Roger and Daniel tomorrow to talk through those books we read back in December. I'm looking forward to that one, too.
I've been watching a lot of Olympics coverage. And Thursday night basketball has started up again. I guess that's about it.
