- Math 095M - I spent a lot of time building up a set of notes and exams for our new remedial math. This is one where I absolutely had to get it done before the start of the semester because other people will be using the things I was putting together. There are about 50 sets of notes for this class because it's a 5 unit class that meets 4 days a week. I also had to help the course coordinator make sure that everything was ready on her end. There are 12 sections of this class, and so the size of any problem is magnified by a factor of 12. So there's a lot of extra pressure on that one. But I'm pretty sure I got that one to a good enough place that it should be fine.
- Math 389 - This is the 3D printing course. I've got my notes ready, but nothing is tested yet. The reason why nothing is tested yet is because when I left campus on Friday, the computer lab wasn't set up yet. I'll get into that later. The upshot at this point is that I have my notes ready to go, but I have no idea what we'll be able to do. At least this class is on Friday (it only meets once a week), so there is still time for everything to be up and running, and time to try to get in there and try things out. I've put out a couple announcements to some staff and faculty that they can sit in on the course if they wanted. There's interest, but nobody has committed yet. I'm most interested in seeing someone from the library come, because I'd kind of like the library to invest in a 3D printer of their own so that we can have a newer 3D printer on campus. That's not an unprecedented move, as I think some libraries around the country are getting into the maker space concept.
- Math 455 - This is my experimental flipped number theory course. I watched all of the lectures and have my own set of notes for all of them. But they're not all worked out in a way that is student-ready. When working with a flipped class, you need to actually have problems and activities to fill the class time that you would normally spend presenting information. And since I'm not entirely sure how long things will take students to do, there's a lot of guesswork in terms of estimating the appropriate amount of work and a lot of time spent trying to build contingency plans for when things go either long or short. I've got myself up to the first midterm, which I think is an okay place to be.
- Math 491 - This is the Putnam seminar. I've picked some topics for the first several weeks, but I've only got notes together for the first day. It's another once a week course, so my required prep work will be spaced out a bit more. That buys me some more time.
- Spring 2016 scheduling - There were some last minute issues with the Fall 2015 scheduling and staffing because we opened up a number of extra math sections because of a spike in enrollment. I think there were 5 more math sections that we needed to cover. But they got covered, and so I was able to move on to the Spring staffing. The full time faculty are staffed and the classes are scheduled, and so it's on to staffing the part time faculty. I'm trying something new this semester, which is to put out the entire schedule for all the PTIs to see, and then have them tell me which sections they have an interest in teaching. By doing this, I'm hoping to discover combinations of schedules that I might not have considered on my own. Of course, I still need to exercise my discretion on which faculty actually teach which classes. That request went out on Friday, and I'm going to take a look at what I've got on September 1. So at least for now this is mostly a passive thing.
- Math video - This is another passive thing for me at this point. Last year, we picked up a faculty to do animation for us, and I've been working with her for a PSA-like math video. After working through some of the ideas with her, I think we'll have a pretty nice product. I built the script and created a preliminary audio for her earlier in the summer, and she's been working on it as her own schedule has allowed. There have been a couple other time-critical projects that have intervened, and since mine is not it got bumped. But that's okay. I just need to keep tabs on it over the next couple months to know when I need to go in to make final audio recordings and possibly make adjustments to the script.
- Winter Robotics Camp - A couple weeks ago, I met with two teachers from Coronado High School that are the faculty leads on the robotics club. We are interested in partnering with them to bring their camp out to our campus and start building a good relationship with them for potential future projects. So we met for a couple hours and showed them the various spaces we had, and they are looking forward to trying to go forward. During the meeting, it came out that they were looking to start a hacker team for a high school hacking competition, and but because the school district locks down their internet access pretty tightly, they needed to find an offsite facility to use. Our IT guy has given preliminary approval subject details that we will know about later in the semester. The school district hasn't started yet, so we just need to wait for them to get their information together right now.
- Conference attendance - I need to decide fairly quickly whether I want to attend a STEM conference in November or I want to go to the Joint Math Meetings in January. Interestingly, they're both in Seattle (a place I've never been), so I can't use that to help me to tip the scales. I'm leaning towards the STEM conference because it's something different. I've got a few weeks to decide, but I think that one is going to sneak up on me faster than I think it will.
- Math majors - Our new degree program has launched, and we've already got 7 majors. I was only expecting to have about half of that by this point, so we're ahead of the game. But this means that I need to start thinking about building the culture of our math majors. That's another type of communication structure and student mentorship and guidance that needs to be created. And that's just more work to do.
But that's probably way more school stuff than anyone actually would care to read, so let's move on to church stuff. I'm still putting in time working on the missions projects. I've put a lot of time into the interactive missions kiosk concept. It will take a little bit of imagination at this point, but the basic idea is like this: Imagine in the lobby that there's an inviting area near the Basek Cafe that has a large touch screen computer monitor. When it's not in use, the screensaver is showing pictures from previous missions trips and such. But then when you wake it up, it takes you to the following webpage: Missions @ Life Springs. From here, you can just explore. The pages aren't completely built yet, but a couple places I'd recommend visiting are the "How Can I get Involved?" link and the "Oaxaca Science Camp" link under the "Other Activities" link.
For anyone who has the time to browse around, I'm actually interested in your feedback. Obviously, since not all the pages have been built, there are some places that are going to be missing information. I also want to include more pictures to make it brighter and more colorful. So you're going to have to simply imagine those things. I'm more interested in the categories and navigation. If you had a question about something, do you feel like there's an answer that's easy to find? If you were just exploring, do you think there would be enough to keep you engaged for several seconds or several minutes? Can you think of a better organizational scheme? And for the areas that look like they're mostly complete, are there any glaring typos or errors?
The reconstruction at church is still going. It's supposed to be done for Sunday, September 13 to kick off the new ministry year. I'm hopeful that they'll get there in time, but we will just have to wait and see if they make it. The parts that have been finished look great. I think it will certainly feel like a new, more modern place. The jury is still out for how the stadium seats will feel when it's all said and done.
We had our first small group "super huddle" (which is what we call our meetings with all group leaders) today. I'm feeling optimistic about our organizational practices. We've set forth a lot of good principles about relationship building, communication, and accountability, and so now that these things have been declared, we need to follow-through and stick with them.
That's most of what has been occupying my time in the last couple weeks. I got some board games in, and I think we're going to brew some beer soon. I'm working on my Spanish with Duolingo, trying to consistently put in about 20-30 minutes before bed and build up my vocabulary a bit more. I'm sure there are a couple other projects lying around, but one other one I definitely want to work on is the "Don't Let Your Head Explode Due to All the Projects You've Got Going on" project. I'll let you know how that one's going in a few weeks.
