One thing that's nice about the end of the year is the number of days off I get. It starts with Nevada Day, then it's Veterans Day, then Thanksgiving, and then the end of the semester. I'm actually not feeling as if I need the break, but I'll take it.
I'm almost done with my faculty observations, which is good. Each faculty observation is about 90 minutes of observing plus another 15 minutes looking at their course syllabus and webpage, and 30-45 minutes of figuring out what exactly to write up. So all-in-all, it's about 2-2.5 hours per faculty member. And I've got a dozen faculty to deal with. So about 75% of a normal work week's worth of extra work that's on top of all the other work. But I can spread it out over several weeks, so it's not too bad. Just more work. There's always more work.
We're about a week and a half into registration for the Spring semester, and I'm kind of dreading a couple things this time around. I'm afraid that I might have made some big errors in the estimation of the number of sections of certain classes. The mistake is on the side of not putting up enough sections, which means I'm going to have to scramble around for instructors. Hopefully, I'll be able to find them. Although I've put some effort over the last year to build up some connections, I'm not sure that it's going to be enough.
On the other side of that, I'm not sure how some of our higher level classes will fill, which may leave me in position to need to cancel courses. My 3D printing course still doesn't appear to be picking up students. I don't know why. I hear from the library that students are incredibly interested in it, but they're not actually signing up for it. It's still early, so we'll see. There are a couple other courses that I'm monitoring carefully. We're really trying to push the efficiency side of things, which is really a bit scary when you're trying to launch new things.
I went to a NASA Space Grant/EPSCoR grant talk. Basically, these are two funding sources for both students and faculty to get involved in things that support NASA's goals. I came away from it somewhat disappointed because I wasn't clear if anything I've got going on can possibly qualify. But after talking with another faculty, there might be a way to get some funding to continue trying to develop the robotics/3D printing thing that I've been doing in the last year and try to further develop curriculum. I would really like to mix the two skills together and do 3D printed custom robots or something similar. Of course, it would be easier to do this when I'm not the department chair. Maybe I'll find relief from this in another 1.5 years. It's not that far away, is it?
I recently finished reading "The Power of Habit." I thought it was an incredibly insightful book. I don't know yet what types of applications it may have for me, but there are ideas floating around my head. I think I'm more interested in thinking about institutional level habits. The only ones I can directly impact are in my own department, but starting there are learning about this stuff seems to be a reasonable thing to do. So I try to look at things in terms of "Cue-Routine-Reward."
I've got a meeting at UNLV this Friday. It's an all-day meeting that has to do with remedial math. We've implemented a ton of stuff over the last year, and so we're in a great spot in terms of meeting expectations that were set. But I still have to be there all day and look at all of the data and talk about the things we're supposed to talk about. I'll probably park off campus and walk because I don't want to deal with their parking services. When I was talking to another faculty that used to be at UNLV, he told me that his parking plan was to park on the highest levels of one of the structures and just hope to not get ticketed. Parking tickets are $15, and he estimated that the frequency with which he got ticketed was small enough that it was cheaper to just get tickets and pay the fines instead of actually paying for the parking permit. It's an interesting strategy.
On the topic of UNLV parking services, I found out that a former student that's now overseas was trying to get her transcript from UNLV, but she had an unpaid ticket. The first person she talked to over the phone was insistent that she had to pay the fine in person, and that they couldn't accept payment over the phone or over the internet. After a lot of time on the phone with that person, she gave up trying to reason with her and decided to call back another day. On her second attempt, she got it taken care of quickly and easily. I'm glad that NSC doesn't have parking services to deal with right now. And I hope that when we reach the point that we do (which I'm sure will happen eventually), that we're not nearly as incompetent.
We're only a week and a half away from the annual fried turkey fest. I bought the 35 pound jug of oil from Smart and Final, and I've got the injection marinade ready to go. I'll probably buy the bird on Saturday so that it can thaw over the course of the week. It seems like we're not going to get as many people this year, or maybe people are just being slower to respond. But we're going to fry at least two turkeys no matter what. I'd really like to do three, but so far it doesn't look like it's going to happen.
I'm going to be speaking to the youth about Oaxaca a couple Sundays from now. My talk is mostly outlined, but it's not rehearsed and timed out yet, but I've got time. This will be fun, because I haven't given a talk like this in a while. The youth may be taking a Oaxaca trip either during Spring Break or immediately after the school year ends. I'm thinking about volunteering to go on that trip. I was also thinking about going to Urbana. But I probably can't do both. So I'm leaning towards the Oaxaca trip because I'd rather go back to Oaxaca in the spring or early summer than go to St. Louis in the winter.
I guess that's about it. I head back to Livermore in a couple weeks for Thanksgiving, and then that marks the final run up to finals.
