It always starts with Nevada Day. This is the 10th time I've celebrated it. I'm still amused by it as a strange Nevadan oddity. But more practically, it announces the beginning of the holiday season. The next two months are going to be full of eating and activities around eating. This year we kick off a little bit earlier as our annual friends-of-friends turkey fry will be a week earlier than usual. I bought a new burner because the other one wasn't working as well as it used to. It was struggling to get up to temperature and stay there. It could have been just a regulator issue, but I've also had that setup since 2010 (back when I fried my first turkey), so maybe it was time for an upgrade. Spending $90 on something that should probably last me another 5-7 years (or even longer) seems like a reasonable investment. Plus, fried turkey needs to happen the right way, and it's hard to do that if it's hard to keep the oil hot.
The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur. I didn't even realize until I looked at the previous post that it's been 3 weeks already since the last time I posted anything. My brain told me that it had only been two weeks, but I trust the computers more than my brain at this point when it comes to times and dates of events. Most of the big problems that I was dealing with earlier in the semester have been taken care of. This gave me some space to start in on some long-term planning projects, like figuring out things related to our lab usage in preparation for the new lab which should (hopefully) be ready by the end of the semester. I've also been working through the long-term planning schedule again to try to feel out a few more of the details that had not yet been worked out.
I'm also starting to think about my classes for next semester. I've got MATH 301 coming around again (the proof-writing class), and I'm thinking about ways of expanding it a bit. One thing I'm definitely adding is a few Excel exercises for the students to work on. It's a strange situation when students are working their way through upper division courses, but they can't do simple functions with a spreadsheet. Since I am the one teaches that gateway class, it's my job to fix that. The good news is that we're not expecting high level Excel functionality from them, and so I'm hoping that a few assignments with minimal written instructions will be sufficient for them. They seem to do okay when I set the up on LaTeX using that scheme, so I don't anticipate any major problems with Excel. I also am shifting some content out of the course to allow for more writing projects. I really need to get an assignment or two in front of them that are long enough to warrant a rough draft and a final draft. While the writing I'm seeing is better than it was a couple years ago, there's still more improvement that can be done, and so I need to work on that.
I'm scheduled to teach a second class as an independent study, which is the second semester of Real Analysis. However, it doesn't look like any students are actually intending to take that course, which means I've stopped preparing for it. Initially, I thought there might be one or two students, but I think after some further advising they decided that it's probably not in their best interest to take it. I don't feel bad about this at all, because Real Analysis is just a really tough course. I'm also glad to not have to prep that course right now. I've never taught it before, and while I'm comfortable enough with the material it's not something I can really do on the fly.
There has been a recent influx of students that have interest in board games. It started with a student in my MATH 126 class, who was actually stopping by my office to get some help with stuff, and then saw the collection of board games. She showed up at the next meeting, borrowed the game for the weekend, and then brought friends to the meeting after that. So in a couple weeks, the size of the club basically doubled. They are all younger students, which gives me some hope for the longevity of the group (the existing members are graduating at the end of the year). So we'll see what happens.
Things are in a bit of a holding pattern with the Oaxaca stuff. I need to send out another email tomorrow to update the faculty on some of the information about it. We have positive feedback from the leaders in Eloxochitlán and the dimensions of a room that we're likely to use. I'm meeting with Dave on Friday to do a bit of brainstorming and to hammer out some plans for how we move forward. Also, the announcement of the winner of the Travel For Good competition is going to be on November 15. So pray, cross your fingers, light incense, or whatever you do, and we'll see if we win the money. If we don't win, there's a second run of the competition through the end of November, and I'll put together another little run of tweets and a second essay with updates about our progress and we'll see what happens on December 15.
In the last couple weeks, I've been watching a lot of machine learning tutorials on YouTube. I've still got an interest in it, but am trying to move out of the theoretical world (which came through the Stanford videos I watched earlier this year) and into the practical world. I've watched 54 out of the 57 videos that he has on machine learning, which is a lot of YouTube watching. I've found this particular video series to be especially nice because he talks and programs at the same time, so I can really get inside the logic of the ideas much more easily. Hopefully, this will mean that when I go to try to code some stuff of my own (eventually) I'll be more fluid with things.
I've switched over to listening to podcasts on my way to and from work. I've got Car Talk, This American Life, Your Move (Andy Stanley), The Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, A Way with Words, and a couple others. I think it's a good change of pace for me. Maybe I'll look for books on tape or something like that down the line. But for now, this is working well enough for me.
I guess that's all I've got this time around.
