It seems that this year, the end of the semester is further away than it should be. Maybe it's because Thanksgiving is the second earliest possible day (it's always the fourth Thursday of November). Maybe it's because this semester I'm teaching my first evening class in a long time and I've forgotten how fatigue catches up to you when you don't get home until 8 PM four days a week. Maybe it's that I'm teaching five classes instead of the usual four. Or maybe it's because I'm busier because of Leadership Las Vegas. Or maybe it's just that the daylight savings shift was last week and my body is taking its time adjusting to darkness arriving at 5 PM. I don't know. One way or another, a month from now, it will be over.
My MATH 127 course had their second exam, and it went horribly. The class average as 18.3/41 = 45%. I normally like the average to be about 75%. I had actually thought the average was around 60% based on just a quick skim of the numbers. But those really low scores brought that down much further than I had estimated. I'm still not sure what to make of this. It's certainly possible that the test was too hard. But we had gone over a lot of problems on the review that were similar to the ones that were on the test. And students were making mistakes that they really shouldn't be making on a normal basis. I've also considered the possibility that the first couple questions were just a little bit harder than average, and that threw them off for the entire test. Because I've always been an academically-minded person, I am less prone to being thrown off by that sort of thing. But I know that the majority of our students aren't like that, and this can just cause them to freak out. I had talked with one of the students before the class after the exam, and she said that she got to the end up page 2 (out of 8) and looked up at the clock to realize that more than half the time had gone by. After that point, she couldn't concentrate because she was worried about the fact that she didn't have enough time.
I created assignments to allow the students to earn up to 2/3 of their lost points back. Basically, I'm having the both solve problems and write up explanations of their solutions. This should be hard enough to make them work for the points back while also reinforcing the things they're supposed to have learned. We'll see what happens, though. I've never tried this specific remedy for making up for low test scores. This also means that I'm going to have an extra stack of grading to do right before the end of the semester. I think future me is going to be very unhappy with this decision. But it's too late now.
My other classes are going well. I have a MATH 126 exam coming up this week. I hope it goes better. All the indications suggest that it should be fine, but I would have said the same thing going into the MATH 127 exam. We've got a review session coming up on Tuesday, and I'll hopefully get to feel that out a bit. The MATH 95M is going fine. Only about 2/3 of the students in my class moved from Unit 2 to Unit 3, but I think that's about normal. The difficulty spikes at Unit 2 and then eases off for Units 3 and 4. My CS 135 course is finishing up the lecture part of the class and moving into their final projects. I'm looking forward to what they're going to do. A couple of them could potentially put together some really interesting things. And my MATH 455 course continues to be easy to teach. I had built in a buffer day in case we had gotten bogged down in some of the content. But after talking to the students (all two of them), they've agreed to take that buffer day and move everything up by a class to take the exam early. This will help them to not have as many exams stacked up on the same day. So that's going to give me a bit of breathing room for grading during finals week.
I went to the Dia de los Muertos celebration at Springs Preserve a couple weekends ago. I was told that it was one of their best events of the year, and I can believe it. The food was good (which is perhaps the most important thing). I also learned a random craft, which is making tissue paper marigolds. There were also altars scattered throughout the back area, which is a traditional thing that I had never actually seen before. Basically, they were remembrances of relatives who had died, so it was both solemn and celebratory.
Besides that... I'm not sure that much else happened. It feels like a week of just focusing in on getting work done. One of my work colleagues had a dessert recipe that she was struggling with, so I took a shot at it. And it didn't go quite right for me, either. The part that didn't work right was the meringue. It was an Italian meringue except with a lot more sugar than normal. It was supposed to roll out and then roll up. But it was too stiff the first time and too marshmallow-y the second time. It's been a while since I've played with desserts. At least, that's my excuse. I'll probably try again in December after the semester is over. Or maybe when I'm procrastinating instead of grading finals.
I've got family coming into town for Thanksgiving week. They should be arriving on Saturday night and/or Sunday afternoon. This will be the first Thanksgiving that we've done out here instead of in California. So that should be fun. Because of my evening classes, I'm going to be able to slide out during the day to spend time with them, but I'll be missing out on dinner and evening things.
We'll be starting the process of reviewing applications for the new math professor soon. I'm curious to see how that will go. It will be very helpful to have another professor here to help us continue to build and grow things.
I've got to start thinking a little more carefully about next semester. I'm going to lose the week before the semester because I'll be in Oaxaca again. There's going to be a rough transition there because I get back from Oaxaca on Thursday and go straight into an all-day Leadership Las Vegas event on Friday, and then classes start on Tuesday. (Monday is a holiday, which gives me just a tiny extra buffer if I need it.) I've already got 14 students for my 3D printing course, which means it's going to run. That will help my course load to balance out because the MATH 301 (Introduction to Proofs) and MATH 314 (History of Math) are probably going to be in the 5-7 student range. All I need is for my MATH 126 class to be a comfortable low 30s and everything should be fine.
I guess that's all. Life is busy.
