The last couple weeks have been busy. I think I say that all the time. But hopefully next year I won't be teaching as much overload and so it won't be quite as busy. Although I'm not as fatigued as I was coming out of the time change, I'm still looking forward to the downshift at the end of the semester.
My MATH 126 and MATH 127 courses had their second midterm. I've already graded the MATH 126 exams and the scores seem pretty normal there. I haven't graded the MATH 127 ones, and that was the class that got beat up last semester. I feel as though the students were better prepared this time around, so I hope the scores are stronger. But at this point, I just have to wait and see. (And by wait, I mean wait until Monday because I'm not grading over the weekend.)
The ART 240 course had a guest lecturer for a couple days. I met a guy that runs a 3D printing shop out here, and he came in to teach the class how to use a program called Fusion 360. He had a pretty nice toy robot that he designed, and he showed the students the steps he took to create the design. And after that week, the project for the students is to make their own robots using the same techniques but implementing their own designs. It's fun because I also learned a few new things about the program and have some ideas for how I might teach a couple things differently in the future.
The upper division courses are going fine. I really don't feel as though I have a lot to say about them. Those both seem perfectly normal.
One of the reasons I'm going to be taking Spring Break to get work done is because we're about to launch into a couple projects. We've got the no-cost textbook initiative, which we're going to start on in April. We're also going to look at hosting a local math conference for high school teachers and students, and that's another thing we're going to try to get outlined in April (to run in Fall 2018). I've also got my own MATH 127 videos that I'm planning to make (I have 50-ish pages of notes for that one). So there's going to be some pretty hefty work on the curriculum development front this summer.
I also want to finish the data science and machine learning courses I started a while ago on Udemy. This work will be in preparation for our data science minor. I know some stuff, but I feel as though I need to know more stuff. Even though our new faculty member will be bringing in some background of his own, I don't want to dump the whole thing on him. I need to be able to help support that. Along the same lines, I had a meeting today with the data science guys at the Southern Nevada Health District. They seem interested in working with us, and they expressed a general interest of building out their community connections. From the conversations, it seems that they've spent a lot of time in the last couple years getting a lot of their data hygiene worked out, so that now they have good daily processes to get the data from the various sources into their data warehouse. So they have some interest in creating predictive models and that sort of thing. It was a good conversation and I'm looking forward to the types of things we'll be able to do with them as we start to build out our program.
I received my first award at NSC for longevity. I gambled on Las Vegas and things seem to be working out for me so far. Ten years. A lot has happened in that time. Survived the recession. Revised the remedial mathematics program a couple times to improve student outcomes. First tenured math faculty. Working on building out a math program. Starting up a science center and trying to start an annual medical mission trip with students. Still dreaming of a 3D printing nook. We'll see what the next ten years bring my way. Maybe some day I'll read back through the last 300+ posts I've made since I've moved out here and see how my perspectives have changed over the years. But probably not. I don't think it will be an interesting read.
I got to go on a tour of the T-Mobile Arena today. It was pretty neat to see the different parts of the arena, including hanging out in the visitor's bench and in the suite that costs $1,000,000 per year. That's a place I'm probably never going to see again. The operations guy also told us about seats that they can sometimes sell for as much as $10,000 for a concert. It kind of reminds me of those Travel Channel specials where they talk about the high roller suites that people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on for just a couple nights. And then there's me, someone willing to temporarily change banks because one of them is offering me $500 to open a checking account and a savings account (with some minor stipulations). As an academic, I'm not really expecting huge pay increases over the course of my career. So I'll never be one of the people who can do that sort of thing. And I'm okay with that.
I haven't done as much work for the science center as I hoped I would have done by now. But that's going to get ramped up pretty quickly this weekend and over the course of next week. I have a finalized equipment list and I just need to look up item numbers and prices to turn it into an estimated budget. The price of everything is going to change because we're going to source as much as we possibly can from Mexico. It will be easier to do that than to buy it in the US and figure out how to ship it there. The target date for the move-in is the first week of July.
And then there's curling. There's a curling club out here, and I'm starting to get connected to it. I'm not sure if it's something I'm going to keep on doing, but it's certainly fun and not unreasonably-priced. ($20-25 for a couple hours on the ice.) So that's something new that I'm doing now.
