Reading student evaluations is always an interesting thing to do. Sometimes, you get insightful comments from students that help to spur new ideas for you. Other times, students say nice things and thank you for your efforts. And then there are the other times. There are the times when you have contradictory comments, like "He goes into too much detail on the calculations" and "He needs to go into more detail on the calculations." There are the times you get comments like, "He never talked about this" even though you talked about it several times throughout the semester. And then there is the category of comments that just make you shake your head. I've seen a lot of them, but this semester I got a couple new ones:
- "Be less strict on the spelling when he is grading the homework."
- "Quiz answers shouldn't be shown after the quiz at the beginning of class, because it brings the mood down when you know you got them wrong."
So now it's time to move into summer mode. This summer will be quite a bit like last summer. I've got a lot of projects and not a lot of time. I have about 3 trips planned in a span of about 5 weeks. One is a weekend trip to see family (celebrating birth and birthdays), then two weeks in Mexico (Science Center and youth camp), and then one week in Santa Barbara (InterVarsity retreat). And after that, it's only a few weeks until the start of the next semester. But all of this means that there's not a whole lot of work that's going to get done in July. And so I need to accelerate my work leading up to that time.
The first project is for us to finish our search for a couple new math lecturers. The search is still ongoing, so I can't say much about it. I can say that we're moving faster than any other search I've been a part of, and that I'm feeling pretty optimistic that we'll hit our deadline of having a recommendation by the end of May.
The next project I've got is being a part of a No-Cost Textbook initiative with the other math faculty. We spent a lot of time a few years ago to create a pretty good math course, but we were relying on a program that kind of disappeared on us. I looked them up today, and it seems that they've relaunched as something a little bit different from what it used to be. But we're probably not going back in that direction. A lot of the work I'm doing for this is going to be making pre-class videos. I've already started working on these videos. I've got two or three of them (out of maybe 12) in a mostly final form.
There's some other work to do, too. Most of that is just checking in with the other faculty to make sure we're all on the same page in terms of our learning outcomes and just making sure that the quality of work is sufficient (checking for silly errors and that sort of thing).
My third project is the pre-class videos for MATH 127. I've been teaching this class for the last year, and I've come to the conclusion that this is the one class that I teach consistently that needs the most work. I have a good set of notes and problems to work on, but the students need more. The pre-class videos will hopefully bridge the gap a little bit and allow me a little more in-class time to work on practice problems. The long term goal is to have a flipped classroom, but I don't think I'll have quite enough done by the end of the summer to do that. I've got about 25 classes, and each class as 3-5 videos, which means I need to make around 100 videos to have a complete set. So I'm pretty sure I won't have that all done by the start of the Fall semester. But I'm going to do as much as I can and just see where things end up. The good news is that I've at least got them roughly scripted out, so I've at least got a jump start on the work.
There are a couple other things that need to get done. We're still working on that math conference that we're hoping to run at the start of November. My next steps are to have some meetings with some people to make sure that we're on the calendar and that we've got all of the groundwork laid out so that we know what we're expected to do. There's going to be a lot of coordination going on, so this is going to be one of those checklist activities where I just need to make a list of things to do and keep checking it to make sure that it's moving forward.
We also have some changes to our degree program that we've got to work on. It should be mostly done at this point, but we need to interface a bit with the School of Education. The goal is to allow students to have a double major in both math and math education, and we just need to make sure that the programs are compatible with each other to allow students to graduate in 4 years. After all of those conversations are done, the rest is just paperwork.
I'm also changing offices. All of the math faculty are moving back into the Dawson building, which is a bit like going to my first home at NSC. I will be next door to the office I shared with three other faculty. We're also looking at a much larger transition for that space. We don't want it to be a "math hell" that students resent going to, so we're going to try to do things that show ourselves to be supportive to students. One idea that's on the table is a math drop-in tutoring space. We also might have a place for some board games and puzzles that students can borrow and play. I've also got a request in for a 3D printing nook, that we can hopefully draw in some more interest to that course.
And somehow, this all fits into the next seven weeks. Or at least, mostly fits. I'll have some time on the back end and a couple in-between weeks to try to cram in a few extra hours of work into those things.
Leadership Las Vegas is coming to a close. We had our second to last session this last Friday. This one was on gaming and tourism. We had breakfast up in a 60th floor of the Cosmopolitan, looking down on the Bellagio fountains and with a great view of the strip. (Note: A Senior Vice President of the organization insisted that we not call it the "Cosmo"). There was a lot of interesting stuff that happened that day, including a conversation with some of the security people. Apparently, facial recognition at the casino level is just around the corner. It's both interesting and creepy. They're doing it with their current surveillance systems, which is pretty impressive because it means they're doing IDs with roughly data that's probably only 100 by 100 pixels.
We also had a little "cooking" challenge in the middle of the day. They put us in random teams of about 6, and they gave us pre-cooked meats, breads, and other pantry items, plus we were supposed to use the "secret ingredients" of sherry vinegar, mustard, radish, and cajun seasoning. And I have to admit that I feel a little disappointed because I could have done better. Oh well. It was fun, and next time I have such an opportunity I'll have a little more experience under my belt.
I'm teaming up with one the pastors at church to do lead a "Theology and Coffee" community group for a few Saturdays during summer. I've really enjoyed working through the material that he's picked out. It starts with reading through a speech by Dr. Mark Labberton (president of Fuller Seminary), and then a selection of five chapters from the IVPress book "Still Evangelical" (which was edited by Labberton). There's a lot of stuff there that boldly tries to speak into an Evangelical culture that is shifting around and trying to reconcile its identity with what has happened in politics over the last couple years. It will be a challenging discussion to be a part of, but one that I think will be very fruitful if we can have it well.
I hope to be able to structure my time this summer to get back to cooking a little bit more. Maybe I'll pick a night, like a Tuesday night, where I'm going to intentionally leave work early so that I can just spend a little time in the kitchen. Working until 6:00 or later during the week, plus board games on Saturday nights and curling on Sunday nights makes it really hard to spend intentional kitchen time. And since I've got so many projects going on, I will probably be tempted to do those long work days. So we'll see what happens.
Speaking of curling, we lost our perfect record in a spectacular fashion tonight. Fortunately, I don't think point differential is being used in determining the rankings, so it's just a loss and it doesn't matter how badly we got blown out.
A couple final notes: I have a new nephew (Jalon). This is niece/nephew #6. I'll see him soon. And some good friends are leaving Las Vegas to move to Arizona. Life keeps on happening.
