Although the clock will have an extra hour of time added to it, I'm not sure how my body is going to respond. Will I sleep that extra hour or will I wake up on my internal clock? Maybe I should just stay up an extra hour and treat it like a normal night of sleep. Actually, my sleep clock is probably all messed up anyway because I took a nap at around 5 PM tonight.
Why would I be taking a nap at 5 PM? Today was our first ever math conference at NSC, which we've called AXIOM (Annual Xonference for Increasing Opportunities in Mathematics). We put in a lot of work over the last few months to bring it together. It ended up with right around 30 people (which was our target number), and I'm pleased with how it all came together. We probably over-planned and over-worked it a bit, but that's okay. This was intended to be a learning experience for us as we try to grow it out into a larger conference moving forward. We had all the participants fill out a feedback form, but we won't look at that until next week. I arrived on campus at about 7:45 and I left at around 4. So it ended up being basically a 6-day work week for me, which is why I ended up napping for an hour this evening.
I feel as though I ought to have more thoughts about the conference, but maybe I'm just done thinking about it for a little bit. So in other news, my precalculus courses had their midterm this week as well. I've graded one class completely and I'm halfway through the second one. This was definitely a rough exam for them all. I really need to conceptualize a way of helping them work with fractions (which is something that's a bit embarrassing to say since I teach college, but that's the reality for these students). It's really hard to fix over a decade of failed mathematics instruction in a single semester. I don't know how to change such deeply rooted mindsets and approaches to thinking. It's such a challenging problem that is going to probably require a breakthrough on my side to help them get past it.
And now that I have the conference behind me, I can start to transition to thinking about the next things that I have coming up. On Monday, I'm going to be meeting with the team of students I'm taking to Oaxaca for the medical trip in January. I need to start doing some work on some science activities. This year, my hope is to bring down some posters that explain the activities in Spanish. These posters can then also continue to exist on the walls of the science center, which will theoretically be worked on before we get there. I've got one activity that will be significantly different than previous ones. When I was talking with one of my visual media colleagues, I noticed that she had some old-school animation things. Among them was a zoetrope. This is a round container with slits in the side that spins around. If you look through the slits, you see an animation. This led us to talking about an animation wheel, which is the same concept, but can be built from just heavy paper. It's the sort of art/science project that can easily fill a lot of time and leave kids being imaginative while also having a solid scientific lesson (persistence of vision and the perception of motion).
I also need to start focusing a bit on my classes for next semester. In order to make the changes I want to make for the computer science course, I'm going to need to do quite a bit of work in advance. While I'm comfortable with programming, I'm not comfortable enough with teaching it that I feel I can just do things on the fly. So I'm needing to work out some more detailed notes than I normally have. I will be using some ideas from the last time I taught the course, but there will simply be things that need to change in order to fit the data science focus that we really want to have. A lot of those things will come in world of data processing and visualization.
A little bit of house stuff got done in the last couple weeks. I moved everything out of the office, painted it, and moved everything back in again. That ended up taking about a week, mostly because I did it a little bit at a time instead of trying to set aside a single day to just work it all out. It also gave me the opportunity to reorganize my closet of stuff (stuff that includes guitar things, old computer things, electronics, robotics, science, and some older arts and crafts things from previous Mexico trips). At this point, I feel really good about the organization of the space, and I'm hoping that will become the first cat space whenever I actually get around to getting a cat.
Other stuff... We're second in our division in curling right now at 3-1. In our division, there's one team that's 3-0, and in the other division, there's a 3-0 team and a 2-1 team. So that puts us with the third best record across the entire league. I got access to DAW 104A, which will be at least a temporary 3D printing lab space. We've approved the final version of our test tube holder for manufacturing. The next step there will be to get the part machined and to get some samples to choose the mateiral. We also want to get some business students involved to try to develop a marketing plan. So that stuff should start to get exciting next semester. After talking with our Institutional Research guy, I think I need to learn R Markdown, which requires me to learn R. Also, I went to see a colleague perform Indian music at the Smith Center. It was certainly different and interesting. I'm not sure how much was the music and how much it was just that the main guy (not my colleague) was just quirky. But it was still fun to listen to.
