There's one week to the end of the semester. It's been a busy semester, but a good one. Although the students aren't earning the highest grades, they've been pretty good with their attitudes and willingness to work, and those are things that can go a long, long way for them. One of the classes took their final yesterday, and the rest will take them next week.
MATH 126 went pretty well this semester. There were a couple older students that gave me some good energy and some verbal play that kept things nice and loose. The grades were basically on par with previous semesters (perhaps a little weaker). I did see that there were a good number of students that struggled with some basic things, and we tried to iron them out a bit over the semester. But watching this class made me wonder whether I needed to do some sort of broader review of algebra basics with the class, but by video (because there's not enough class time to do it in class). We may be changing textbooks to an OER (open educational resource) next Fall, which will give me a different set of videos to start with. But I still want to make some foundational videos to help create a better framework for them.
MATH 127 was the class that struggled the most. They didn't do so well on the first test, and then they really bombed the second one. But surprisingly, they kept chugging along. However, they didn't really seem to understand how to maximize the opportunities that were presented to them. On the second exam, the scores were so low that I offered to raise their score to 60% if they were to just write up the problems on the exam and score at least an 80% on that write-up. Only a few students did that. I do have a number of students coming in for a test retake (retake the test and I'll average their original score with their second attempt). I've got a few students signed up for that, but still not that many. So the grades for this class are going to be way down.
MATH 283 is a course that I had not taught for several years. I liked the textbook that we used, and it was a very casual class with good students, which meant that I was able to just have fun with it. There was one student earlier in the semester that I was struggling to connect with (he had not taken calculus in a very long time and that put him behind the whole time), but he ultimately dropped out. I would absolutely use the same textbook again and teach the class in pretty much the same way if I have the opportunity to do so two years from now.
MATH 457 is a course that I'd rather not teach. This year, I got to the last couple lectures, and I just had a hard time dragging myself through the discussion and the proofs. It's definitely not my best work this time around. I liked the students, and things ran smoothly, but I was not as interested in real analysis as I needed to be in order to make the class feel right. Further back, I used a different textbook that got really dense in spots, and the current textbook is better. But in some ways it just feels like the flow is a little off. But I'm probably the one that's a little off.
So with all of this wrapping up, I'm starting to put together next semester's courses. I'm really not as far into it as I feel like I should be, so hopefully I'll be able to speed things up over the break. The good news is that as long as I hit the major learning outcomes, it doesn't matter.
The easier of the two classes to teach is ART 240. It's a lot of hands-on time at the computer for them, and so I just need to make sure that the assignments are well-defined. I'm going to do more with drafting this year, giving them physical objects to measure and draw out. This might help some of the students overcome some of the struggles they had with things like design drawings. It may also help them with their general visualization skills. We'll have to see.
The CS 135 course is a more interesting one. I'm definitely moving in a slightly different direction with it this time. I don't think I'm going to be doing a game project, but will instead be focused more on problem-solving and data visualization. This shift is in line with the move towards the data science minor and trying to give students the tools to start to do that type of work. What exactly this means is still unclear to me. I do know that I'll need to do more demonstrating of computational processes and handling data sets. But I've still got a lot of thinking to do about that one.
My other two classes are MATH 127 and MATH 301. I'm expecting a few carryover students from MATH 126, and not all of them are strong students. But I'm hoping that the pattern I've established with them this semester, especially with regards to doing consistent work and using academic resources, will carry them forward and help them get through it all. I do think I need to make videos for this course, but if we make the textbook switch I might transition to making problem-explaining videos instead of concept-explaining videos. That's another thing that's just rolling around in the back of my mind.
It's also about time to wrap up the fundraiser. I technically announced I'd be closing off the fundraiser on December 1. But since then, I've continued to receive donations and got another $500+. At some point, it just feels weird, but in a good way. There's just a steady drip of a few more dollars that keeps happening. But after fees, I've raised over $5000, which is a solid amount for my first time fundraising. A lot of donations came in from a lot of places, but I get a lot of excitement thinking about the fact that my NSC family stepped up that first week and really got the ball rolling. I had no idea what to expect when I got started, and that just gave me a really big boost.
So now it's on to the hard work of the next steps. The first next step is heading back in January. I'm going to be bringing a science poster printed on cloth that explains the creation of clouds, along with a little experiment that does that. There are a couple ways to do it, and I'm going to try to do both. The first is to fill a plastic soda bottle mostly full of water (3/4 full or so). If you squeeze the bottle and release, nothing happens. But if you light a match and drop it in and then do it again, you get clouds. The science is that squeezing the bottle actually raises the pressure and temperature. This increases the amount of moisture that the air can hold. When you release, you drop the pressure and temperature, which then decreases the amount of moisture. But nothing happens at first because the water needs to have airborne particles to condense on. The match puts particles in the air for that to happen.
You can do the same thing with rubbing alcohol and a bike pump to get a more dramatic result. I've been doing various things to try to get a good system for that without buying something, but I've finally decided to just pay for the pump connector and not fight with it anymore. I'm sure if I kept playing with it, I'd eventually get something to work. But I think that my time is worth more than the cost of the thing at this point, so I'm just buying the thing.
There's a bunch of other stuff going on. I'm chair of a search for a data science/informatics position that we're trying to bring on at NSC. It's going to be a rather interesting one for us to do because we've got none of the infrastructure for it, and so we're going to have to figure out how to make it all happen. I'm also involved with talking to the architects that will be designing the remodeling of the Dawson building. We're still in DAW 101 right now, but they were doing painting and cleaning up there this week, so we'll probably be able to go up sometime over the break. I don't know what the long term of that will be, as they may be needing to do some demolition up there to make space for the future changes. But it will be good to have individual offices again. So that stuff is happening.
Rounding off the other stuff: I'm meeting with a contractor to talk about remodeling stuff mid-week next week. I'm looking forward to family time during Christmas week. I didn't really say much about Thanksgiving weekend and other Thanksgiving stuff (10 pounds of mashed potatoes, driving to Southern California and not being up north for Thanksgiving for the first time, driving back up and taking the mysterious roundabout route that Google told me to take to avoid traffic), I'm supposed to think about a missions fact-finding trip for church, and curling is going well.
