The first week of classes has come and gone. I think this semester is going to be one of the more fun ones I've had in a while.
My MATH 127 course this semester has a Course Assistant. The student is a math major that I had in class last semester and in this semester as well. He's also a pretty good student who did solid work. I'm hoping that his participation will help to solidify some of the weaknesses that this class has had. I've also moved away from the lecture slides I had developed for the last few times I taught it. Instead, I'm moving to using just a coarse outline and teaching more off the top of my head. This represents a swing back to how I used to teach much earlier on. I don't know if this is just me going through a cyclical thing, but I will say that I'm having more fun teaching this way right now. The downside is that there seems to be a small something that I wish I had mentioned in class that I accidentally skip. So far, it's been something at a pretty low level, so nothing central. I do worry somewhat that some day I'm going to forget something critical. They still have access to the lecture slides that I used in the past, and I can always fall back on them if I need to for some reason. But I kind of hope to be able to do it this way for the whole semester.
MATH 301 has its largest class ever, which is exciting. There are 8 students in the class, and the number we've had the last few times was closer to 4-5. This is a good reflection of the general growth we've seen on campus as well as the effort by the School of Education to try to pipeline more math education students. This also represents a good sign for the next few years for the rest of the upper division courses, as we'll now have a much larger cohort working their way through the classes. So far, the students all seem to be in a good place for the class. Nobody has yet shown any significant holes in their basic backgrounds. And I get a good energy from them when we discuss things, so I'm quite optimistic that the next couple years of upper division courses will be pretty strong.
ART 240 has only had one class so far, so it's hard to really gauge how that one is going to be. But the last time I taught the course everything seemed fine. It's the sort of course that's more about "doing stuff" than it is about "knowing stuff" which tends to make it more of a "fun" class. Of course, there is still work for them to do, which includes both projects and a couple writing assignments, but it should be a pretty laid back class.
CS 135 is going to be fun, but slightly more stressful than the others. Part of that is that I've only got the first 7-8 weeks of the class really figured out (kind of like last time). But after two classes, I think the students are on board with the ideas of the course and seem willing to engage in discussion and that sort of thing. And it's also more of a "doing stuff" class (though they have a much larger "knowing stuff" component) so I'm trying to limit my teaching to just 45-60 minutes and give them time to program things at the end of each class. I think I have a good overall trajectory set up for the class, and I just need to start fleshing out the details. Right now, I'm kind of going a little more slowly through a section on data visualization and data frames just to make sure I set them up well for the second semester course (which we are theoretically running next Fall). I really hope to make that course a fairly substantial push into the specific skills that our community partners talked about when we talked about the need for data science skills. So I really want to make sure I do that well.
We're about the start the review of candidates for the Informatics/Data Science position. It's got a relatively small pool and there are some restrictions that the HR manager has put on it because of some of the shortcomings of the pool. It will be an interesting search to navigate, and I'm not entirely optimistic about where things are at this specific moment. But we knew this was going to be a tough search from the beginning, so I'm feeling okay that expectations and reality are falling roughly in line with each other. The committee has a meeting with one of the Vice Provosts to try to clarify a bit more about the overall vision for the position and we'll see if we can't set things up for success. One of my biggest concerns is that we're bringing on someone at a time when we don't have a lot of the basic computer infrastructure pieces in place. For example, we don't yet have a dedicated computer lab/computing center where students can work on projects. That could become a deal-breaker. I'm going to be working with the administration to try to help set expectations of the needs of such a computationally-intensive program, and I hope that can grease the wheels a bit to make it easier for the potential incoming person to settle in and get things moving.
I added another update to the Science Center GoFundMe. It has been officially closed for over a month now, but I wanted to put in a few words about the ongoing donations that we've received. Thanks to people donating as Christmas gifts and others who missed the GoFundMe but donated directly to Adventures in Life, I think we're somewhere around the $7000 mark for total donations. So that's pretty good. I've also updated the webpage with the Medical Clinic summary. The website is a little bit interesting to me right now because we're getting 10-15 visitors per week there, which isn't what anyone would consider to be a huge amount of traffic, but it's more than we were getting before the GoFundMe. So there's some latent interest there. I doubt it will lead to anything, but that it's out there is better than it not being out there at all.
Coming out of that trip, there was a bit of sadness as we learned that one of the Mexican volunteers was shot and killed in his hometown. He was in his early 20s and was being trained to take over the optometry portion of the clinic. I can't say that I was close to him and I didn't work with him directly, but he was definitely a known quantity at the camps, serving as one of the leaders the for at least the last year or two. It hit me at the level of a friend losing a friend. I feel bad for the situation and can feel some of the sadness (especially seeing people posting pictures and memories the week immediately after it happened), but I don't feel it as a full-on grief. Instead, there was just a sense of "this really sucks."
On a more upbeat note, I volunteered for Leadership Las Vegas' Education Day. My participation was pretty low key. In the morning, I set up a Pre-K learning activity for the class to do. It was a math activity focusing on some early pre-numeracy skills. The basic concept is that children can recognize that 2 dots and 3 dots are different numbers of dots even if they don't have any language available to them to "count" the dots. So they had different dragon pictures to match up and put into different arrangements and patterns. The learning concept is called subitization and basically being exposed to patterns and playing with patterns helps children develop a sense that two different arrangements represent the "same number" without having to actually give a name to that number. I didn't see any feedback from it yet, but I'm not really worried about it.
Church stuff is about to hit some interesting transitions. We're losing one of our pastors. In fact, today was his last day. It's nothing bad. He's just ready to transition his life into a new phase where he's not going to be in the ministry anymore. This is the sort of situation where the decision is probably the right one for him personally, but it's just tough for the church because there's going to be a pretty significant leadership void to fill. And at the same time, we're starting down the path of possibly moving into a new building (we're spending the next month to explore that option very carefully). I think I've mentioned that it's a church plant, but it's been around long enough that it kind of needs to take another step forward in some way, and this may be that step. We'll just have to wait and see how things play out.
Home remodeling is gearing up to start making progress again. I met with the contractor again to do another walkthrough and have reviewed his proposal/estimate. Everything seems to be pretty good, and so I'm starting to buy up hardware and such for him to install. His estimate is just over $5000, and if I add in the things I need to provide for him it's probably going to be about $6500-$7000, which means I should be ready to spend about $8000 because there's always extra stuff that comes up. But that's fine. His estimate is that he can be in and out in about 2 weeks, which seems pretty reasonable. I'm setting my expectation to be 3-3.5 weeks just so that I don't get too frustrated by things running late.
Other things: I've maybe played 4-5 hours worth of piano since I got it. I really ought to try to put in some more regular practice time. I have 5 different moles from Oaxaca and am working my way through them. I've started off using about two tablespoons of powder for 2 cups of water. I think they've been a little bit weak, so the next time through the cycle I'm going to increase the amount of powder. I'm mostly eating it with chicken, rice, and corn tortillas (though I'm generally a bit frustrated that the corn tortillas I can get at the store basically suck). I finished my half kilo of Oaxacan quesillo, and I'm not going to get any more for another 5 months. I replaced my garbage disposal successfully (at least, it seems successful so far). And eventually, I'll get a cat.
