I spent about four hours helping a friend move about 10 tons of rock to his back yard. I spent most of that time shoveling from the pile to wheelbarrows, so I'm really feeling it in my shoulders. There were 5 of us before the neighbor brought his kids out for a life lesson in hard work (and allowance). Actually, if they weren't there we might have quit sooner. Instead, we pushed through to get it all done instead of stopping in the middle. But now I'm sore, and I'm just lying on the couch in pajamas after having taken a shower. I may have to get changed again if I decide to go out and do something later tonight, but I might also just lie here for a while.
Classes are going well. I strangely feel as though I have basically nothing to say about them other than that. I have MATH 127 exams to grade, but that probably won't happen until Monday. I hope they do well. This is the notorious chapter 5 test that has traditionally tanked the students' grades. The MATH 301 course is doing fine. I ran some experiments using the "Blue Jeans" platform to test for the possibility of doing some distance learning things with the School of Education. I think it can work. The ART 240 course has been good. I've got a phone meeting this morning with HP about some possible educational partnership, but I have no idea what they have in mind. It's most likely a dead end. But you never know. I'm also taking the students to do a tour of a local company that has spent about $1 million on 3D printing stuff. This will happen in a couple weeks.
It's coming down to crunch time on this data science/informatics thing. I've also got a number of conversations scheduled with various people in the valley who do that type of work or have interest in such a program. While I'm feeling more and more confident about the network of things, I still have some fears and concerns about the actual implementation. For something this big, I don't want to bring in someone and have them set up to fail. I want to know that this person will be sufficiently resourced for everything that needs to happen. So that one is really chewing up some brain power right now.
I got NSC Learn to Curl officially onto the NSC calendar. That's been something I've been talking with Brian about for a couple years, and so it's exciting to see it go forward. We will see how popular it is and whether it's something we decide to try to do again in the future. But I'm pretty happy that it's just happening once. So we can file that in the win column.
I spent the last two days at a planning summit/meeting/whatever you want to call it for some initiatives that are happening with higher education. The campus has been involved with Complete College America initiatives for a while now. This one is a bit different because there's a larger community buy-in that's happening. I think this is the first time that social safety net people have been present at one of these CCA meetings. One of the points that was brought up that I thought was important was to focus on finding ways to support students by addressing their bigger life issues, such as food insecurity and transportation. I'm hopeful that we will be able to find partners for that. Many of the other things that are getting pushed are things that the campus has either already started or was planning to start, so there's nothing dramatic on that front.
One thing that I had a number of conversations about was the impending remediation policy that's being pushed through the NSHE system extremely quickly. Basically, they're going to outlaw all forms of math remediation beyond co-requisite courses (which means that you're doing just-in-time remediation in parallel with the college level course). This has a lot of math folks around the valley extremely worried. Basically, they're saying that they want to take students that are coming out of one of the worst K-12 math education systems in the nation (with plenty of anecdotes of students simply being pushed through even though they're failing their courses) and just cram them into college level material. This puts us in a bind, because on the one hand we don't want to lower standards, but on the other hand we're not going to put students in front of a course where they're simply expected to fail. We're going to find a way to create courses that benefit students, but it's going to come at a cost if we can't take the time to help develop some basic mathematical understanding before just shoving them into a college level course.
We've moved forward into our first full production run of the test tube suspender that we've been working on for a couple years. A week ago, I was standing on top of the lab tables dropping these things from the ceiling to give it a rigorous drop testing after the samples all passed the table-top height drops. I'm feeling pretty excited about this. My hope is that the business students that have been working on a plan, but I haven't heard anything from them all semester. (We've got a business faculty guiding them, so it's not like they were supposed to report to me about anything.) I'm very interested to see what they have come up with.
The house remodeling is virtually done at this point. There are a couple items on the punch list, but none of them really obstruct anything from being put back together again, so I've been slowly starting that process. I'm actually in pretty good shape with all the things that I've currently got, but I'm pushing into new territory (with some help). Daniel's old room is going to be a guest room/reading room combination. I'm also thinking semi-seriously about trying to play around with more video. Right now, most of the things I've done have been scripted and heavily edited. But there's also a need for my classes to have problems worked out by hand, and I don't really have a good setup to record those. So I'm thinking of some sort of overhead webcam setup where I can work through problems "live to tape." This will greatly reduce the post-production time and allow me to do more in less time with less effort. And some of this may eventually start to spill into more general YouTube content creation. I've got some stuff in the pipeline, but haven't had time to really pursue it. Having a setup at home would encourage me to move into that a little better because doing that at work is not the most ideal thing. So the office may move in that direction. Or I might put that into the master bedroom because I've got so much more space there. (But do I want work in my bedroom space? I'm still thinking about that.)
The last couple weeks have been pretty interesting in ways that's a bit different from the usual sorts of things. For various reasons (this among them), I've been knocked out of my usual sleeping patterns, and I'm still not back to normal. I used to sleep pretty consistently from around 11:30 to about 6:30, waking up with no alarm after 7 hours of sleep. Right now, I'm falling asleep any time between 10 PM and about 12:30 AM, and getting anywhere from 4 to 6 hours of sleep. Things are starting to renormalize a bit, but sleep has still been somewhat slippery. Thinking about this has opened up the idea of possibly changing up some of my patterns and trying to inject some new-ness into my routine. I don't know exactly what that means just yet. If I think back over the last decade, there were times that I was pretty busy with various types of things. Church involvement required more time as a small group leader, I played pickup basketball, I had that crazy year of Leadership Las Vegas, I used to do more random cooking adventures, poker, and all sorts of things. But many of those communities and connections are in the past, and less has filled in to replace them. So maybe it's time to start working on those things again.
Other stuff: No cat yet, but now the construction is over that should be happening soon-ish. I'm also reading a Jackson Galaxy book on cats because that's what I do. I'm paying someone to do a deep clean of my house after all the construction, and that might turn into a regular thing because I'm really that lazy when it comes to cleaning. I'm doing a bit better with piano time. I need to take some time in the next couple weeks to go through all the Oaxaca science center protocols and put some sensible ordering to it all. Summer will contain a LLV trip to Zion, Oaxaca, and Santa Barbara (GFM Conference). I had family visitors last weekend, which was a refreshing change of pace. There will also be more family in town in another couple weeks. I did some calculations, and if I continue paying my mortgage down at the rate I'm currently doing it, I should own it outright in just over two years. That's weird and scary, but also kind of awesome.
