It's called "Holy Saturday." Because this is "Holy Week." It goes Palm Sunday, Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, Spy Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter. Apparently, the marketing team got burnt out trying to name the days and just gave up and just put "Holy" in front of the ones they had difficulty with.
There are only a few weeks left in the semester. I'm ready for it to end. Every time I sit down to grade, there's a sense of fatigue that kicks in even before I start. But it's been a busy and disruptive semester, so it all kind of makes sense.
I realized this week that something about the MATH 127 course this semester is that I haven't suffered the same type of attrition that I've experienced in the past. The class started at 38 students and there are still 35 or so active students. I usually lose a few more than that by the end of the semester. I'm not sure what accounts for that difference, whether it's a random fluke or something I've done has helped to hold them this time around. But whatever the reason, it's good that students are sticking it out and not giving up, but it also means that there's just that much more work for me to do.
I'm feeling ready to rework my MATH 301 course. At the minimum, I need to restructure the assignments a bit. Looking back across this semester, I think I added in too many things without taking out enough things, so the workload is a bit heavier than I meant for it to be. That should be a relatively easy adjustment. I'll probably still keep a lot of what I've got and maybe only make a few minor adjustments to the slides.
The CS 135 class has been in self-teaching mode for the last couple weeks. Basically, I found a pretty solid tutorial series for pygame and the last two weeks was just for them to go through the series themselves. One aspect of this is that learning through online sources is kind of what happens with programming beyond a certain point. There's a lot of looking up code snippets and figuring out how to integrate that into what you're doing. The students seem to have taken to it pretty well. Though I have to admit that it feels weird to be teaching a class where I don't really talk to them much (because they're just happily working the whole time). I'm around to answer questions when they struggle with something, like they missed a line of code or have a typo. But it's just kind of weird to be mostly sitting around and doing my own work in class.
The ART 240 class is also in project mode, but I get more questions from that class than I do from the CS class. I've got my list of changes for the next time I teach this class as well. I want to make them do more measurement and drawing on the front end, and maybe even drop TinkerCAD completely (or shrink it down to a single week). I think that the TinkerCAD actually slows students down a bit, even though it's a nice, gentle introduction to thinking 3-dimensionally. I think I might be able to get a better result using a different approach. I also want to help them visualize the deconstruction of complex shapes into simpler pieces, which will help them out with the creative process later in the course.
Search committee work has picked up again. We'll be having the data science candidates coming in over the next couple weeks, and we'll see what happens from there. At this point, I feel as though I've done all the groundwork laying I can do for now. There's going to be a ton of work in the next year, regardless of whether or not we end up with a hire. And a fair amount of that will probably come back my way, regardless of whether or not we end up with a hire. In the last couple weeks, I've been in three extra meetings (beyond the strict search committee work) to talk about data science and related initiatives with various people.
I'm also part of another campus search for someone to take the lead on some of our campus build-out. I don't have a lot of experience with this part of campus, so I'm treating it as a learning experience. But that also means more time investment. This one will hopefully move quickly, though, because I just don't want to have too many things hanging over my head as the summer starts.
NSC Learn to Curl night happened. There were only about a dozen of us who were there, but I think most people had a good time and there was interest in trying to do it again at some point. I was amused that in the weekly curling club newsletter (email) that it came out as a CSN Learn to Curl. Sometimes, things just don't come out the way you think they will.
We're going through a very interesting transition period right now on campus overall. Aside from the growth, we've got the collective bargaining vote coming up, plus we learned this week that our Dean will be stepping down for medical reasons, and that there are some other administrative support people that may be shuffled around. It will be interesting to see where things go. This will probably be the most significant disruptive change since coming out of the recession. We're going to have lots of new faculty arriving, but be short a permanent leader-figure within LAS. So we'll see how everyone manages to move through it.
I'm going in today to be interviewed by the pet adoption agency. I had a text exchange earlier this week with a woman that's fostering a couple of the cats that are up for adoption, and so she's the one I'm going to have to meet with. I have no idea what to actually expect from it. But apparently, I won't be getting a cat today. This is the first time they're doing their adoptions at this specific location, and she wasn't comfortable bringing out these cats (they "don't show well" -- which is a code for cats that are a little shy/skittish). I'm okay with that. My house is quiet and empty most of the time, and so a skittish cat will likely do better here than somewhere else. So no cat for maybe another couple weeks.
Other stuff: Crawfish cooking is scheduled for mid-May. I purchased a new computer with which to focus on making more math videos. I'm taking students to a tour of a company that spent over a million dollars in 3D printing equipment today. Zion in about a month. Sleep patterns have normalized, which is nice. There's a ton of stuff I need to do this summer. Relatives came through town earlier this week, and I happily ate leftover Maggiano's all week as a result. I need to practice piano more.
