This is the week that I look at the calendar and realize that there's only a week before classes start. The transition is a bit bigger this time around, because I'll be going in to work for the first time since the start of the pandemic. The timing is not ideal because of omicron (Clark County is currently at all time high for COVID cases), but with around 80% vaccination among students, 95% vacination among faculty and staff, and (for me) small classes, I'm not too concerned. Masks will be required in all public spaces, and the level of exposure that I'm expecting to face is nothing like what the majority of people have to deal with. Outside of my classes, I expect to spend most of my time by myself in my office.
The campus as a whole is in a mixed space. There's a big push to be back in person (the "Back and Bold" initiative), but it's clear that not everyone is 100% supportive because of the omicron surge. I think there was more support for it back in November before omicron hit, but I think we've passed the point of no return (at least for the launch of the semester). I don't foresee disaster on the horizon because of the high vaccination rate and good mask compliance, but with thousands of students and hundreds of faculty, it's basically assured that people will get sick (though it's less clear that campus will be the place where they got sick -- there are lots of multi-person households, including households with kids going to school, and tracing the source is basically impossible).
I'm pretty close to being ready for the start of the semester. All my notes are done, and two out of the four classes have their course webpages fully built. I should be able to get the last two done in about a day and a half. I've revised how my course webpages are organized, and so this part is taking a little bit longer than it typically does. I'm doing something new with my quizzes by pushing them outside of the classroom and making students both take and grade their them. I've got Canvas set up so that after they take the quiz, the solutions are released to them, and I'll be grading their graded quiz. My hope is that this supports their learning better by giving them faster feedback on what they did so that they can correct their errors right away. And for me, I'm hoping it lightens the grading load because they will (theoretically) have already identified their errors for me, and I can just look it over to make sure that what said they they did wrong makes sense.
Over the break, there were other types of productivity. I was able to crank out a manuscript. This one is a bit more focused than the one I was working on last year. I'm still using the ATMI (Attitudes Towards Mathematics Inventory) survey, but I've linked it the question of whether students see themselves as a "math person." The short of it is that "math person" identity is tied to their enjoyment of mathematics and self-confidence, but not tied to whether or not they think math is a valuable skill. It also included a lot of direct comments from students regarding their math identity. So now that one goes into the machine that is the journal article editorial review process, and we'll see what happens.
We also heard that our patent is very close to being issued. It's basically down to making the payment (which comes from the institution). It's been a 3-year process, which is apparently pretty fast for a patent. So whenever that happens, I'll post a link. It also formally marks the next step in the process, which is getting the product to market. We've done some basic market research (sort of), and we have around 700 pieces to sell (or give away to people who are interestd in giving us feedback), but we don't have a website or anything. Our hope is that we can find some business students and just let them go for it. We are also starting the process of looking into how we actually license intellectual property. Because the end goal is really to get to the point of having that type of passive income. Our marker for success is that we make a 1 cent profit after paying back all of the money that the institution put into it. Maybe in about 3-5 more years we'll be there.
Something I didn't do was get my game up and running. I've got a good sense of what I want it to do, and I don't expect to have too many problems doing it. But I will need time. I'm hoping to put in a few hours this week, and then be able to sink in little chunks of time as the semester gets started. (One of the reasons I spend a lot of up-front time getting classes built is to provide myself time during the semester to take care of other things.) But that's one I'm definitely going to need to make sure happens, as a bunch of other things will depend on it.
The math search committee is put together, and we're hoping to see the candidate pool early this week. I'm not expecting the review process to be too difficult, but you never know what's going to happen. It's a reminder for me that the department is kind of doing a big reset right now, as (besides me) it's just one tenure track line that's really focusing on our upper division coursework, and they're in their first year. So there's a lot of space for new perspectives to take root and see where it takes us.
I just realized that I didn't post anything post-Christmas. Christmas was good. The first part was with Joan's family and the second with mine. Time with Joan's family was pretty smooth. We ended up working on a 1000 piece puzzle, which took just about the whole time we had together. There are some tasty traditions, including crab dinner and shrimp cocktail. It was the first time I spent any real extended time with Joan's sister and brother-in-law. We visited some of their cousins and "cousins" (close family friends that function like cousins), and that was also good time. On my side of the family, we spent a day with my parents and then Justin came up with his family which was another day. Then we came back. It was a quick trip, but it was good and probably just the right length.
The drive home was kind of fun. Going up through the Tehachapi Pass, there was snow. It was coming down lightly, but it looked like the night before (or maybe a couple days before) it was hit pretty hard. One of the fun parts of the drive is that right as you got to the top of the pass, the weather turned from a wintry landscape to a high desert landscape. It's almost like turning the page in a book, because you suddenly had no idea that there was any snow anywhere nearby.
I guess I should wrap this up. Thor had his annual check-up and everything is good. Christmas decorations came down and are all packed away for the next 11 months. I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do for lunch when I'm on campus now. It's something I haven't had to think about for such a long, long time. The piano remains unplayed. I'm hoping the current batch of basil fleshes out into more of a bush, but we'll see. I really haven't used much basil from my plants because I'm really trying to get one to a really healthy place where I feel that I can sustainably harvest from it. We're going on more walks/hikes right now, and I hope we are able to keep doing that while the weather is good (because summer hikes in the desert are much less enjoyable).
