Somehow, four weeks have managed to pass by almost as if it were two.
My big recent win is the completion of the game jam video series. Everything is uploaded and the videos are rolling out. I didn't post them all at once because I believe the YouTube algorithm favors something that looks more like sustained activity than a video dump, but really that's just a guess. It's nothing too fancy or too exciting, but I'm optimistic that we will get at least a few students to engage with the contents favorably. But we'll just have to wait and see what happens.
My office is a bit like Christmas right now. We made a bunch of purchases with some grant money, and I'm getting boxes and boxes of stuff appearing in my office. Most of it are just random math manipulatives, but there are a couple other "larger" items coming in eventually. A part of the office may get temporarily converted into a mini-studio this summer as we play around with our new eglass system. My idea at this point is to make a bunch of videos for my MATH 127 course, mostly doing example calculations and not as much focusing on the direct teaching of the content. But I'll need to actually get my hands on it and see.
Classes themselves are chugging along. There are only about six weeks left in the semester, and I'm looking forward to this one being over. I have to admit that I'm just not feeling as "good" about how things have gone this semester. Maybe it's just me transitioning back into the in-person teaching environment, maybe it was just the particular classes this semester, but I don't actually feel as though things are firing on all cylinders. But I also can't quite place what I think is off. I can identify several small things that I would want to do differently if I could do it again, and maybe that's enough to make things feel the way they do. But I don't know. And even if I did know, with only six weeks left in the semester, there's not really much time to make a transition or implement a change. So I'll just keep pushing onward through the end of the sesmester and start thinking about what I'm wanting to do with the Fall.
The Fall is already shaping up to be a fun one. I'm going to finally get to teach a course I proposed about 5 years ago, which is the math course on games and programming. I envision a highly interactive class with the students regularly playing games with each other and writing simple simulations of different strategies to make them compete with each other. I've got a decent outline for the course, but I'll need to sit down and think through the details. I'm also teaching the 3D printing course, and we will likely have a new 3D printer by then, which will bring a little extra energy back to the course.
The math search landed a good faculty member, and the only barrier to him making it here immigration. So... who knows how long it wil take? He's coming in on a spousal visa from South Korea, but he spent a good number of years in the US as a child and all the way through his Master's degree, so he's sufficiently familiar with American culture and everything. So it's just a matter of paperwork. At some level, I'm not expecting to see him until Spring 2023 because I lack confidence in our immigration process right now. But there's a chance he'll be here sooner. We just have to wait and see.
I've started working on my Senior Fellowship application with Advance HE. My goal is to have a first draft cranked out by the end of next week, which may or may not happen. But I at least have a broad sense of what I want to write, so it's just a matter of spending the time to get the concepts into words. Which could go pleasantly quickly or painfully slowly, or anything in between. So I just need to make some time to do that.
That feels like it more or less covers the work stuff, but I have to admit that I have this feeling that I've overlooked something. The FLC stuff is going well, and I've got a lot of good notes for things for me to think about in future semesters. My annual review for last year looks pretty much what I expected it to look like. We had a rooftop gathering again, which was nice. And that feels like pretty much everything of importance going on around campus.
Thor seems to be doing fine now. He might have vomited in the last month, but maybe that was more than a month ago at this point. In any event, he seems to be his normal self. His new toy of choice is a hair tie, which he'll toss back and forth between his paws, and sometimes spin around while he's playing with it. He also talks when plays with it, which is something he didn't do with the feather toy or the laser pen. I'm not entirely sure why he does that. It sounds a bit like crying, but when you watch him it seems quite clear he's having fun. It seems a little different than crying for attention as he brings over a "prize" because he's really intent on his game when it happens. But in any event, it's a thing he does now.
A couple other topics before wrapping up:
Russia's war on Ukraine has not gone the way it thought. At this point, it seems that Russia is looking to move the goalposts on the definition of victory, and that they may need that offramp to come sooner rather than later. This doesn't mean that things have gone "well" for them, as war is still ugly. Ten million people have been displaced from the start of the war and there's still more to come. Still, fending ing off a country that has aspirations of being a global superpower is pretty strong.
I recommend reading this essay in its entirety for an understanding of the subtext of the Ketanji Brown Jackson nomination process. Also, the "What is a woman?" question is a much bigger loser from an intellectual perspective than I think most conservatives realize. They may be successful at riling the base (which was the goal), but when confronted with the actual content of the question, it comes up incredibly short. The judicial branch does not create definitions for the purposes of law. That's what the legislative branch does. Furthermore, despite internet memes claiming the contrary, the question is scientifically complicated: "The popular belief that your sex arises only from your chromosomal makeup is wrong. The truth is, your biological sex isn’t carved in stone, but a living system with the potential for change."
And lastly, the last paragraph flurry of whatever. I'm putting the basil planting to rest for now. Ironically, as I let the plants suck up the last bit of water and slowly dry out, one of the plants is *finally* starting to grow a new set of shoots so that it's more bush-like, which is what I've been trying to get the whole time. So maybe when I pick this up again, cutting off the water sometimes to put it under stress may be a good thing. We've got a couple dwarf sunflower seeds planted in some pots in the front yard. We'll how that goes. I'm working a bit more on the armoire. It's gotten kind of personal now, as I really want to figure out how to de-smoke it. Also, I'm getting some experience sanding and staining, so that's at least some useful experience for me to have. I need to finish reading "Hood Feminism" for a book group that Joan's cousin is doing (over Zoom). COVID case counts are low right now, and I hope they stay there. But there is the potential for more problems in the coming weeks. So we'll have to watch the numbers and see what happens. At some point in the past, I think I called it "intellectual constipation" (or maybe "mental constipation") when I get out of the habit of taking time to reflect. I kind of feel like that happened this last week, and it feels good to make the time to do it.
