Tonight, I did something I haven't done in a long time. I watched an extended YouTube video at 1x speed. But it was the TwoSetViolin concert with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. Definitely worth the time and the listen. It reminded me that I should probably listen to more music.
The last couple weeks have been more of the same. Classes are doing what they do, and students are doing what they do. There's an irony with the 3D printing course in that I started off the semester too fast, and now things are moving too slowly. I allotted time for the students to do a couple projects to end the semester, and the students are tearing through it and finishing in a very short period of time. Which is great, because it means that they've developed the requisite skills for the course. But now I feel like I haven't given them enough to do. So next semester I'm going to add in a couple more projects to help fill up this part of the class. The trigonometry and calculus courses are just kind of doing their thing. We're on a path to get to the end, and we're just going to take it where it leads us.
I've been investing most of my spare work time building out more materials for next semester's trigonometry course. I have one assignment that's about gears and gear ratios (dealing with linear and rotational motion). In the past, I've treated it as more of a theoretical construct, but I've decided to try to 3D print some gears and have them play with them to make it a bit more discovery-based. Over the past few days I've been printing different gears of different sizes to see if I can get a collection of them that mesh well with each other and aren't too big. And as I'm sitting here typing this, I'm thinking of maybe also creating a gear rack to show the conversion of rotational to linear motion (and vice versa). So now I guess I've got another round of developing and testing to do. I won't need them until probably early February, so I have plenty of time (which is a terrible thing to put in writing).
And I still have some work to do with the game course for next semester. So there's that, too.
I'm also building out practice problems and solution sets to go with the updated videos for that course. I've got the updated videos uploaded, but I'm not releasing them until after I get the solutions worked out because I want to make sure that everything matches up. So I'll probably put those out over the break. It's not like I have a schedule to maintain with those. They just need to be done.
I also have it in my mind to build a collection of videos that are all about developing automaticity with arithmetic. It's an overlooked skill that I know that students need to practice more. The cognitive theory behind it is the same as "sight words" (being able to recognize a word by sight, rather than sounding out the word). If you're trying to read a sentence, but you have to keep stopping to sound out the words, you will be less able to understand the sentence because you've spent so much of your mental energy just figuring out the words. And so it is with arithmetic and basic algebra. And just as the goal of reading isn't just to get through all the words, the goal of math isn't just to get through all of the calculations. But that's how it's often treated. So I need to think about how I would want to structure the practice videos, and then code it up in Python with manim to make it all come together. And probably make an introductory video or two. So that's going to be a project to have on the back burner for a bit.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I'm going to go in to campus and try to build some shelves for our 3D printing supplies. It's going to be a little bit janky because it will be a mixture of plywood and particle board (basically, some scrap wood from other projects), and it will be my first time building something like this. But in theory, I know what I'm doing. It will be my first time using a circular saw, and so I've been watching a few how-to videos to make sure I don't cut my fingers off or anything like that. So it will be a couple hours to do a 30 minute job or something like that because I'll be re-measuring and taking my time to get everything as right as possible. So that will be kind of fun and interesting.
The house is kind of falling apart. A couple months ago, the main water line to the house broke and it cost a few thousand dollars to fix. And the other day when I was pulling out of the garage to go to work, the door broke. As I was watching the door come down, I noticed that one side was at a weird angle, so I got out and took a look. The wheels were no longer in the track on that side, and the door was hanging at a bad angle. I was able to get the door closed and prop it up so that it wouldn't look broken from the outside. The garage door is probably as old as the house, which makes it just about 30 years old. So, of course it failed. The good news is that I've been thinking about replacing the motor for a while because the one I have is quite loud and it really doesn't need to be that loud. The bad news is that this is probably going to be a couple thousand more dollars. But that's how this stuff goes, I guess.
Thanksgiving diner this year will be a hot pot dinner. Maybe next year, we'll gather people together and fry some turkeys. But this year, it's going to be more of a quiet and casual meal. I'll probably make some mashed potatoes at some point this week because 5 pounds of potatoes for a dollar is a deal that I have a hard time passing up. We will miss doing family and friend time, but at this point we're not quite ready to get back to larger social gatherings.
Other things: Today, we went to do some photos at Wetlands Park. We're both really bad at taking selfies, so this is one of the few times that we will have visual evidence that we actually spend time together. I hope they came out well! (We're waiting for the photographer to upload them so we can review them and decide which, if any, we want.) I haven't played the piano in a while. Thor is doing well. I got a small water pump and am going to try making a basic little cat water fountain (mostly because I'm curious to see if I can do it). So that will be a little winter break project. Life just keeps rolling on.
