The weeks seem to be going by faster right now. It seems like the list of things to do keeps getting longer.
Classes are going well. I seem to have successfully connected with the students in the MATH 120E course and they are really starting to get comfortable with me as we work through the material. There are even a couple students that are really starting to feel like math isn't a terrible subject, which is a win on its own. That doesn't mean that they're doing amazingly. But for some of them, it starts with not feeling like they've already failed before they've even gotten started. So that's a good win for me in that class.
The MATH 126 course is going okay. I'm liking the activity framework that the other instructor gave me, and I'm generally feeling good about how things are structured. At this point, I'm not too sure of what I would try to do differently if I were to try to make some incremental improvements. I can see how I might do the entire thing completely differently if I were building it up from scratch, but that's an entirely different conversation. I'll have to keep thinking about that one.
The MATH 127 course is going much better this semester. The students are more engaged in the material, and they seem to be learning it pretty well. I'm getting more direct conversations with students, which is also giving me more insights into where they're at. One thing that I can already see will need to be changed is that I'm going to make the preclass activities just a little bit longer so that they have a bit more prepared at the start of class. And then with that I will slightly modify the "class ticket" concept to sometimes include presenting your work to the class. The current system has the students breaking the work into individual pieces and then working by themselves, which isn't quite the group activity I was hoping for. I may also cut the write-up assignments to just one problem per section instead of two.
And MATH 182 is what it usually is. A small number of students (6 this time -- we started at 7 but one dropped) who are all pretty comfortable mathematically and who are all independently motivated. So that one is pretty much on cruise control and I'm expecting good things from this group.
This Friday, I'm giving a presentation at the corequisite math conference. It's kind of late in the day, and I don't know how many people we're expecting to have there. But it's provocatively titled "The Definition of Insanity - Corequisite Curriculum" which is a play on the statement that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. The presentation is basically built around the idea that maybe re-re-teaching algebra again to students isn't really going to benefit them much, and maybe we should rethink the whole mess now that we don't have remedial curriculum anymore. I'm going to be sharing the Foundations Textbook that I've been working on with input from a couple other faculty, and try to start up some conversations about what we teach and how we teach it.
For a short while, I thought I was going to get away without having to do my sabbatical presentation, but it finally got put on the calendar, and so I'm also spending time working on that. I've got the slides put together and so it's mostly just cleaning it up and rehearsing it a bit. It's scheduled for the end of March, which gives me plenty of time to work on it. I'm setting it up as a discussion of my goals and series of short observations of things that I took away from the experiences and can apply towards the Data Science program. It's a little weird because I've already handed off the program to the Data Science faculty (though I'm still around for support, especially in helping them navigate our systems), but everything that I'm sharing does connect back to things that they're doing.
The other day, I got word that I've climbed the ladder to achieve the title of "Professor." I find the title amusing because non-academic people think I've been a professor for years (and they're not exactly wrong), and so it's not well-understood how that is a promotion. Academia is weird, just like those gowns that we wear at graduation. And it's been oddly anticlimactic. There was a bit of intrigue regarding my application in the sense that I don't have a lot of the typical academic publishing, but I had enough that the various committees and other gatekeepers let it go through. I felt very solid on the teaching and service fronts, so there was no drama there. I don't know what I expected to happen at this point. I did receive a few congratulatory emails (that I'll need to reply to on Tuesday when I get back to the office). And I need to send a couple notes to people who also got promotions at the same time I did. But there's just not a huge burst of energy and excitement when I think about it. Maybe there's just too many other things going on right now.
The math faculty are going to spend some time developing our program learning outcomes this coming week. It's turning into a much broader pilot than I had initially anticipated because the institution recently got approval to change out assessment methods, which is giving us a different outlook on how we think about our learning outcomes. Rather than the previous artifact-based approach, we're moving to a more refleciton-based approach. This is less methodologically sound, but will probably be more impactful in terms of actually coming up with programmatic improvements. We're going to be one of the first programs to try this out, so we'll see how it goes.
I'm involved in some high level conversations about creating a space for new innovative programs to come forward. It's kind of an internal grant program where the institution tries to set particular goals and then people with ideas can propose them and (if they get approved) get support to help make them into a reality. We're sort of slowly working through the details right now of how such a thing might look, and then whenever that superstructure is created, I have ideas of things that I would like to try to get through that process. It's mostly about expanding our math support by leaning more on the tutoring center to move towards providing sessions in specific topics to further support the corequisite courses.
I finally finsihed printing the OWL security bases for IT. It really did take a full month of printing to crank out 30 of them, but the task is done.
Life outside of work has been geting busy, too. We're changing out some of the furniture, which is our first larger-scale redecorating move as a couple. I'm learning to think about things like having a focal point for a room, but I can't say that I really have a solid intuition for what that means in practice. I think I see the decorating world through the distinct elements and not about building up a cohesive picture. Which probably explains why my rooms looked the way they did before I got married. But all of that is coming along well.
Thor is doing well. I haven't redesigned his water fountain, so we're back to the boring old bowl method. But I did complete the 3D printed scoop, and it's working well. I got him a scratching mat to try to get him to not scratch the new carpet as much, but that was literally today and I don't know if he'll make the transition. He has used it a couple times already, so I'm optimistic. I also completed the new stool for his bed to rest on to get it off the floor. It's not amazing. Or even that good. But it works, and that's what counts.
Other news: Still no piano playing. It's been a lot of months. But maybe eventually. I kind of wonder if getting an electric piano would encourage me to play more because I can better control the volume. But that would be another expense when we're already spending a bunch on other things, so maybe not now. I found out that someone literally copied a bunch of my videos on YouTube, and so claimed copyright for the first time with them. And I think I'm getting a little bit of a bump in viewership because of that, which is a little bit exciting. Maybe I'll start drinking tea. Joan is doing well, and we're learning a lot for the other project. Everything looks to be on target for that, which is great. And life goes on.
