Coming to the end of the Semester

Spring break came late this semester. So did Easter, which was the last day of Spring Break. And it happened to align with my birthday, which was right on time. Apparently, the last time that Easter was on April 9 was back in 1950. But I only need to wait 11 years for it to happen next.

The lateness of Spring Break means that the post-break run to the end of the semester is shorter than usual. There were only four weeks of class (which includes finals week), and now there are only three, and so the pull of "Are we there yet?" is pulling extra hard.

The MATH 120E course spends the last two weeks working on a final presentation project, which means that I really only have one week of direct teaching left. Overall, this class has been pretty good. Although there's the typical 10-15% of the class that just disappears and whatever, the students that have stuck with it are doing great overall and I think they've had a pretty good experience.

The MATH 126 course falls squarely in the "meh" category. The materials were fine, and the broad narrative that the other faculty gave me to work with was also fine. This class had a cluster of students who were all in the same biology and/or chemistry class, and so around test time these students would leave class early en masse to study. I don't blame them for that, but it's been a while since I've had a whole cohort of students in the same situation. Typically, I've had just one or two students do that, and it was less noticeable. But when a quarter of the class leaves, you can really feel the shift of energy. As to whether I should allow this, I stand firmly on the side of "these are adults who can make their own decisions." So after the quiz, if they want to get up and leave, they can, and I'm not going to give them a hard time about it.

The MATH 127 course has one week of content and then two weeks of time for final presentations. This is my first fully-flipped class with self-made videos and everything. I'm quite pleased with this class overall, even if I have some tweaks I want to make. None of the students indicated that information was inaccessible or tests were unfair or anything, and so there's a clear sense of students getting out what they put in. Which is kind of a good general goal of higher education, I think.

The MATH 182 course is what it usually is. We're winding down the class talking and series convergence, and it's an easy class to teach and grade. This one does roll all the way through the last week with teaching, and doesn't have a final project.

In the last week, I've started to mess around with the Canvas API (using a Python setup that someone else created). At this point, I'm not doing anything specifically interesting, but it may be moving in the direction of some interesting automation/research collaborations. What exactly this looks like remains to be seen, as it depends on my ability to make more headway into the getting the API to do things that I want it to. I've learned (for example) that grades are marked as a series of grade changes, and it doesn't appear that the grades themselves exist anywhere, and so in order for me to generate my own grade output, I've got to download the list of grade changes and then update them. And it makes sense why they would do it this way, since (I believe) it makes changes trackable and therefore things are more robust. But it also means that for my purposes I may have to do some extra steps. But that's fine.

On Thursday of next week, I'm going to be heading up to UNLV for some sort of STEM conversation. I guess there's some movement for a multi-institutional grant or something, and so I'm sitting in to see what I and other faculty might have to contribute to it. My understanding is that it's focused primarily on math preparedness, which is right up my alley. So we'll see how that plays out.

Around the house, I'm still working on a number of little projects. And I have the pictures to prove it!

This is part of my garage storage/organization. These cardboard drawers are made from old Amazon boxes and a couple Ikea boxes, plus small 3D printed brackets to better support the layers. This is actually my second attempt at doing something like this. The first one was very ad hoc and was built into a moving box, and this one was much more planned out and intentional. Most of this stuff is random electronics bits and pieces.

From there, we've got the improved scratching pad for Thor. Thor was starting to scratch at the rug, and so I got this scratch pad, but he would put his claws into it and lift it up, and then kind of just look at me as if to say, "Really? You expect me to scratch this?" The problem (as I understood from watching him) is that he can't really "dig in" and pull hard, and so it wasn't satisfying to scratch. And so I got some 2x4s, tried to make nice 45 degree mitre cuts to hide the seams, failed but not badly enough that I couldn't fake it, cut up a rectangle some old particle board with a white finish from what I think was an old dresser, and then screwed the pad into place with some washers. Happily, this did the trick and he's able to really go nuts on this instead of on the carpet, and so everyone is happy.

Then out back, I've got a mister system up and running. You can't really tell, but I also 3D printed some pieces to help direct the nozzles because they kind of pointed in all sorts of directions and needed to be held better than what the manufacturer's clips were able to do. But now they all spray downward and create a curtain of mist that should theoretically make the back yard a bit cooler in the summer. I've got a little more work to do in the not-shown part of this, as right now the part that connects to the hose just kind of hangs down weirdly. I need to get that part to run down the side of the house and closer to where the hose is. I'm not entirely sure how I want to finish that part off.

Here is my first attempt at an elevated planter bed. You can see in the background of the image that I haven't cleaned up the water line. My understanding is that the "correct" thing to do is to bury it. But I haven't gotten around to that and so the hose just winds its way over. I can't say that I really know what I'm doing, but I kind-of-sort-of mimicked something I saw on YouTube. There's a mesh underneath that keeps everything off the ground, and a layer of rock across that mesh to help with drainage and not having the soil fall through, and then a couple bags of "all purpose" soil. Right now, there are a couple drawf sunflower seeds in there. I don't know if that part of the yard will get enough sunlight for them, but those were the seeds we had on hand. This planter box lives under the window of the room that used to be my office.

And here is the former office. The drapes (which are new) are closed because it was nighttime when I took this photo. And we hung some of Joan's grandmother's artwork.

In other news... Friends and family have been super generous, far beyond anything I might have imagined. Thor is doing well. A former student might be interested in taking the piano, which gets me one step closer to getting a digital piano. I met up with a long-time friend this morning and got to hear some updates from his life. I hung out with a couple friends for my birthday/Easter morning. Joan and I did Ventano's for birthday dinner, and the weather was spectacular. We're close to having all of the estate-planning stuff on paper. I should have gone to bed about 45 minutes ago. And life goes on.