What comes after "four"?

Deep not-specifically-mathematical thought for the day: it's been a long time since I've been at the same school for more than four years without some major milestone (e.g., receiving a degree) marking a significant turn in the road. I was at UIUC for three years only, and at Vandy for four years before that...there were five years in Denver, but I earned the B.S. at the end of the third year and at that point entered the wide, wonderful world of graduate school, so I may as well have been on a different planet.

I'm about to enter my fifth year here (and my fourth year of blogging about it). I wonder how it's going to feel? Steady? Stable? Institutionalizing?

We'll see.

Everything's more or less in place for the REU to start in a little over a week. (A week from right now is when I expect the first of the students to arrive.) Aside from the personnel, little is changing from last year's program: if things go well (and they did), why bother messing around? I've managed to put together a list of 39 at least moderately tractable questions to start with, we'll see where we go from there. Obviously the REU is going to take up much of my summer, and what little work time I've got outside of that will go toward prepping for the fall semester's courses (Calc I, with a new text, and 280 again).

In other news, my colleague Euterpe agreed to help read through last year's students' weekly reports, in order to assess the development of the students' writing skills along various axes. Thanks, Euterpe!

Plans for the weekend? Finish up the revisions on the paper on mathematical poetry that I wrote for Math Horizons. The editors gave me some great suggestions, and I hope that after I've hammered out the last remaining details the article will be more engaging and enlightening still.