Assess this!

After polling my Calc II students briefly at the start of the last two class periods, I realized there was no clear consensus regarding the format of their final evaluation. I had proposed two options: (a) a more "traditional" final exam in which students would solve several more problems involving the techniques we've developed this term, or (b) a "portfolio" of prior work students would put together in order to demonstrate mastery of several different aspects of the class (techniques of integration, applications of integration, communication of mathematics, and a fourth piece of their choice). A successful portfolio would demand that the student justify her inclusion of a particular piece ("piece" being defined loosely as a single problem or an entire homework set, miniproject, quiz, or exam): why does that particular piece demonstrate the mastery being measured?

While a number of students seemed excited about the prospect of a portfolio, several balked, visibly discomfited by the idea of putting a portfolio together. I wonder if some of the less well-organized students would have trouble putting together a portfolio because they've not kept a good record of their work over the semester...? Or perhaps the reluctant students simply want to avoid the "writing" that comes with putting the portfolio in order...? I'm not sure.

As a compromise, I went ahead and made up both, and students can choose which path to take. On the one hand, I made up a four-question "traditional" exam that'll get the students solving several more problems (though one question still asks for a students to come up with their own problem to solve); on the other, I've made a prompt for a four-piece portfolio whose form mirrors the structure of the "traditional" exam. I hope this compromise will satisfy everyone's intellectual curiosities. I'm curious, for one, to see how it works out.

Home stretch

We've got two weeks of classes to go, including 2 meetings of MATH 480, 4 meetings of Ethnomathematics, 6 of MATH 280, and 8 of Calc II. I can't believe we're here already! This semester's gone faster than any I can recall, and it's left us all stressed and strained.

This past week's conference gave me a much-needed break, and I honestly feel much more on top of things now than I did a week ago. I felt much more relaxed going into both of my classes today, especially given that I'm feeling pretty good about where my Calc II and 280 classes are right now.

As this semester's been so dramatically abbreviated (it's almost two weeks shorter than spring semester of last year, for instance, after snow days are factored in), I've spent no small amount of time this term stressing out over how much I'd be able to "get through" in my classes. I fear MATH 280's suffered a little bit because of this, and I'm going to have to trim back on the "special topics" I like to include at the end, just to get the bare minimum in. Ditto Calc II: bye-bye differential equations, hello Taylor series; the latter I deem indispensable, the former not so much.

Despite the frustration I've felt at gettin' it done, so to speak, I'm feeling better about where we are. I think at this point I've just got an (pardon my language) "ah-fuck-it" attitude about the term. By that I don't mean that I'm cutting the students loose and letting them drift in the wind; nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I'm relaxing my expectations for the courses and focusing on making sure every last student understands fully every last thing we work on together in these closing weeks. If that means we have to cut a quiz here or modify an assignment there, so be it. I want us all on the same page as we cross the finish line.

Students: if you're in one of my classes and you're reading this, you can help me out immensely by responding in the comments to this post. Please take five minutes to write back to me there, indicating one thing you'd like to see happen in your course before the semester's up that'll help you make the most out of our remaining time together. Tell me which class you're in (anonymously, if you'd prefer), and let me know what one thing we can do to help each other across the finish line.

Job satisfaction

Every now and then you have one of those moments that makes you realize why it is you do what you do. I've had a couple of them in the past 15 hours or so.

Last night I managed to prove that the path P₅ on five vertices is Ramsey unsaturated. (Oddly, there were no ticker-tape parades this morning.) I'm pretty certain this fact has been proven before (I know it's conjectured), but it was satisfying to prove it for myself.

Just now one of the five stalwart students taking both Calc II and MATH 280 with me this term (poor souls) asked a fantastic question based on one of their take-home exam questions. "Is it possible for the center of mass of an object to lie outside the object?" Indeed it is possible, though it turns out not to be the case on the exam problem in question, and this was an astute question to ask!

We then spent about ten minutes generalizing the problem I'd asked on the exam. It turns out that by modifying the endpoints of the interval on which our object is based (and leaving alone the function giving its upper boundary, namely sec(x)), we can in fact obtain an object with center of mass lying outside of the object.

Good times.

CRTF?!

For the past two years I've served as Chair both of our university's Writing Intensive (WI) Subcommittee and of its Integrative Liberal Studies Oversight Committee (ILSOC; the body of which WI is a component). I was on WI for two years before chairing it, and during that time did a good deal of assessment and faculty development work for the body before coming to its head.

I've enjoyed all of this work: as anyone who reads this blog even casually (or anyone who's talked to me for more than a few minutes about my teaching) knows, I'm passionate about writing across the curriculum in all of its manifestations, and I consider myself duty-bound to evangelize and elegize.

I've enjoyed the work, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm tired of it. I'd estimate (if I had to pull a number or two out of a hat) that I've put an average of 5-7 hours a week towards WI during the past four years, and probably 3-5 hours a week towards ILSOC during the past two. This includes the summer months, for much of the assessment, faculty development, and reporting I've had to do for both bodies has taken place over the summer. In all this adds up to well over 1000 hours of work...and this is likely a conservative estimate.

I'll be rotating off of WI (my term is up) at the end of this academic year, and thus off of ILSOC, for it's my chairing of the former body that places me on the latter one in the first place. I've had a few good innings, and, to further that metaphor, I might say I've bowled several centuries. It's been fun.

What'll I be doing with my free time come next Fall, or even sooner? Lest you think I'll be languishing in a non-administrative lull, I might let you know that I've been placed on the "Curricular Sustainability" subcommittee of the latest chimerical beast dreamed up by our Provost and Faculty Senate Chair, the Curricular Review Task Force, or CRTF, for short.

To be clear: I volunteered to be on CRTF when the call went out a few weeks back. I even asked specifically to be placed on the subcommittee I've been placed on. (I'm delighted to find that several colleagues whom I respect deeply will be on the same subcommittee...many of whom have roughly my tenure, and many of whom I've worked with before.) I'm actually not complaining about this new assignment, as I believe it'll prove interesting, challenging, fulfilling, and (yes, I'm going to say it) fun.

But...

...there's something wrong here.

The Curricular Sustainability Subcommittee (CSS..."cascading style sheet"?) will be tasked with mapping out a proposal to make our school's curriculum deliverable by the current faculty (read: "without the adjuncts we cannot at this time afford") without driving them insane or further abrading their already red, rubbed, and raw morale. Sounds simple enough, right? During the CRTF's organizational meeting this past Friday, I began jotting down a list of related issues as they came to me. One after another they came, a few here, a few there, all interlocking and interacting, one popping up as another is squeezed down, like the flesh of a bulbous balloon.

What's involved?

• Class size
• Number of classes
• Frequency of class meetings
• Physical space available for class meetings
• Student enrollment
• Funding supplied by students' tuition
• "Down time" (release time and sabbatical...the latter now euphemistically called "professional development leave," and before that "off-campus scholarly assignment"; heaven forbid we call it "sabbatical": that would make us sound lazy!)
• Comparability with other institutions' policies
• Accounting of courses (cross-listing, "double-dipping," other accounting tricks)
• Meaningful co-teaching and related pedagogical practices
• Relation of our mission and goals to those of the UNC system as a whole
• Time to perform research
• Time to perform service to the department, university, and community
• Use of technology (especially regarding distance learning and hybrid course designs)
• Faculty development (cost of, and targets of)
• Support for curricular development efforts, for faculty development efforts...support in general
• Reassessment of the roles of graders, UG teaching assistants, and other opportunities for student engagement in pedagogy
• The university's identity and mission as a liberal arts institution
  
• Et cetera

As some sample interpenetrations, working off of the unwritten (but widely stated, including over and over at this past Friday's meeting) aim of ensuring a 3-3 load:

Moving to a 3-3 load without the help of several dozen more faculty will lead to...larger class sizes, creating...greater demands for more (and more frequently unavailable) physical space, requiring...further renovations to existing physical structures, or perhaps extending hours during which regular courses are offered...unless...

...enrollment is forced downward, leading to...a decrease in the tuition monies available to fund the university's efforts across the board, raising...the school's dependence on other sources of funding...or, unless...

...a move is made to offer more and more online and hybrid online/face-to-face courses, for which...faculty will need more professional development (to better acquaint themselves with this pedagogical paradigm) and preparation time (you can teach an old dog new tricks, but not overnight), assuming we can all get over...the damage this move might do to the university's identity as a liberal arts institution, in which meaningful student-instructor engagement and student-led learning (undoubtedly harder to orchestrate from afar) are highly prized.

The astute reader will noticed that I've not yet followed up on the "something's wrong here" I threw out above.

In asking faculty to take on the job of resolving this and other equally immense issues involved with overhauling our curriculum, the administration is adding yet another duty to the already vertiginous tower of tasks it's performing (like QEP design and delivery, assessment for SACS, day-to-day operations of the Humanities, Arts and Ideas, Intensives, Clusters, and ILS Colloquia, and various and sundry other sickeningly corporatized bureaucratic functions). Faculty, most of whom are already teaching three or four increasingly large sections every semester, many of whom are facing increasingly great expectations for service and scholarship, are more and more frequently being asked to take on administrative roles.

Like it or not, we're being turned into quasi-administrators, all of us.

Halfway through Friday's CRTF meeting the question was raised: "well, once we've put all of our recommendations together, then what?" Clearly, as it stands, no single body will have the authority to make all of the changes we're likely to suggest; whatever the faculty can't do on an informal basis will have at least to go through Faculty Senate (or at least its subcommittee, the Academic Policy Committee), if not General Administration (GA) itself, far away in a semi-mythical place called Raleigh (a place where the public liberal arts university is not well-, if ever at all, understood). I imagined the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which the ark is trundled off into the bowels of an immense warehouse, presumably never to be seen again...so it would be with our report, no doubt: how many months would be wasted in trying to coordinate the several separate bodies whose work it would be to try to implement whatever suggestions we could come up with?

In a delightful moment of daydream, I thought: "Rebel. Revolt. Take over. Throw the Senate out, screw GA, and rewrite the rulebook, starting with page 1. If we've got the backing of the faculty as a whole [there are some 50 or 60 of us on CRTF, by the way], who's to stop us?" It was a childish thought, to be sure, but it was nice while it lasted.

Just minutes before the meeting on Friday I'd been sitting in the Math Lab working with Didi and Belle, two of my favorite new students this semester. They were working at trying to make their submission for the Calc II Integral Insanity miniproject more fiendish (the goal is to make as difficult an integral as possible, while still making it doable). We were trying to figure out how to build a reasonably challenging integration-by-parts problem backwards, through reverse engineering. I don't think any of the three of us had had much sleep this past week, and we were all slap-happy and silly as hell. Progress was slow, but I think we eventually got there.

It's moments like these that make me remember why I do what I do. I'm a teacher (and scholar) first, and an administrator second...distantly second. As important as WI, ILSOC, CRTF, and all of the other academic acronymic entities are in the abstract, there's nothing more important in concrete terms than making sure that a future mathematician understands induction, or that a future engineer or public health official knows how to analyze a simple mathematical model, or that I keep playing an active role in the generation of new knowledge, for my own sake and for my students'.

I can't lose sight of this.

How tweet it is

My Calc II students were all atwitter again today. I knew today's tweet would treat them to a challenge: I asked them to (in 140 characters or fewer) summarize the method of partial fractions for integrating rational functions. Anyone who has more than a passing memory of Calc II likely remembers that the process is not particularly hard...but it's long as hell and therefore difficult to summarize succinctly.

Those I felt were some of the students' strongest tweets are below, complete with intentional spelling errors and sparse spacing. I think they did very well (only a couple of them seemed to miss the method altogether...if you're one of those people, please don't hesitate to come on by my office; we can go over another example or two together).

"makesuretopislowerindefreethanbottomfactorbottomdecomposethebottomintegratethatdecompositionclearthedenominatorssolveforconstantsbingo!"

"1)long divide 2)factor 3)look for decomposition 4)anti-differentiate 5)find constants"

"1.long division if degree_top>degree_bottom.2.factor denominator.3.A/linear&Bx+C/irreducable quads. cross-mult.denomxnumerators.4.solve A,B,C"

"to integrate fractions, 1st long divide, then factor separate the integral and solve if not solvable separate out each term bottom and the" [ran out of room!]

"1poly long division 2factor3decompose w/each factor in the denominator4integrate5cross multiply and solve for each constant."

"makeoriginalfunctionsumofpartialfractions.clearthedenominators.findx-valueto=0tosolveforconstants.ifcant,comparecoefficientsonlikepowers."

They're definitely growing more accustomed to writing in this highly constrained genre, one which encourages concision and carefulness, and the ability to get right to the heart of the matter.

Reboot

Long day. Full day.

I got to campus by about 7:30 so I could take care of some bureaucratic matters and get ready for the "reboot" of my MATH 179 Ethnomathematics course. My intent today was to transition smoothly from the textbook by Marcia Ascher we've been using to guide the course so far to Stanislas Dehaene's (about the relative merits of these books I blogged yesterday).

That we did: we spent about half an hour talking about least common multiples, primes, and relative primeness. These concepts all come up in understanding Mayan calendar. Though some of the students were shaky with the concepts at first, they all seemed willing to engage them, and moreover the concepts are more concrete than many of those we've worked with so far this semester (like Marshall Islander stick charts and months based on Jupiter's moons). This concreteness helped students get a grip. We even dished a bit about Gauss's formula for the sum of the first n natural numbers and the conjectural infinitude of twin prime pairs.

The smooth slide into Dehaene that I'd hoped for came with an exercise I'd put together to test one of the points Dehaene makes in Chapter 4 of his text (which students are to read for next Tuesday): people who grow up with either English (13 of the 14 students present today) or French (the remaining one of the 14) as their native language have difficulty in remembering any series of more than seven or eight randomly generated digits shown to them 20 seconds previously. All 14 students were successful at remembering five, six, or seven digits, and at eight people started to falter: two students failed to get all eight, and several more failed to get nine. No one remembered ten correctly.

Incidentally, native Cantonese speakers can generally manage 10 without difficulty. If you'd like to know more, read Dehaene's book.

I felt renewed energy in class today. I'm looking forward to seeing what the students think about the reading for next week.

From Ethnomathematics I went straight to my colleague Louise's LANG 120 (our first-year composition) course, where I was guest-lecturing on the subject of writing in mathematics. Louise hoped that I could expose the students to some of the conventions of mathematical writing, partly in order to demonstrate that many of those conventions, and the criteria by means of which the quality of writing can be measured, are not all that different from those of academic writing in general. I think I succeeded in this to some extent. It was a lot of fun! It seemed like a good class, with some very outgoing and eager students.

In Calc II I (boy, that looks weird) tried out a new format for the students' quiz. Rather than offering a collaborative quiz (as the last few have been), and rather than making the quiz a fully solitary activity, I gave the students a brief "consultation period" in the middle of the exercise. The students had several minutes to get a start on solving the problem posed to them, and then I allowed them roughly two minutes to confer with one another in whatever way they wanted to, sharing ideas, checking their answers against each others', etc. This period over, they returned to solo work before submitting their quizzes. My theory was that this format would help students in much the same way "think/pair/share" exercises help them: the initial brainstorming and groundwork is done on a solo basis, but then conference with their colleagues helps to refine their initial thoughts as they take shape.

I can't tell how people felt about this, or if it had a noticeable effect on performance on the quiz. (The students did pretty well, making, for the most part, the errors I'd expect them to make. Nothing out of the ordinary.) Only one student offered feedback on the format on the quiz itself, indicating that she felt it threw her off more than it helped her.

If you're in my Calc II class, how do you think it went? If you're not in my Calc II class, how do you think you'd respond to this activity? Would it help you? Hinder you? What up? Feedback, please!

Brevity is the soul of wit

I had the Calc II students tweeting again today, this time about the appropriate way to solve trig integrals involving sines and cosines. In 140 characters or less, how much can you say about solving such integrals? Below are some of the strongest responses. (By the way, "EFTI" means "Everyone's Favorite Trig Identity," my term for the identity sin²(θ) + cos²(θ) = 1.)

"If you see an odd # of cos(x), u=sin(x).If you see an odd # of sin(x), u=cos(x).If they are both even then throw your things and cry:("

"If there is an odd number of cos(x),letu=sin(x). If there is an odd number of sin(x) let u=cos(x).Then use trig identity if needed."

"To solve integrals with sin & cos, u=sinif ur cos is odd. u=cos if ur sin is odd. If both are even: weep. And Patrick spake it thus."

"Use EFTI!If the trigS has an odd and an even, make u=the even term.If the exponent is higher than 2,it may be easiest to seperate it first!"

"Integral with sin&cos: u sub the non-odd and sub the remainder with trig identity, then simplify. The rest should be easy."

"To solve intergral w/ sin & cos/if you see odd # of cos u=sin if you see odd # of sin u=cos/think of how to split them upsoit works out right"

"when u hav sine&cosine,ur u is the nonodd one.if both r odd u can choose either then use usub and EFTI to solve the trigintegral.its so fun!"

"In general: If the integral has an odd # of sins or cos, make the opposite one the u in the u-substitution set up.(Be careful of evens!)"

"Ifanodd#ofcos,u=sin(x)Ifanodd#ofsin,u=cos(x)Thendifferentiatetheu,andrememberthat1=sin2(x)+cos2(x).Settheintegralintermsofuandsolvewithrespecttou"

"If the powers are even/odd, use the even one as u. Iff there are extra of the odds, use EFTI. If both are odd, use the higher power as u."

I should mention that the overall quality of these tweets was stronger than that of the last set. Words were selected more carefully and fewer students felt the need to forgo spaces to say what they needed to in the room provided. I'm not sure if this improvement is a consequence of a more easily-summarized topic or a growing acquaintance with the genre. Maybe a little of both?

Tweet!

At the end of class today I asked my Calc II students to write Twitter-style tweets in which they describe how to use the method of integration by parts. To help them stay within the 140-character limit of the genre, I provided them with graph paper on which I'd blocked out boxes containing 140 squares apiece.

The results?

They found it hard to say all that they wanted to say, so they had to focus on the issues most central to the method. (This, of course, was the point of the exercise.) Some tried to save space by eliminating spaces between words or by eliminating vowels. The former resulted in text that was still readable; the latter, I would argue, did not. Compare:

"findauvalue&differentiateit.findadvvalue&integrateit.taketheproductofuvandsubtracttheintegralofvdufromthatproduct."

versus

"Use da frmla fr ibp's. you cn chse ne prt fr u. da othr prts r dv. slve fr du and v. thn plg into frml. look a pngun <(") !!!!11one!!!"

Not only is the first easier to read; it's also correct, complete, and doesn't succumb to silly non sequitur by the end.

Some of the best were short and to the point, and even managed to get in some guidance about how to choose u and dv: "Sudv=uv-SvduumustgetsimpledvmustbeS.use formula above solve" was far terser than it needed to be; throw in a few spaces to make it more readable, and expand on what "mustbeS" surely means:

"Sudv=uv-Svdu. u must get simple. dv must be integrable. use formula above. solve."

is still well within the 140-character limit.

Clearer, but not quite as complete (it makes no mention of dv), and still pretty solid:

"pick a portion of the original integral that will get simpler when derived and set it to u, then do int(f(x))=uv-int(vdu)."

Several others were nearly as good, but used slightly awkward notation or omitted critical pieces of the formula. From what I can tell, the students get the gist of the process, but may still be a little iffy on the details.

Practice, people, practice! This gets much easier after you've done a few of them. If you want to go over a few examples together, please come on by. I'd love to work on a few with you. You'll get there, I promise.

Confusion and confidence

Lately in all of my classes I've been using a variation on the classic "three-minute theme" low-stakes writing activity in which I ask students to write three things about a reading or a class discussion or a course in its entirety:

1. What one topic are you most intrigued about, or want to know more about, right now?

2. What one topic are you most confused about right now?

3. What one topic are you most confident about right now?

Each of these prompts has a particular purpose. The first helps students identify their interests and better understand why it is they might find our coursework appealing. This interest and appeal translates into motivation to keep working at the course. The third prompt has much the same effect: by reflecting on a topic she feels confident about, a student is likely to say to herself "yeah, I can get this! I'll keep at it, and sometime soon the rest will come just as easily." Meanwhile in the reflection needed to respond to the second prompt the student will identify areas on which she may need to focus extra effort.

I'm calling this activity "Intrigue, Confusion, and Confidence," for obvious reasons. I've already used it several times this term to help my MATH 179 class focus their discussions, and I just used it a half-hour ago to help me figure out where it is my Calc II students are feeling good about themselves...and where it is they might need extra work.

What are the students feeling good about?

Numerical integration: 18
Finding volumes (using disks/washers or cylindrical shells): 13
General integration: 6
Riemann sums: 2

What are they feeling not-so-good about?

Finding volumes: 13 (general: 5, cylindrical shells: 4, disks/washers: 4)
Work and other physical applications: 6
Numerical integration: 5
Setting up integrals: 3
General integration: 3
Visualization (drawing): 1

It's worth noting that we've just today wrapped up our discussion of numerical integration, so those topics may appear more frequently because they're fresh in mind. They're also not quite as complicated conceptually as some of the other topics we've covered. I find it interesting that as many people are fine with volumes as are iffy about them; this complication makes it difficult to give any specific prescription for study or review. I'll put together some additional practice problems for people to tackle tomorrow after the quiz.

If you're one of the students in my Calc II class and you're reading this, do me a favor: take five minutes to go to the comments section and let me know if this brief exercise at the end of class today was helpful to you...and if so, why. I appreciate it!

By the way, the two most entertaining comments, both about areas of confidence: "Rotating functions around axes is SUPER FUN! [accompanied by a Bundt-pan shaped volume of revolution]" and "That thingy. Can't think of process name. [accompanied by a sketch of a vase-like object suggesting a disk-method volume-finding question]"

Where it's at

At the end of Calc II today I asked the students to write two things on a scrap of paper: (1) whether they'd like to get the first take-home exam this Friday or next Friday and (2) on a scale of 1 to 10, how they feel about our class so far (with additional commentary as needed).

Most of the students are really enjoying the class and getting a lot out of it, giving a rating of either 9 or 10, and in one case 11, for the second question. (There were, of course, some oddballs who insisted on giving a rating of 3π or √97 or some similar silliness.) Most people loved the way the class is set up, with a high level of interaction, applicability, challenging but authentic problems, and fun. "I'm enjoying the togetherness," said one student, and another said "I really enjoy your approach. It can be overwhelming, and a lot of work. But you make it fun."

The most common concern was the speedy pace of the class: 4 out of 30 students mentioned this concern. (3 out of 30 mentioned the amount of work, the next-most-common concern.) The pace is, sadly, hard to make much slower, given how much mileage we're expected to make before Calc III. (And, as I point out almost every term, I make my way through these topics more slowly than any of my colleagues do. I know my department chair's section of Calc II is about three sections ahead of us right now.)

There are ways to make the pace and workload feel less stressful:

Do you feel like you're having a hard time keeping up with notes in class? Come to class with my "skeletal" notes already printed out: you'll have less to write and can focus more on the ideas. I strongly recommend this route. I know it's helped a lot of people in previous semesters.

Do you feel overwhelmed by the homework load? Get started on the homework as soon as it's assigned, and identify immediately any potential problems you think you might encounter. Ask me about these problems right away, so that you're not stuck asking them on Friday afternoon, an hour before the homework is due. (Things always feel more stressful right before the deadline.)

Do you feel like you're getting the ideas as we talk about them, but that they're just not sinking in as well as you'd like them to? Talk them out with your friends in the class. Draw lots of pictures as you explain the ideas to your friends. Puzzle through the pictures together and make sure you can tie the conceptual ideas to the computations that go hand-in-hand with them. Not only do your friends sometimes do a better job than I do in explaining these concepts; moreover often the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. (I honestly didn't truly understand Calc II until I started teaching it as a graduate student.)

Above all else, remember that you're not alone. We have an overwhelmingly friendly class, and I've seen how wonderfully you're all working together. Take advantage of that sense of togetherness and help each other out. You're making a great team.

Oh, and this Friday beat out next Friday, 17 to 12 (with 1 abstention). I believe I will pass out the exam this week, but please recall that you'll have a week in which to do it.

So far

So far, though it took a little while to build up steam, this semester's been great.

After three straight days of canceled classes and (and a couple more late starts thrown in the next couple of weeks), we got enough ground to get some traction, and I'm starting to feel like I'm in the groove.

Both my Calc II and 280 classes are large...I'd even call the 280 class huge: 33 in Calc II and 36 in 280. Yes: three, six. I'm always anxious about classes this large (I seem to attract them), but the students in both have set my mind at ease: they're all very engaged, outgoing, and willing to both ask and answer questions, in both classes. I've got fantastic students in both, and they're making the classrooms' atmosphere lively, spirited, safe, and fun.

I think I've done a good job in encouraging a healthy learning environment so far this term, downplaying grades, up-playing collaboration, throwing in a good number of writing-to-learn opportunities...the students are receiving this well. I sense a greater-than average willingness to learn on these students' parts. It's going to work out well.

I was particularly excited about today's 280 class. This morning we had our "LaTeX seminar," in preparation for which I asked everyone to install a compiler and a text editor on their computers and bring them, if possible, to class. Roughly three quarters of the students had laptops with them, and most of these (after a few fits and starts and glitches involving flavors of Texmaker and odd configuration settings) were able to get LaTeX up and running within five or six minutes. And they liked it. Comments like "This is so cool!" were fairly frequent. It's the best reception LaTeX has ever gotten in a 280 course.

Meanwhile Ethnomathematics is steaming along, picking out a course through the Marshall Islands. Literally, actually. We've spend the last week talking about the mathematical aspects of the mattang, the stick charts used by traditional Marshall Islander navigators in order to plot their path from one atoll to another in the sprawling and sparse archipelago. The students have even been working on building their own mattang out of various materials, including everything from pipe cleaners to pretzel sticks.

Late last week I tried to get the students to cast aside their "Western" assumptions about the make-up of maps by asking them to create maps from our classroom to various important offices and organizations on campus, maps which could not make reference to human-made objects, could not use any sort of reference to fixed units of distance (feet, miles, paces, etc.), and would be followable by someone who had not had a hand in creating the map in the first place. I realized after the fact that I should have included additional stipulations: no text, and mandatory use of "nontraditional" materials: the vast majority of the texts included copious textual commentary and were drawn on paper. (I admit that I'd hoped to see more "tactile" map-like objects like the mattang.)

Nevertheless, the students are doing well in what I think is a highly nontraditional course. I'm eager to see what they come up with for the brochures I'm asking them to make, one for each of several important campus services (like the Math Lab and the Student Health Center).

That's all I'll say for now. I'm sorry this is a bit of a banal post, but I've had nothing heinous happen so far this term. I could say something about the book (coming along, in bits and pieces) or the state's budget situation (in a word, bleak...think "how in the hell can we keep providing the quality of education we pretend to provide?"), or even about my upcoming visits to various writing programs around the state, but I'll leave those for other posts to come soon.

Confuzzled

At the end of class yesterday I asked each of my Calc II students to write down two things: the single topic (of all those we've addressed so far) about which she feels most confused, and the single topic about which she feels most confident.

The results?

Ambiguous.

What are you confused about?

1. Antiderivatives: 3
2. Riemann sums and finding area: 6
3. Basics from Calc I: 7
4. Trigonometry: 7
5. u-substitution: 10

What do you feel good about?

1. Setting up problems: 1
2. Riemann sums: 1
3. Derivatives: 2
4. Antiderivatives: 8
5. Finding area: 10
6. u-substitution: 10

I find it funny that equally many people find u-substitution confusing as find it fine. More people are okay with both antidifferentiation and area-finding than aren't, and there seems to be more uncertainty about carry-over from Calc I than there is about anything else.

Bottom line? I don't think any adjustments are necessary at this point. I'll just keep in mind that people are going to want reminders about tricksy twists in trig and algebra as those twists appear (as they did today in the form of 30-60-90 right triangles).

Having identified several students in this class who are accomplished writers, I'm including in this course a greater-than-even-I-generally-include number of writing-to-learn exercises. Today we ended class with a two-minute reflection on the process of finding volumes using integrals; I hope it helped.

In other news, I've now finished three of the tentatively-six chapters of my book. This weekend I hope to make a dent in Chapter 4, which deals with assessing and responding to student writing. The current draft's largely complete but is still rather ellipsis-ridden...

Update on the update, or, The Squeaky Wheel

Well, I squeaked, and I got greased. Beginning on Wednesday, the Monday-Wednesday-Friday meetings of my Calc II course will take place in a room in my own building, and with

1. ten more desks,
2. much more boardspace, and
3. a much more open, workable configuration.

Whew.

The only question remaining is...why didn't they give me this classroom in the first place?

Okay, y'all...this s**t is weak.

I am apoplectic, and my students aren't far behind.

My section of Calc II currently has 33 students enrolled in it, just one over the cap. I think it's going to stabilize at that number.

The room they've stuck us in had only 25 desks when I got to the classroom this afternoon; every one of them was taken. We fashioned two more seats out of a spare table and some stray chairs, but they had to be placed off to the side, in this small "alcove" formed by the wall that separates a roughly 10-by-10-foot section of the room from the entryway (don't get me started on the floorplan). From this place, the two students sitting at the table couldn't see the whiteboard because of the acuteness of the angle their lines of sight formed to it. The whiteboard's not all that big to begin with (maybe 12 feet long?), and though there's a blackboard of about the same length, it's placed off at the back of the "alcove" I described above, so that only half of the class would be able to see it at all.

This is ridiculous. I refuse to believe that this is the only room available to me at that time, especially when there are classrooms on campus which are simply going unused. Yeah, there's a "classroom," a spacious one at that, in a portion of the science building next door which is allocated to the Chemistry Department, which is currently being used to store desks, from what I can tell. There are no classes scheduled in it this semester. I don't know if there's even a writing surface in it, but this begs the question:

Why on Earth is there a large department scrounging to find rooms to accommodate its courses, when there are much smaller departments wasting the (much larger) space they've been given?

I'm going to try to snag that unused classroom, if it's at all usable.

To be continued...

Day One...finally

Well, yesterday was our first day of classes. I knew we'd get there eventually, but Snowpocalypse 2011 gave us three days of canceled classes before we finally got things underway with a two-hour delay.

My "first class" therefore turned out to be the first meeting of my first-ever first-year seminar, on ethnomathematics. Although we were a bit rushed (trying to take care of two days' worth of business in a single day), I think things went well. At 14 students, the class is the smallest I've taught in years (not counting, perhaps, one or two sessions of the senior seminar); this is going to offer me a welcome relief. It'll also make my student-centered teaching techniques more effective.

After introductions and bureaucratic whatnot, we got started with a "Think/Three/Share" on campus services, offices, et cetera. (One of the purposes of the course is to introduce students to the university and to academic life, and to help students understand the purpose of a liberal arts institution.) Unprompted, the students came up with a substantial list of university offerings, including everything from the Health and Wellness Center to the many offices lining the student union. In a few weeks I'll be asking them to go around to each of these points of interest, interviewing employees there, and designing brochures to advertise those offices' services to prospective students.

After this exercise, we got the mathematical ball rolling with an activity I thought might help the students to identify certain mathematical "conceits" we hold. I showed a clip from the movie Contact (1997), in which Jodie Foster (as Carl Sagan's Eleanor Arroway) and friends are first contacted by an alien intelligence. The alien transmits a series of radio pulses their way, consisting of 2 bursts, then a pause; 3 bursts, then a pause; 5 bursts, then a pause...the first few dozen primes are pulsed out, and from this nonrandom behavior the scientists infer that whatever's sending the message must be a smart cookie.

Of course, there are several assumptions here that are arrogant and "humanocentric." Ranging from the most specific to the most broad:

1. The pulses are sent assuming knowledge about (and concern for) divisibility, the conceptual underpinning of prime numbers),
2. the pulses are meant to be interpreted in base-10 arithmetic, and
3. the pulses are broadcast with the assumption that we use a discrete number system in the first place.

The students didn't catch the first of these, but they caught the second two. I was impressed! We didn't have a whole lot of time to follow up on this exercise before we had to go. I only had a small bit of time to explain their first writing assignment, an "ethnomathematical autobiography," which, besides having the most Greek I've ever fit into a single assignment title, will challenge them to speculate on the ways in which one's upbringing might affect one's perception of mathematics, in the context of their own lives. We'll do some writing exercises on Tuesday (peer review and metacognitive writing), and Thursday will see us begin talking about math in other cultures.

My second class was the first meeting of my Calc II kiddoes. This class is packed! The room's designed to max out around 30 students; I've got 34 in the class now, and one or two more who'd like to get in. It was almost standing-room-only: once the desks ran out we had just enough chairs (and a single stool) to accommodate every last tush in the room. Moreover, the room itself is rather small and cramped. Fortunately we meet in a different room on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; I hope this other room is larger.

However, this begs a pedagogical point: what effect does it have on learning, moving the class from room to room on different days of the week? It can't help but have a noticeable impact, I would think. I've got to be open about this: I'm becoming increasingly ticked about the lack of respect the administration has shown the Mathematics Department here, in the form of allocation of space and resources. Every single semester we teach with too few rooms and too few seats. Despite serving more students (as measured by face-time equivalents) than any other department except perhaps Literature and Language, we always get the short end of the stick when it comes to classroom space.

It's verging on the absurd now. I teach in four different buildings this semester. Four. There's one day of the week (Wednesday) on which I'll teach in three different buildings in one day. I understand if occasionally one might need to be sent out into some far-flung corner of campus for one class or another, but considering most departments teach courses which meet almost exclusively in that department's faculty's home building, I can't help but feel we're being slighted. (I just did a quick survey of our course offerings; at a glance most departments teach either one or no sections outside of their home buildings.)

At the risk of sounding crass, that shit ain't right. Can you imagine the holy hell that would be raised if the chemists were asked to teach their small upper-level courses in the basement of New Hall, where all of the foreign language people dwell?

Anyway....

Aside from being cramped, the first day of Calc II came off rather well. No major kinks. We spent much of the class time building a rough concept map of Calc I, which I hope to include in my book.

Speaking of which: I finished off about 26,000 words over break, and am now about 80% done with a first draft. Draft versions of Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 are nearly done, and 7's coming along as well. Chapters 1 and 2 might end up getting merged into one, and I'll likely get a start on those/that this weekend.

For now, I'm off...in twenty minutes I've got the first meeting of this semester's 280 course. 34 students! The last time I taught it (Fall 2009), I had 15. Crikey.

Wish me luck.

Rocks and gravel

I've just finished reading Jonathan Kozol's Ordinary resurrections, begun just a few days back, and I feel, as I usually do on reaching the end of one of his books, an overwhelming sense of tiredness bound together with a bright and unbreakable thread of hope and strength.

It's a good book on which to end this academic year, surely the most tiring yet of my career (although, as I've noted on this blog before, not the busiest). Reading it at the close of the year gives me at once a sense of closure (which I've sorely needed) and a feeling of renewed energy. The book ends on the same note, as Kozol describes a gift of art Pineapple, one of the children of whom he speaks about most often in the book, gave to him: "an imitation stained-glass window that she made from tissue paper, brightly colored with green paint and with a wash of light-blue ink...When I asked her recently if it was supposed to be a rising sun or a setting sun, she seemed at first to not remember what I meant...'You decide,' she told me uselessly...at the risk of being sentimental about somebody whose sunny disposition brings a lot of joy into a world that has too many cloudy afternoons, I like to think it's rising" (p. 339).

Is it?

Kozol often admits in this book and others he's written since that he's getting older and feeling weaker. Although not yet as frail as he is physically (he's over seventy now, if I'm not wrong, and was sixty-four when he wrote the book I've just finished), I feel, on certain days at least, that I can empathize: each passing year steals away a little bit more of my relevance, my credibility, and my coolness.

"You may have them eating out of your hand now," my department's chair sometimes warns me, a hint of glee in his voice, "since you're not all that much older than they are. But just wait until you're my age." I'm warned that I won't be seen so much as the cool older brother but rather the stern-but-caring father. Just this past semester I encountered a student out of whom my most earnest attempts at cool cajolery could coax nothing. Magda, scarred, I suspect, by recent unpleasant experiences with mathematics, was timid in her dealing with me, reluctant to take part in any activities in class, and unresponsive to personal offerings of assistance I sent to her by e-mail. "I have to be honest that I've gotten a sense of 'defeat' from you for much of this semester," I wrote her. "I know you'd mentioned earlier this semester that you'd considered math as a major, and I hope that that's not an idea you've abandoned entirely."

I urged her to reply, but I never heard back from her.

This incident can't help but make me think of a noontime meeting several of my colleagues in the department and I shared with a pair of textbook company representatives. While my colleagues and I pored through elaborate boxed lunches bought from an off-campus catering company, the two textbook reps gushed for several minutes over the features of their company's latest Stewart-clone calculus textbook.

They tried to make their case, I'll give them that. I'd indicated that I honestly don't use whatever calculus textbook I've been assigned as much more than a source of examples and exercises (generally the exposition in such textbooks is godawful, and the organization is unmotivated, at best), supplementing the textbook substantially with descriptions, worksheets, activities, and projects of my own devising, including a number of nontraditional writing assignments. "We're very proud that [their text] contains [some unsubstantiated and moderately large number of] pre-written group projects." I nodded, unimpressed. (So does every Stewart-clone; generally these projects are as unmotivated as the integument of the text itself.)

About fifteen minutes into their demonstration, and after about ten minutes of fiddling with recalcitrant teleconferencing software, the reps got the lead textbook author himself on the line. He sounded tired, as though he'd made these dogs and ponies to dance two or three times already earlier that morning (or at least that week). He showed us a number of the features of the on-line text, most excited about the numerous Mathematica-driven animations he and his colleagues had developed for the textbook. (Such animations are not in themselves bad things; however I fear that without empowering the students to learn how to create their own animations, the animations alone do little more than provide an alternative visualization tool.)

After trotting the poor schlub of an author around the rink for a few more laps, the reps resumed their own presentation, and reached the part of their sell about which I was reminded above. "The beauty of the on-line scoring capabilities," one of them said proudly, "is that once a student has submitted her homework and the homework is graded, the computer can generate a personalized letter indicating to the student what sorts of problems she got wrong, telling her where she needs to focus her study. This can be done automatically, for a class of two hundred students. They'll think that you cared enough to write a personalized note to every one of them about their work."

I don't want to give the impression that this past year was all about weariness and defeat. To the contrary, I feel I've had some tremendous successes in the classroom.

While the textbook exercise fell on its face this past semester in Topology, it went over fantastically with the MATH 280 folks in the fall, and I can't think of many moments in my career at which I was prouder than I was when Ulrich and Uriah spoke on the project at the Elon conference (including in their presentation the phrase "writing-to-learn," and defining the phrase correctly!).

While I feel I lost the "faith" of some of my favorite students, like Magda, above, and like Tish, who became openly disillusioned about topology by the semester's end, I feel like that loss was only temporary, and that through open communication and understanding I've won that faith back.

While I feel my attempt at crafting a more meaningful system of feedback met with mixed success, the success I've earned is great enough to encourage me to recraft the system and try it again next term, rather than simply to abandon it.

While I've had my share of dealings with troubled and troubling students this past year, I've also had my share of dealings with marvelous ones. Jacobina's transformation from a hesitant and nearly math-phobic student at the outset of Calc I to one of the most outspoken, confident, and competent scholars in the stronger of my two sections of Calc II was nothing short of astounding. Words cannot describe the pride I have of her. Equally exciting is the undergraduate research Tonio and Siegfried have done, and the potential Ino and Iris have to do similar research this summer.

These small (and not-so-small) victories and many more like them are the rocks and gravel out of which, as the old blues standard goes, a solid road is built. Where's the road headed?

I've got back-to-back conferences coming up in less than a week (the International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference in Indiana and the AMS Eastern Sectional Meeting in New Jersey), then a half-week of Integrative Liberal Studies workshops in which I'm playing some role or another. A week after those come to and end the REU students start arriving. I have high hopes for this year's program; they're clearly a bright bunch with a lot of strengths. I've got a book proposal in at a good publisher, on which I'm still waiting to hear a decision. I've got great ideas for my courses next fall. It's going to be a good year.

The road is a long one, but the sun's shining yet.

I think, indeed, it is rising.

A modest proposal (one having nothing to do with cannibalism)

Hmm.

In the past week or so I've had several really good conversations about this past semester's revisions policy with students in both Topology and Calc II. A few things are clear from these conversations:

1. A large number of students benefited from the policy of allowing unlimited revisions (on exams in Calc II and on homework in Topology). Moreover, they benefited in exactly the ways I would hope that they'd have benefited: they profess to being much more eager to look over their past mistakes, to understand what they did wrong, and to attempt (sometimes over and over again) to correct their errors.

2. A much smaller number of students played the system like a two-dollar fiddle, not taking adequate measures to prepare for the exams (or the homework), putting off studying various topics until after the exam's been given, graded, and returned (or until after time's been found to corner one of the class's brighter students and ask said student for a transcription of her or his homework).

3. Something needs to be done to counteract the inevitable effect of procrastination, so that I'm not socked with a hundred revised exams and homework sets to grade at the same time final exams come due. (I apologize if the mass of grading I had to do during the past week as more and more revisions came in made me a bit more snippy of late.)

One of my Topology students made the following suggestion (thanks, Karl!): include with each successive revision an "expiration date," which, once past, precludes further revision. For example, I might allow a student a week to complete each iteration of a revised assignment: say I hand back a graded assignment on Monday, May 10th; the next revision, should a student wish to undertake said revision, would be due on Monday, May 17th. If that date passes without revision, the student's out of luck. If the student does perform some revision and receives the paper back on Wednesday, May 19th, then he'll have until Wednesday, May 26th to effect further revision, and so on. It would be the student's responsibility to be present in class to pick up graded revisions.

This would definitely help address the third observation above. Moreover, I think it would encourage more students to take advantage of the revisions: instead of putting them off until the inevitably busy end of the semester, students would be pressed to perform revisions right away and receive the benefits thereof.

The second observation above remains unaddressed. What to do about those who play the system? I will say that to some extent the chickens came home to roost when the final exam was graded: it was clear to me from performance on the final exam which students cruised on through with little concern for actual understanding of the concepts treated in the course. However, perhaps it might be appropriate to provide some sort of system of diminishing returns, at least for the lower-level courses (like Precalc, Calc I or Calc II) in which I might allow unlimited revisions: the first round of revisions will earn 1/2 credit back, the next 1/3, and so forth, until after two or three rounds there's really no purpose, from a "credit" standpoint, to revise. I'd like to think the best students would continue to revise anyway, striving for a perfect theoretical mark and a more and more perfect understanding.

Anyway...that's where I stand right now.

FYI: I just kicked off my summer leisure-reading season by starting Jonathan Kozol's Ordinary resurrections: children in the years of hope, and although I'm only about thirty pages in (and enjoying it immensely), it's making me more and more aware of the need for "ethnographic" methods in the "hard" sciences. I suspect this coming summer will see me write a number of posts on this blog in which I discuss the humanistic side of mathematics, in which I experiment with what Laurel Richardson would call "creative analytic practices." Stay tuned!

Patrick is a patsy no more

I'm a nice guy, but I don't like to be made a fool...nor do I want people to think they can make a fool of me.

To the Calc II students who were overheard by Math Lab staff to say, while completing the homework on Taylor series after the exam featuring Taylor series questions had been given in class, "yeah, now we need to learn how to do this stuff, so we can do the revisions!": congratulations! Your flagrant display of immaturity has caused me to completely rethink the revision policy. Sufficiently many of your more mature colleagues have let me know that the revisions truly do help them learn that the opportunity for revision will remain in place, but I fear that offering full credit for unlimited revisions may simply be unfair to those who struggle to master the material in a timely fashion. Look forward to a revamped version of the policy for the Fall 2010 semester.

To the Topology students whose homework is an automatistic transcription of the work of one of your more steady peers in the same class: as I'm fond of saying, I've been in this line of work for over a decade now, and I know the score. I just want you to know that I can tell when a person's work is really that person's work. Don't think you're pulling a fast one on me.

That is all.

Please understand that I'm not angry, just tired, and, honestly, a little disappointed.

And I'm also off to class.

A tale of two issues

One thing is undeniable: grades on Calc II exams have gone down since the last time I taught this course.

By quite a bit.

I don't think the students are any less bright, and I don't think my teaching has plummeted in quality since Spring 2008. The classroom format is nearly identical, many of the activities the same.

What's changed, and changed substantially, is my exam grading policy: instead of allowing a single round of revisions in which students can earn back up to 1/3 of the points they initially missed, I now allow unlimited revisions, with an opportunity to make up every single point missed.

My aim in allowing such revisions is to mimic a not uncommon practice in writing-intensive courses, in which students are allowed a chance to continually revise their written work until it meets whatever standard they hold for themselves: if a student is happy with the C she earns in the first place, she can stop there. But if she's so motivated, she can continue to clean up her work, polish her argument, practice her diction, until she's made the paper the best damned paper it could ever be.

Why shouldn't this translate well into mathematics?

I'm finding, as I mentioned above, that it's having a deleterious effect on the initial grades. On yesterday's exam (the third for the semester, regarding the infamous sequences and series), students averaged roughly 61% between my two sections. Though the topic is an inherently difficult one for beginning students, the exam was not overly long and fairly straightforward. It had no "curveball questions" (for instance, I felt that all four "test for convergence" problems were solvable by obvious choices of convergence tests) and two or three of the problems were nearly identical to those worked out during a review session attended by roughly 30 students the night before. I thought the exam was extremely fair. (Students, if you're reading this, feel free to chime in in the comments section. I'd be curious to know your thoughts on the matter.)

In the past my pre-revision grades have been in the neighborhood of 70% or 72%. What's caused this drop?

My hypothesis: students feel less pressure to do well on the initial go, knowing that they'll have the chance to make up whatever points they miss in the aftermath. Simply put, the stakes are lower, so students don't prepare as well. Granted, you're always going to have those "gotta have a 100" grinds (and I use this term appreciatively!) who'll by god be sure to nail it on the first go-around, but I think it's likely that most students, knowing that the stakes are low, will ease up a bit on the throttle. They'll forgo that preliminary all-nighter, they'll pass on the practice exam, and they'll sleep in an extra hour on the morning of the exam instead of getting up early to pore over integration formulas while they chomp on their Lucky Charms.

For one reason or another, the grades are lower. To me, though, the issue isn't so much the grades as it is the students' learning. I'll gladly accept lower grades on the initial run of an in-class exam as long as I know that the students are still effectively mastering the concepts we discuss in class.

But how to know that they're doing this? I would argue that, the way things are now, I simply can't know this, as the exams are now saying very little about how much students have learned. (It could be very cogently argued that few traditional exams have ever said anything about how much students have learned, but that's a post for a different day.) I suspect that my exams have ceased providing summative feedback of any kind and offer almost exclusively formative feedback. In theory, they may be providing this service very effectively: by bombing this or that question on a particular exam, a student can know exactly what she needs to brush up on before the semester's over, allowing her to very carefully target her studies for the next iteration of the exam revisions, and the next, and the next, until perfection is achieved.

If the exams really are performing this function, offering meaningful contribution to students' understanding, then the revision policy is definitely worth keeping. As my students well know, I don't give a rat's tuckus about grades so long as students are learning.

But are the students really learning? Are the exams, cut free of any indexical mooring they might once have had, performing any meaningful assessment function? How can I tease apart the two matters, grades and learning?

Students, if you're reading this, let me know by commenting on this post: do you feel that the exams (and, more to the point, the revision policy on the exams) are serving a meaningful purpose? Are you learning effectively by performing the revisions? And, honestly, do you feel as though you've slackened your efforts at achieving a high initial score in light of the revision policy? (Topology students, feel free to chime in too, regarding the similar revision policy on our homework.)

Colleagues, if you're reading this, let me know your thoughts as well: do you have revision policies? Do they work? Have you had to relearn how to discern students' mastery by means of exams?

A postscript: I realize I've been incredibly absent from this forum this semester; it's not for lack of things to say. In fact, I've found myself overwhelmed by matters pedagogical. It's a cruel thing that the semesters in which I've had the most food for thought are precisely those in which I've had the least time to reflect on those thoughts in writing. I hope this will change!

Wha...? A new post!? (Complete with interrobang...)

Yeah, yeah. I know it's been a while.

It's been a crazy semester.

I've lost track of the number of snow days (three?) and late starts (four? or five?) we've had...there was one point at which I met with each of my classes precisely once in the span of 14 days: in the week prior to Spring Break I'd canceled Monday's Calc II classes for some reason I've since forgotten, and Tuesday and Wednesday ended up both being snow days, so I met with my Topology class and one of the Calc II sections only on Thursday, and with the other Calc II section only on Friday...and then Spring Break came.

Needless to say, this threw everyone's trains of thought off the rails, and in the subsequent weeks (the last couple) we've all been running around like mad trying to pick up the pieces.

I've made a number of mid-course adjustments in order to try to compensate for the craziness. I've scrapped several "less critical" sections from the Calc II calendar, and I've changed up the syllabus for Topology: having found from several of the most dedicated students in that class that the textbook assignments were not proving to be an effective means of learning the material, I ditched those. Many of the concepts were proving very difficult for the students to paraphrase, so that only a handful of the students were producing textbook submissions which were anything more than reiterations of my own course notes. Moreover, the homework assignments have been difficult enough to demand substantial amounts of the students' attention. In return for scrubbing the textbook project, I've asked the students to redouble their efforts at revising their homework, and so far they've kept up their end of the bargain.

I feel strongly that flexibility, both on the part of the teacher and on the part of the students, is critical in designing an effective learning environment. I've never been able to fathom faculty members who use the same rigid note sets semester after semester, or who plan precisely which exercises they'll assign to their classes for the duration of the term on the term's very first day.

Yeah, Topology could be moving a bit more smoothly, but as this is the first time I've taught the course, a few fits and starts are inevitable, I suppose. I appreciate my students' patience as I figure out what works and what doesn't.

Calc II, on the other hand, is cruising over smooth seas.

What else is new?

Um...

...I'm still waiting to hear back from Jossey-Bass regarding my book proposal. I'm hopeful that the proposal will get picked up...although I'm not sure where I'm going to find the time to finish the two chapters I'd promised by May. I've got an outline for the first chapter worked up, but little more than that right now.

There's been little movement on the rhetorical analysis of REU students' writing I began several weeks ago with the Charleston folks. Last I knew, Bella was planning on making some revisions to the initial version I posted on our Google site a few weeks back. Nothin' new there, though.

The Writing Intensive Subcommittee's knocking off new proposals left and right...moving to the Google Docs platform has made our work dramatically simpler and more streamlined. And right now ILSOC's workload has been relatively light as we've all hunkered down in our respective subcommittees to put together faculty development workshops (WI's planning one on writing instruction for ESL students, based on a workshop run at this year's Meeting in the Middle, the Carolina Writing Program Administrators' spring conference) and hammer out assessment plans. WI's assessment plan's been in the works for over a year now, and many of the materials have been collected already...it's just a matter of sitting down, establishing inter-rater reliability for the rubric (say that three times really quickly), and making our way through the students' writing samples.

What else?

Tomorrow I'm truckin' over to the 2010 MAA Southeast Sectional Meetings at Elon University with a boatload (well, a vanload, anyway) of our students. We've got 23 students attending, several of whom are giving talks or posters or serving on panels. Several first-year students are going (props, Iris, Ino! What's up, Ulysses?), and they're particularly stoked. I'm glad I put forth a strong recruiting effort...I don't mind saying that it's been a ridiculous amount of work to organize transportation, housing, special events, et cetera, but I think it'll be worth it. I'm particularly proud of my most recent research students, Siegfried and Tonio, who'll both be presenting their work in the undergraduate talk sessions; and Ulrich, Uriah, and LaDonna, whose presentation late on Saturday morning will showcase their views on the 280 textbook project.

Oh...oh...oh...OHHHHH! And after two weeks or so of intense paring and picking, my colleague Tip and I plowed through the 268 REU applications we received and came up with a list of participants for this year's program. Only three students to whom we offered positions turned us down, so we got most of our top choices. I'm excited to have them all on board. I've got a good feeling about this year.

What else?

The Tenth International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference is quickly coming closer...and plans are moving ahead for the celebration of Oulipo's 50th birthday I'm helping to put together in November. We've now got a tentative list of invited speakers, informal promises of financial support, and a rough schedule of activities. Once we've confirmed our speakers list we can begin to advertise to the campus and other communities.

I've got a few more trips coming up (two in April and two in May), but once those are over I'll be looking forward to settling in for the summer.

And I'm still waiting to find out the decision on my tenure application. Should come any day now. Fingers crossed.

That's about it, pedagogically speaking. I'll be sure to check in if anything noteworthy happens, maybe from Elon.

Fare thee well!