Trust me

Elon's over.

At last.

And after several months of planning, it came off all right. And the planning was worth it, as annoying as it often was: the students (particularly the younger ones!) got a lot out of it.

The drive out was a pleasant one (with only a light spray of rain), and the three-hour trip to the conference site gave the students (several of whom didn't yet know each other well) open up a bit and build bridges. As I told them then, for the first of several times during the next 48 hours or so, "you don't really know someone until you've got to a conference with them."

Obligatory alcohol-induced first-night revelry out of the way, the conference began on a high note. After an hour at the Project NExT session, I headed over to the first round of Math Jeopardy! in which our school has ever fielded a team. The Asheville team faced off against three others, and though our folks stumbled a bit at first (with a score at one point dipping into negative numbers), they quickly rebounded. Georgia Southern's team ran through the differential equations category, but with those questions depleted the UNCA team blazed through the category on "trans" words, pulling ahead, the ten or so of us in the audience exultantly pumping our fists with each right answer. A brief slump put them in second place going into Final Jeopardy, and it was only because of conservative wagering that our team came in second in the round...and ultimately ninth out of thirty-four teams. I was floored, and beaming with pride.

The conference itself began with a plenary talk on female mathematicians in the time of Euler. One of the central figures in the talk was the Italian mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi (of "Witch" fame), a topic I knew would be of interest to Ino, a student I've come to know as something of an Italophile. Sitting behind her, I tried to judge her level of enthusiasm during the talk. My suspicions were confirmed when I talked to her after the lecture was over, noting the excitement in her eyes. I've since suggested she might look into the possibility of translating the work of some other classical Italian mathematician as a research project straddling math and her beloved language.

The REU panel my colleague Lancelot and I put together was well-received, with nearly 100 people attending the panels and talks. I most enjoyed the student panel, on which three UNCA students, each of whom had taken part in a very different summer research experience, and one of the participants in my 2009 REU led a discussion regarding the aspects of a successful REU program. The discussion was open and frank, touching on negative aspects of summer programs as well as positive ones. As Lancelot said, our panels (both the faculty-led one and the student-led one) each could have been an hour long, and the conversations would have remained as rich at the end as at the beginning.

My new department-mate Kelli and I had a chance to catch up for a bit after the REU session ended, and after she and I and Lancelot hung out for a bit shooting the breeze I headed back to the hotel to lead our entire UNCA contingent to a Thai restaurant I happened to spy on the hotel's dining list: most of us trekked halfway across town to enjoy a surprisingly lovely dinner together in the company of twenty or so of our closest friends.

I spent most of last night putting the finishing touches on my talk for this morning, a fifteen-minute piece titled "The role of trust in teaching and learning." Here I had a few words to say about the ways in which the affective effects our learning environments as strongly as does the cognitive. More engaging to me than my talk were the conversations with my students that led up to it, in which I asked them to offer me their own views on trust in teaching. In every one of these conversations (ones similar to which I would recommend my fellow teachers to have with their own students) the students were lively and animated. I suspect that students may be so animated because they're not often asked questions like "how do you feel about the work you're doing in class?" or "how might your professors most easily earn your respect and trust?"

I think my talk was somewhat well-received, judging from comments people made to me afterward. I was a little worried that its rather unorthodox topic and methodology (highly qualitative, empirical, and anecdotal) would rub some of the more traditionalists the wrong way, but I'm not overly concerned. I feel strongly about what it is I had to say, and I can live with whatever discomfiture it may have caused a few of the gray-beards.

During the next couple of hours I had a chance to catch up with previous years' REU students (Dione from 2008 and Daria from 2009, who'd already spoken and served on a panel in the REU session the day before) and take in a couple of talks given by a few of my Asheville students: Siegfried's discussion of logarithmic concavity was breezy and easygoing, and Uriah and Ulrich's overview of last semester's textbook assignment in 280 was fantastic. Not only did they offer a full and accurate picture of the assignment's structure; they also highlighted the ways in which the assignment served as an extremal example of a writing-to-learn project and the ways in which bridges to other aspects of mathematics could be built from the abutments it offered. (Ulrich mentioned his discovery of the software package Geogebra, inspired by his need to create attractive graphics for the textbook. Reminder: the latest version of the textbook can be found by following this this link.)

The conference over, we hit the road again. I wish I'd had the van miked on the way home: Uriah, Iris, and Ino and I spent much of the drive back to Asheville talking about various things, including AP exams, life plans, Southern accents, and, yet again, trust in teaching. By the time we'd returned to the parking lot we'd left a little over two days before, several of the students were zombified from over-stimulation and lack of sleep, but everyone seemed happy and all professed to have been stimulated by the past days' goings-on. The younger students in particular, including those who may still have been on the fence regarding the pursuit of a math degree, were sold. Several are already ready for their next conference.

I'm tired. But happy. And proud. They're wonderful people.

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!

Shame! Shame!

I've spent 15 of the last 32 hours or so printing, sorting, collating, filing, annotating, ranking the applications submitted by this year's REU aspirants.

We ended up receiving materials from 261 different students, and 190 of those were complete enough to consider (missing at most one rec letter). I've begun the painstaking process of identifying those students I'd most like to invite to this year's installment of "Groups, Graphs, and Geometry," to begin in early June.

I'd like to share a few things that irked me about the materials submitted by the various parties to this process, both the student applicants and their faculty recommenders.

To the students: should you ever apply to an REU or to a similar program and have need to call on your professors to write a letter on your behalf, please have the courtesy to actually submit your application. If sometimes world-famous math professors have taken the time to tailor-make a two-page letter describing your talents, you can take the time to follow through on your plans to apply to the program for which you needed that two-page letter in the first place.

To the faculty: should one of your students call on your to write a letter on her behalf, please take the time to ensure that you actually know that student's name, and know how to spell it right. (Faculty from R-1 research-intensive institutions are often guilty of this oversight.) It also wouldn't hurt to bother to write more than two or three lines elegizing your student, particularly if she's a good one. (I'm making the assumption that should you have agreed to write a letter in the first place, the student likely merits the support you're offering.) There's only so much one can read into a letter whose entirety is "Cassandra was a strong student. I've had her in three classes, and she's done well in all of them. She's usually good about getting her assignments in on time. I think she'll be great in your program."

Common courtesy, folks: I'm only asking for common courtesy.

To be continued, I'm sure.

Welcome!

Not much to say at the moment (or, more accurately, not much time in which to say it), but I wanted to take a moment to welcome to UNCA our recent hire, a talented young scholar who will here be known as Kelli. She'll be joining us in Fall 2010.

Welcome, Kelli!

Kelli comes to us with experience in directing REU students, using writing-intensive methods in her courses, and designing student-centered learning activities.

Needless to say, I'm excited about her joining our department.

Now I'm off to campus. Avanti!

Best...working weekend...ever.

I'm three hours into my work on the rhetoric of mathematical writing with Bella, Damian, and Nicola.

This is awesome. I am having a blast. I am learning so much about so many things I thought I knew already.

I need to hang out with rhetoricians more often!

About last night...

Having a few spare minutes before I have to get underway with this long working weekend, and feeling guilty as hell about my long internet absence in this space, I thought I'd take a few moments to follow up on one or two of the brief comments I made in my peremptory post last night before leaving for Charleston.

Indeed, I am in Charleston. I'll be here for a couple of days, during which time I'll be working away with the three folks from The College of Charleston whom I met at the CWPA conference back in September 2009. (Nicola's already got an alias; I'll call the other two Damian and Bella.) I'm not sure how much I've said about this project: we'll be digging into the weekly written reports penned by the REU students during the 2008 and 2009 programs, analyzing them from a rhetorical point of view, using them as mileposts to help us chart the development of the students as professional writers of mathematics as the program progressed. In order to help perceive this development I've refined the list of rough criteria I developed a while back on this blog. We'll see how that goes.

I'm tremendously excited about all of this; I feel like I'm taking my scholarship of academic writing to a new level.

Speaking of which, I finished up and sent off the book proposal I've been planning for several months now, flinging it across the country on diaphanous electronic wings. Its working title is "More than numbers: writing-to-learn and writing in the disciplines in the mathematical sciences," and I've submitted the proposal to Jossey-Bass via an editor I was directed to by my wonderfully supportive grad school colleague, Erdrick (thanks, man!), who himself has a text published through Wiley (Jossey-Bass's parent company). I'll let folks know how things progress on that front.

About the allusion I made last night to advancements in IBL: I've reached that point in the term at which I'm leading the students in the tedious work of integrating rational functions via the method of partial fractions, and, just as I've done for the past few years when teaching this topic, I'm using the step-by-step worksheets I've developed to help the students guide themselves through the algebraically intense process of partial fractions.

I always enjoy myself at this point, since I'm doing next to nothing as far as lecturing goes, and it's up to the students to chart their own courses. And more than ever before, the students are having a blast.

"Are we going to be doing more work in groups today?" one of my favorite students in the class asked eagerly at the start of class on Wednesday.

"Yup," I said.

"Awesome!" They couldn't wait to get into sets of three or four and dive right in.

Yesterday I hit the pause button and said, "so let me ask this: these worksheets, this step-by-step deal, with me saying a few words before letting you all take the reins, whaddaya'll think? Are you all getting a lot out of this? Is this something that's helping you learn?" The response I got was a more eager "YES!" than I've yet gotten from them this semester. It was tremendously encouraging.

I developed these IBL guides a few years back as a means of guiding students through what I've always thought is one of the least exciting topics in Calc II, but I've never taken the time to put together similar sheets for most other topics in the term. Given the students' obvious receptivity to this method this term, I'm going to continue with this set-up for a few more sections and see how things go.

I know I've indicated somewhere in a previous post (I don't have time to find which one precisely) that I've always had an inexplicable resistance to upping the students' centrality in the first-year math courses, and I've only very slowly inched towards the edge of the cliff from which I must take that leap of faith. I'm delighted that, now that I'm standing by the canyon's rim, my students are ready to push me over.

Yes, I realize that I just wrote that my students are ready to push me over a cliff, and moreover that I'm happy about it. I made no mention of the bungee cord tied around my ankles.

I'll leave with the following bon mots from a student of mine: yesterday one of my Calc II students compared my lecturing style to the kid's show Blue's Clues. "The way you pause when you want us to respond is totally like on that show. There'll be silence, and then someone will mumble something in response." Never having seen the show, I had to check it out on YouTube. Sure enough, two minutes into a ten-minute clip in which the title character and her human companion Chris join another cartoon dog ("Magenta") in a scavenger hunt, I was treated to an example of what my student had described, almost verbatim:

"I don't know what shape this is, kids. What shape is this?"

"It's a triangle!"

I LOLed.

Though she was kind enough not to mention it, I also noticed how my classroom manner is not unlike Chris's: we both overact the hell out of almost every line we're given.

"Okay, girls and boys, today we're going to work on integrating powers of sine and cosine!"

Great. My Calc II class is like a children's show.

On that note, I'll bid adieu. My working day's about to begin.

No excuses

I have no good excuse for not posting on this blog in a long, long time.

Besides being busy as hell.

Lots of exciting stuff going on (book proposals, projects in rhetorical analysis, advances in inquiry-based learning, hiring committee hijinx, REU applications up the wazoo, more speaking invitations, etc.), but I'm off to Charleston for a working weekend with the good folks in the College of Charleston Department of English.

I'll check in again soon!

Rhythmless

The semester began with a truncated week, half of the department gone to the Joint Math Meetings in San Francisco. Two weeks later I scrubbed a Friday class to make way for a writing workshop that would never be, and since then (just in the past week and a half) we've had two late starts and a full-out cancellation, the latter making academic my decision to cancel my Friday class for the second time for the non-existent workshop.

The upshot? We've yet to hit our stride.

Calculus II seems to be chugging along nicely, but I feel like Topology's full of fits and starts. Half of the students enrolled in the course are each going through one or another personal crisis, and various tricky concepts are tripping up all but the strongest among them. For instance, the definition most central to the course, namely that of topology, involves a set whose elements are sets; the same is true of basis, and the relationships between these two sets of sets are subtle and anything but clear. What's helped them most so far is to emphasize and re-emphasize that

1. nothing will help one more than knowing the definitions inside and out, and the relationships between them;

2. one is not really thinking about a problem if one is not writing about it, drawing pictures to help oneself understand it, or experimenting with various methods with which one might solve it: one must write to learn; and

3. the most important things to record in performing any proof are what you know and what you need: having written these down explicitly will often take one halfway to the end of the proof.

I've not yet heard much from the students regarding how they feel about the homework presentations, but they've been stepping up to the plate: for Homework 3 all five problems were covered.

We'll find a groove.

Meanwhile both the weather and overly complicated scheduling issues have wreaked havoc on committee schedules, and our faculty search has eaten up hour after hour in places scattered throughout my calendar. (Incidentally, the candidates who've visited us so far have given me a good deal of food for thought regarding teaching and learning, but at this time, with a week or two left in the search, I don't feel it would be right to say much about it.)

What's the next week hold in store? Two more candidate interviews, more preparations for the upcoming MAA conference at Elon University and next fall's conference on math and poetry, and work on several writing-related projects. So much going on, so little time to finish it all...let me know if you want in on the action.

Arrrrrr...avast!

The "pirate" section of Topology is on. Beginning on Tuesday, February 2nd, I'm going to try holding an intermittent "unofficial" (or "pirate," named for the manner in which we'll have to hijack a vacant classroom somewhere on campus) section of Topology, splitting the class in two in order to attempt to provide a more cozy and intimate learning environment to the students in the class. It looks like I'm going to have roughly 8 or 9 in the unofficial section and the remaining 15 or 16 in the section meeting at the official time.

We'll see how it goes.

In other Topology-related news, we've had two installments of homework presentations (operating in lieu of homework committees this semester), and the second flowed much more smoothly than the first. Students took turns explicating four of the five homework problems which were due today, and they all did a fine job. I was particularly impressed by the way in which the proofs they offered were for the most part merely sketches. It's best that the student presenters leave lacunae to be filled by their fellow scholars in their individual write-ups: to provide a complete and error-free proof would be counterproductive.

What I'd like to know at this point, from the students in Topology with whom I've worked in earlier classes (280, Abstract Algebra, etc.), is: which system do you prefer so far, homework committees or homework presentations? Obviously they both serve different purposes (one offers substantial opportunity to peer-review while the other is an instance collaborative learning in the extreme), but it might very well be asked which serves its purpose more effectively.

Which one is the most useful to you? Which one helps you learn better?

We'll see.

I'll leave by noting my frustration at Mother Nature for dumping several inches of snow all over what should have been the writing workshop I've been co-organizing, scheduled to take place in Black Mountain this afternoon. Snowpocalypse II caused my writing colleague Betty Lou and me to push the workshop back to next Friday.

A highly personal post

I'm demanding of my students. I push them hard. I ask them to challenge themselves on highly nontraditional projects, and on computationally and conceptually difficult assignments. I get them to work together and to present their ideas in front of one another, no matter how shy they are. I don't let up: from Day One through the Final Exam, they're hard at work, writing textbooks, critiquing each others' work, and pushing their intellectual limits.

I push my students in the same ways I push myself.

It's no secret that often try to be superhuman, and sometimes I succeed. I'm proud of the progress I've made in my teaching, of the advances my research (and that of my colleagues and students) has made, and of the work I've done in service to my department, my university, and my profession. I feel that I've achieved a lot, especially since I began this blog over three years ago.

But I've recently come to realize that I can't do it all. Even superhuman strength has its limits.

I've done such a good job of making myself ready to be "the strong one" for so many people in so many different ways that I've forgotten what it's like to lean on others when I need their strength.

This has hurt me.

I don't want to hurt.

I've decided that I'm going to relearn a lot of things I've likely forgotten.

I'm going to relearn how to let myself rest from time to time.

I'm going to relearn what it means to rely on others.

I'm going to relearn what it's like to be human, and not superhuman.

To those who may think this post may seem inappropriate for my blog, whose focus is pedagogical: anyone who's worked with me as a student or as a colleague knows that my teaching style is a very personal one. I believe it's crucial that teacher and student understand one another as persons, as human beings, before real learning can take place. I believe that for effective learning to take place, teacher and student must trust one another, and respect one another, and that teaching and learning are highly personal endeavors.

I don't know that I intend any specific exhortation by this post, except to say that if you know me and if you see me, in class or in the hall, on the quad or in my home, please know what it is that I'm trying to do: I'm trying to be a better person, and in order to be a better person I might just need your help, your support, and your understanding.

I have nothing but the deepest admiration and respect and warmth for my students, my colleagues, and my friends. Thank you for all that you've done for me, and for all that you do, and for all that you'll do in the coming days and weeks and years we spend together.

I feel more human now than I ever have before.

Two weeks in the can

We just wrapped up Week Two here at UNC Asheville, and because of the MLK holiday I've yet to teach a full week of classes this term. In fact, I'll be skipping out on my Friday Calc II class this coming week, so it won't be until Week Four that I manage to teach a full week.

Things are...well, I think they're settling in.

I still feel unsettled, though. Missing the second half of the first week because of the Joint Meetings really threw me off. Nevertheless, the classes are starting to come together, the enrollments are stabilizing, and we're getting work done.

My Calc II students did quite well on their first miniproject. (It was the perennial favorite, "Confectionary Conundrum," in which they are asked to estimate the number of gumballs it would take to full the candy machine I keep on my office desk. They're meant to use Riemann sums, but there are always a few folks who come up with other clever ways of getting an estimate.) And I've got great attendance so far, which is somewhat troubling, since there are 36 people enrolled in one section and 37 in the other, while the room is designed to seat about 32.

Meanwhile my Topology students have weathered their first round of homework presentations. The presentations (of which there've been two so far, delivered by four students) were a bit different, as is to be expected, from the homework committee presentations in past classes. The presentations were less coy and more direct; this is unsurprising, given that in the homework presentations in this class the students are asked to sketch draft solutions for their peers, whereas the purpose of the committee presentations in past classes was not to solve the problem, but rather to highlight common errors and pitfalls, and indicate any clever methods one or more students may have discovered.

I'm hoping that as the homework sets become more difficult, the students will put more thought into their presentations, planning ways to offer their friends helpful hints without giving away the full story. Being able to sketch a proof is as important a skill as being able to write it out in detail.

I'm also hoping that students will start to take advantage of the unlimited revision and resubmission policy I've got for the course.

I think one of the things that's kept me from settling into a groove is that much of the work I've done so far this semester is administrative rather than pedagogical. We've got a lot going on in our search for a new faculty member, and I've been scrambling around putting out fires for the Writing Intensive Subcommittee (dealing with student petitions, setting a new meeting schedule, uploading course proposals, planning next week's workshop, puzzling out assessment) and the ILS Oversight Committee (another new meeting schedule, dealing with the Academic Policies Committee, and putting out a bajillion little fires regarding Clusters). And I'm trying to organize the growing list of students who are planning on going to the MAA's Southeast Sectional meeting at Elon University in March. (Twenty students have committed to going now, and I've got my sights set on nine or ten more.)

Ugh.

Okay, I just realized that I've said nothing interesting or insightful in this post, so I'll end it here and wait until I've got something more meaningful to share before I write again.

Clusterf**k

I know I've not posted lately. I know it, I know it, I know it...things have been rather busy lately, what with a hectic Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco (and thus a severely truncated first week of class), a second week of class spent trying to play catch-up, and a serious need to stick every finger I've got in the quickly-collapsing dike that is the Integrative Liberal Studies Clusters program.

I promise a more meaningful post soon.

Day Two

Topology met this snowy, icy morning, although we were a few people short (due, no doubt, to the hazardous road conditions brought about by the nasty weather). Those who came were excited to be there, though, and no one seemed to have much trouble jumping right into the thick of it.

Even if we can't manage to split the class into two smaller sections (one meeting "informally," commandeering a free classroom here or there), I think the semester will go smoothly for this course: most everyone knows each other quite well, having weathered several previous courses together, and no one seems particularly shy about speaking up in front of the others or about writing on the board. I think it'll be fine.

The feedback I've gotten so far has been very positive. Generally the students respond very well to the problem-based, handout-driven class activities, and almost all of the groups that gathered this morning to work on the handouts together functioned smoothly and efficiently, with animated (and apropos!) conversation.

I should mention there was glee on the part of some regarding the disappearance of the homework committees. We'll see next week how their replacement for this course, the "homework presentations," go over.

On to Day Two of Calc II...

Topology

Sometimes our closeness cannot be
a simple reckoning of distance,
a tally of the steps from you to me;
for in a purer sense
it's in the neighborhoods we share,
and in the friends to which we're bound,
and in the circles where
we find our common ground.

Day One, part 2

One class down, one to go. The first section of Calc II went pretty well. As usual, I felt rushed, since there's just so much to be done on the first day. I left a few things unsaid, but nothing that can't be un-unsaid (would that be "said"?) tomorrow. It'll be all right.

Only fifteen minutes before I head off to the first meeting of the second section.

Day One

It's Day One, all right, but it sure doesn't feel like it yet. There are a few quirks in my schedule this term that are going to take some getting used to:

1. I teach on every single day. Generally I teach four out of five days, and those days are typically very heavy ones, but I've usually got either Tuesday or Thursday to recuperate. Speaking of heavy days...

2. Tuesdays, the days I most frequently have off, are my heaviest days this semester: all three of my courses meet on that day.

3. I'm used to having my first class no later than 10:00 a.m. (frequently 8:00 or 9:00), but on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of this term I don't teach until 1:45 p.m. This pushes me back to 5:25 p.m. on Mondays, the latest I've ever had class. That's going to be weird, especially for the first month or so, as it will be dark by the time class gets out. On the up-side, I've only got one class on Fridays.

4. Finally, and perhaps strangest of all, I teach two sections of Calc II, one which meets three days a week (on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays), and one which meets four days a week (on every day but Thursdays). This is going to cause my two Calc II sections to go out of sync with one another in a New York minute, making it damn near impossible for students to miss one section and show up at the other if convenient to do so, as they occasionally did last semester without any damage done.

Weird.

In other news, I spent a little while this morning walking around and scoping out potential classes for our "pirate" section of Topology. I found a couple of candidates during the 10:00 to 11:00 time slot. This could actually work.

Okay, I'm off to try to get some more bureaucratic BS done before my first class meets, at 1:45. Avanti!

First Day Jitters™

Yup.

Here they are again.

A day early, in fact. Those First Day Jitters™ have returned for another encore performance.

I've no reason for jitters, of course, but that doesn't stop 'em.

I'm prepared through next Tuesday in both of my courses (through next Thursday, likely, in Topology); I already know roughly 2/3 of my 90-odd students, and the faces of those students I don't know are now committed to memory; I'm coming off of a really good semester and looking forward to another good one.

Nope, I still don't feel quite there.

It's the newness.

It's the adventure.

It's the embarkation.

I've been doing this for almost 15 years now, but it never gets any less exciting.

God, I love my job.

Please know, my friends, that when class begins tomorrow I'll be just as nervous (probably more so) than you are.

So be gentle.

Let's make this one a semester for the ages, shall we? Let's teach one another, let's learn from one another. Let's complete compelling projects. Let's prove powerful theorems. Let's plan eye-popping conference talks. Let's give it our all. Let's get out there and make each other proud.

Let's do it, huh?

Two calculi

A derivative is a recipe,
an integral is a poem;
the last has dreams of majesty,
the first is enchained by form.

A textbook for 280

At last.

Working for about four hours this morning, La Donna and I put the finishing touches on the (pen)ultimate draft of the MATH 280 textbook, which can be accessed here.

Why "(pen)"? It would be nice to throw in a few more diagrams (there are spaces and other placeholders left for such diagrams here and there), and one of the folks in the class volunteered to come up with a cover design...but aside from relatively minor matters like that, the thing's done.

Is it perfect? No.

Is it in places sketchy and awkwardly-worded? Yes.

Is it an authentic effort, the culmination of 15 students' legitimate attempt to make sense of a number of difficult concepts drawn from high-level abstract mathematics by putting together a "textbook" which addresses those concepts? You bet yer sweet bippie.

I'm happy. I think it's gone well, and the feedback I've gotten on the project is for the most part good. With better organization on my part, the same project, assigned to my Topology students, should run even more smoothly.

Excellent work, y'all! You've all done a wonderful job both as writers and as editors.

The fun begins anew in a week.

2010

Well, it's a new year. And I've made a good start of it, I think.

This morning, after my first run of 2010, I spent a couple of hours getting a couple more days ahead in Topology (the Joint Meetings are exing out the second half of the first week of class, so I'm doing all that I can to get some traction before the semester actually gets started, since things will be getting crazy quickly once we're underway).

I've now posted the first two handouts and the first two homework sets, which should take us through the end of the second week of class.

I'm happy that this course is a "terminal" course: I'm simply not sure how "far" we'll get given the typical student-centered design of the class. I am, however, taking steps to "streamline" the flow of the course so as to maximize the material we'll be able to explore.

For instance, I'm making efforts to bring "later" concepts in early on so that students are introduced to them sooner rather than later. For instance, the second homework set already includes the definition of the Hausdorff separation condition, which Munkres doesn't address until over a hundred pages in, and I'm already weaving together treatment of continuity and closed sets, both of which come a bit later in Munkres as well.

Also, I'm taking a "just-in-time" approach to review of ideas from set theory and relations (i.e., material from MATH 280), putting off such review until it's needed. Most of that review will probably take place in the homework sets.

I'm happy about the way the course is coming together so far, and I'm eager to get underway!