Moving right along

Gentle readers, I have risen from the ashes! Please travel to (and then follow) my reincarnated blog, Changes of Basis, where I will continue to write about all things pedagogical and where I will invite many of my colleagues, students, and community partners to add their voices to my own!

Meditative

Origami is
a contemplative practice.
Fall is paper leaves.

Day One...Again...

Though I've been teaching at the college level for 15 years now, I've never been able to shake those first-day jitters. I have, however, gotten better at managing them and overcoming them and even having fun in the process.

This morning I taught my first Calc I class in...three years, I think? I believe this is the longest I've gone without teaching Calc I since I started teaching in grad school 15 years ago. That remove from the Calc I classroom, I believe, will help me come back to the subject with excitement and an authentic sense of novelty. I'm looking forward to a new format (for me), flipping the classroom and using computer-graded problem sets to give students practice in the basic computations they'll need to know.

Today we spent some time getting to know one another and reviewing some of the mathematical ideas leading up to calculus. I ended class by asking the students to write down (anonymously) any questions they might have about our class at this time...or if they had no questions, just to draw a smiley face.

Their questions, and my answers, are below, in no order other than the order I picked them up:

What's your biggest pet-peeve with your students? Disengagement. It really bugs me when students check out. Regardless of your skill level, give it some effort, please: we all have something we can give to the class, and we all have something we can take away.

Could we brush over some of the topics that were written on the board today, because even if I learned them, I need a little bit of remembering? Though we won't do much formal review in this class, we will do a lot of "just-in-time" review, meaning that as needed we'll brush up on important topics (e.g., trig identities, rules for exponents, factoring methods, etc.) when they come up. If you'd like more help, the Math Lab (located on the third floor of Robinson Hall) has many more resources and assistants who can help you, and you can always sign up with a private tutor. (You can find information about tutors from the Math Lab, too.)

I recently purchased a new Chromebook. Do you think all those softwares will be able to get on it? I'm assuming you're referring to Mathematica and LaTeX. I'm not sure about this, but it's a great question. I believe if you run a flavor of Linux as your OS on the Chromebook you should be able to find both of these applications by visiting the websites I've linked to on the class website. If you run the standard Chrome OS, though, I'm not sure. I'll look into this.

If we want to practice/review some old (algebra or similar) concepts, is there a site for problems? Good question. I believe the Math Lab staff can point you in the direction of some good texts and e-resources for review. Visit them!

Are there any other calc tutors other than the Math Lab? You can sign up with a private tutor, a list of whom is available by visiting the Math Lab.

Explain what the "lab" section of the class is. For arcane bureaucratic reasons, the department must differentiate between the "standard" class and the "lab," but besides the difference in time and place, there's no other distinction. We'll do many of the same things on all days. Just show up, relax, and have fun!

Can I eat breakfast in class? Yup. No worries! Just try not to spill anything or eat too loudly.

What is the meaning of life? Dunno. I missed that day.

:)

Q: What is beauty? What is truth? A: Type "graph " into Wolfram Alpha. I'll get on this at once and report back.

Ready for Calc! :)

How many chapters will be covered? We'll discuss the information addressed by the first five chapters of the textbook. I should point out, though, that I despise the term "cover" in reference to education. It corresponds to a very antiquated notion of pedagogy, in which the teacher "covers" material by talking about it in front of the students, thereby absolving the teacher of all guilt in case the students do poorly on an exam. "I can't believe they did so poorly on this question...we covered it in class!"

Is most of the reading done in class or not? Not. You will be responsible for reading the textbook on your own time. I would guess that a somewhat careful reading of most sections should take you about an hour, and we'll discuss roughly two or three sections per week. You do the math!

:-)

Can we review trigonometry? Pre-cal was a long time ago... See my comment above about "just-in-time" review. We'll definitely review trig and other tricky concepts as needed, when needed.

Ready for calc!

It's gonna be a good class, folks.

What's a guy to do? (A paean for laziness)

Halfway through our winter break I paused in my course preparations, panicking that I'd spent nearly all of my time planning my HON 479 course and had done nearly nothing to prep for Linear Algebra II. Though I had a rough framework for the course's structure (semiregular homework assignments, a few take-home exams, student-led projects, presentations, and discussions), I had almost no idea what content I would include in the course.

After a few moments (okay, maybe a few hours), the panic passed. I realized the futility of overplanning, a futility reconfirmed by the survey of my Linear II students' background I performed on Monday. The 23 students in that class come to me having taken Linear Algebra I from no fewer than five different faculty members in my department, as long ago as two and a half years back. These faculty include me and one of my colleagues who shares my penchant for student-centered, application-based teaching, a couple folks who typically offer a blend of applications and theory (one with a much more student-centered approach than the other), and a fifth who focuses exclusively on abstraction and theory and whose teaching style can only be described as "traditional." Needless to say, my 23 students come to me with extremely diverse linear algebraic backgrounds. It's unlikely that, beyond a few basic principles (row reduction, linear (in)dependence, bases, determinants, eigenvalues and -vectors, etc.) they all will have studied, they'll have any content knowledge in common. In the end there's really very little I can do to accommodate them all: no matter what static plan for the course that I could come up with, it would no doubt lose some and bore most of the others.

This realization was liberating. Instead of putting forth a particular course of study, I could let the students take the lead, offering them the chance to investigate topics in which they are interested, sharing their investigations with each other in the form of in-class presentations, discussions, and problem sets. I'm going to ask every student to take a turn, working with one or two of her or his peers, leading the class in the study of a topic of her or his choosing. For those who might not know what direction they'd like to head in, I made a list of potential topics, many of which likely made an appearance in some students' first-semester Linear I courses:

• orthonormalization methods
• orthogonal systems of polynomials (e.g., Chebyshev polynomials, Hermite polynomials, and Legendre polynomials)
• Gröbner bases
• LU factorization
• abstract vector spaces and modules
• network flow analysis
• unitary and Hermitian matrices and their applications
• finite element methods (e.g., in atmospheric science)
• Google's PageRank algorithm
• the basics of functional analysis
• linear codes and linear cryptography
• applications to differential equations
• linear programming (e.g., the simplex method)

To help everyone get to the point where we can approach some of these topics, I'm spending the first week or two on review, wherein the students are taking turns, in groups of three or four, presenting on the various "basic principles" I listed above. It's going well so far. "Is this useful at all?" I asked after a couple of presentations this morning. "Should we keep doing this?" There was almost unanimous agreement that yes, we should. So we'll keep it up.

How'll it go? Who knows? Not me. I'm excited to find out, though.

Day Two

Two days down. Day Two was a doozy.

The Honors Program has become a victim of its own success, in a way: so many students are now pursuing Distinction as a University Scholar that I'm finding it necessary to offer not one but two sections of HON 479 this term...and perhaps in (nearly?) every term for the indefinite future. Of course, by the time that I realized the need for a second section of the course (about halfway through last semester's advising period), it was really too late to find another instructor to teach that section, and besides, I'd prefer to have a single instructor for both sections, for consistency's sake. Of course, that meant that the instructor for the first section would also be the instructor for the second section, even if it meant (as it did) teaching a course over the normal load. Of course, that instructor is me.

Genius that I am, I scheduled the two sections to meet back-to-back, 100 minutes apiece with only ten minutes in between, every Tuesday and Thursday. Today was our first meeting. By the end of the first section my throat hurt, and by the end of the second I had nearly no voice: there are so many moving parts to this class that I've just got to spend much of the first class meeting pointing out just how all of those parts fit together and more in a meaningful way.

Throw in a minor student medical emergency, a pressing tech issue facing the school's student-run TEDx chapter (for which I'm the faculty adviser), various administrivia and bureaucratic bullshit, and a two-hour sojourn in Asheville Catholic School's gymnasium, where I helped a friend out as a middle-school science fair judge, and you've got a hell of a day. I'm sore-throated and brain-dead, and I'm tired as hell.

But I'm happy. I've got high hopes for this term. I feel like last semester gave me a good grip on 479, and I had a fantastic first meeting of Linear Algebra II yesterday (the 23 students in that class had five different instructors for Linear I!), a course which I'll be teaching from a nearly total project-based perspective.

Life is good.

Let it go

It's the last day of final exams, and students are trickling in to say their "farewells" and their "see ya next years." Some are saying yet more long-lasting goodbyes, graduation soon to take them far away.

An hour or so ago three of our more outgoing Honors students came by to bid adieu to Queshia and me. They sat in the Honors office and we talked for about twenty minutes. Much of our conversation centered on the idea of letting go...or not: end-of-semester goodbyes, helicopter parenting, and relationships that have run their course.

"Kids these days," I began, noting that I'd once sworn up and down that I'd never say those words, "don't have the freedom we had when I was young. As long as my parents knew roughly where I was, we were free to roam about the town, with little worry what we'd get into." Now, of course, parents hover overhead. They call the program on their kids' behalves, inquiring about requirements and expectations and perks. They ask after every detail of their kids' academic lives. They have to learn to let go.

We all have to learn to do this, and it's not an easy thing to do.

As I wrote in a recent post, my life lately has been filled with loved ones lost. One of my closest friends lost her mother, suddenly, and not two weeks later another friend, just as suddenly, lost her father. In the skinny interstice between these deaths two other, yet younger, friends of friends passed away, and in the time since my friend's father's death I've heard several talk of losing parents, friends, and pets. It's gotten overwhelming, and, as I hinted in that same post above, I can't say that I've handled it well.

Why not? One reason, I think, is that I've been lucky enough to not have lost many people truly close to me. I've made it through 38 years without losing a particularly close friend or family member. I seem to be blessed with a particularly healthy set of childhood friends, and my friends from college are no less hearty and robust. And my mom and dad both up and moved far, far away from their respective families when they were young, so I grew up hell and gone from my extended families. This meant that I hardly knew any of the grandparents and other more distant relatives I've lost, having only seen them for a few days at a time once every other year or so, and then only when I was very young. We simply weren't close.

I don't mean to sound unfeeling or callous or cold: this is just the way it is. I've never had to deal directly with death; I'm as yet unfamiliar with its effects on me. What's more, I still don't feel as though I'm dealing with it directly, even now, but really only through others, and thus I'm not so much dealing with death as I am dealing with the effects that death has on my relationships with those dealing with death directly. Therefore my experience is a mediated one and, because it centers on others' relationships with me, it's an experience I thought at first was necessarily selfish.

But does it have to be selfish? On reflection, I think not.

When tragedy strikes our friends, we can choose to remove ourselves and feel their pain only through the effects it has on the relationships we share with those friends. We see the tragedy strike, but we don't feel it immediately. We shelter ourselves. We may offer our support, but that support is academic, it's detached and distant.

I fear that this is the kind of support I've been offering to my friends in their recent mourning. I've baked a few dozen cookies and a couple loaves of bread, I've offered the expected words of solace and succor, and I've offered a hand with transportation and child care, if needed. But I've not really been present for the pain. I've spent more time focusing on the way in which the various tragedies affect me, as mediated through my friends' pain in turn.

I need to learn to let go.

I need to learn to let go of my own pain, to feel it, but also to let it pass so that in its place I can place a picture of the pain my friends may be going through as they deal with their loss.

Further, I need to learn to let go of  my self, if only for a little while, to see beyond my self and my immediate relationships with my friends, to see instead to my friends' relationships with the loved ones they've lost.

Finally, I need to learn to let go of those very relationships, or at least my static conceptions of those relationships, and to accept that tragedy brings great waves of change and that once those waves have passed the relationships they've left behind might look very different than they did just days before.

To anyone to whom I've not been able to offer the succor or support you've needed from me, I apologize. I've not before dealt with death so directly, and I'm only now learning my own authentic reactions to it. I'm a work in progress, and that progress may be slow at times, but I promise you that it's there.

Thank you for understanding.

We are family

I'm now three semesters into my stint as Honors Program director, and I think I'm starting to get the hang of the gig. I've learned the ropes well enough to feel confident tweaking things here, cinching it up there, and making many many midcourse adjustments. Give me another term or two and I'm gonna feel ready to make some bigger changes.

Like what? I've had a number of conversations with one of my closest colleagues about ways in which the Honors Program could be made to cater more to students who demonstrate exceptional intellect and motivation via measures other than standardized test scores and high achievement in courses (like AP classes) ultimately driven by rote examination. I don't want to go too far too fast, but my colleague and I brainstormed ways we could modify both the admission process to the program and the requirements for graduation with Distinction as a University Scholar in order to encourage less the grinds, grade-grubbers, and résumé-builders (many of whom either drop from the program before completing Distinction requirements or simply take a path of least resistance, relying on courses they know won't really challenge them) and more the risk-takers, visionaries, and authentic learners (many of whom are ineligible for the program as it's currently constructed because their risk-taking and earnest focus on real learning has led them to lower performance by quantitative measures).

How might we do this? Disallow membership in the program for first-year (or at least first-semester) students, requiring all interested students to opt in to the program (and not simply be placed there) after having spent some time at the university. Admittance criteria would be more holistic and not so focused on classroom performance. The program's curricular offerings would be more intentionally integrative and dovetail with substantial extra- and co-curricular activities and programming. Students would be asked to complete a sort of Honors thesis at the end of their involvement in the program. Most important, Honors students would be asked to interact in a meaningful fashion with students who are not members of the program. Of what this interaction would consist...I don't know. All I know now is that both I and my partner in crime in this revisioning exercise believe that the Honors Program offers a troubling equity issue, providing real resources to the most academically gifted of students, the ones who are less likely to need those resources in order to succeed in their college careers, while their less-academically-gifted peers make do without such assistance.

Excellence without elitism: how do we realize this vision? One way might be to take the tack we've slowly been turning to over the last couple of terms, emphasizing not the Honors Program's academic offerings but instead its sense of community. I truly believe we've done far more to support Honors students' success during the past year through Honors yoga sessions, Reading-Day snacks, "Good Books" reading groups, and Honors trivia nights than we have through sending a small handful of Honors students to statewide, regional, and national conferences.

My university (like every other in the country) is struggling with recruitment and retention, and I truly believe the community-building we're trying to do in the Honors Program is an unbeatable means of achieving those two related goals. Nothing beats the inestimable and intangible benefit of bringing the students together in the Laurel Forum, introducing those with like interests and aims, giving them access to one another's support. They'll stick around, and they'll not regret a minute of it. And when their younger peers come to visit the school they'll talk the program up into the stratosphere (I've heard them do it).

So, expect to see more community-building as the program looks to the future. And if you've got any ideas for ways we can do this (jigsaw puzzles? Brew-offs? Iron-Chef-like cooking competitions?), please let me know.