In absentia

It's been a long, long day, and I'm in a particularly honest mood.

I'd like to I apologize for being somewhat gone from this space; I've got no excuse, only explanation. Namely, there's a lot going on, both in my personal life and in my professional life. One or the other I can handle, singly; when the two come together...well, there you have it...

I've much, much more to say about a great many things, including the Honors Program (going well; it's a lot of fun), my two classes (also both going well, I feel, with some ups and downs), the curriculum review (grrrr...), several trips I've made since my last post (lots of fun, and lots learned, on all of them)...but given my mood at present I don't think it would be wise to say much more.

In brief...

Honors Program: I'm learning as I'm going, but having a blast. The students are great. I'm growing into the job, but I hope it can't be said that I'm afraid of making a few changes where changes are called for. The tone I'm trying to strike is one of anti-elitism.

My two classes: my HON 179 is quiet. I'm working on that. My Complex Variables class is fun, a mix of math majors, physics majors, and a few odd engineers and chemists. We're making our way through Churchill and Ward, slowly but surely. It's not the smoothest run I've ever made, but it's the first time I've taught the course (ever!), so I'm willing to make a few mistakes here and there.

The curriculum review: in the words of the late, great Rodney King: can't we all just get along? Into this program (over the past 19 months or so) I've put several hundreds (if not thousands) of hours; I've written hundreds of pages of proposals, meeting minutes, and position papers; I've attended god knows how many meetings...and I fear the entire process may amount to nothing because a few folks seems unwilling to compromise. Color me disappointed right now. We'll see what happens next...

Trips: since posting last, I've been to Laredo, Wildacres, Charlotte, Roanoke, and DC (am I missing anything), doing faculty development for high school math teachers and university faculty, speaking on 3x30, and trying to convince the American Mathematical Society's Committee on Education that yes, we should be trying to get our students to write more. Et cetera. I'm tired of traveling. It's time I stayed home.

More later. Much more. For now, I'd best be off to bed.

Thank you all for reading.

Week One is in the can!

Just an hour ago I wrapped up my last class of the first week of the semester. I'm looking forward to Complex this term: it's a small (for me) class, with only 15 students, many of whom already know each other and are comfortable working together. So far I've had no trouble getting folks to volunteer to present solutions at the board, and I think the students' level of experience and sophistication is almost exactly what I'd expected. This is good.

Meanwhile, my first-year seminar is proving a bit more of a challenge, relatively unused as I am to leading discussion-based classes. The conversations were sluggish again today, and I asked the students at the end of the class to give me some feedback by asking each of them to tell me one thing that would better help them get involved in the discussions. The most common response (from five or six people) was that they feel they'll open up a bit more once they know each other better. There were several other very good suggestions, one of which I'm going to try to implement: "Less of an assumption that the teacher leads the discussion. Maybe we have daily/topical discussion leaders."

In each class meeting starting on Monday, I'm going to have two people volunteer to lead discussion in the next meeting. It'll be up to those people to design activities to plan to prepare people for conversation and to come up with questions to ask to prod conversation along when it lags. This will give students more ownership in the process. Moreover, they'll be asking each other questions, rather than waiting for me to ask questions of them, which in turn decenters the classroom further.

There were aspects of today's conversation that were interesting. As an exercise in identity formation, and to indicate the power of naming things, I asked each student to describe herself in three words. Though they were not required to share their words with the class, all but a couple of students did so (my own three are last):

indecisive/pinpoint/react
I am happy
absurd/optimistic/playful [arranged in a playful little triangle]
Trying my best
geek/sarcastic/neurotic
gracious/observant/driven
unique/perfectionist/artistic
five-clay-happiness
optimistic/thoughtful/musician
outgoing/intelligent/determined [fittingly, for the first, written in large, bold letters]
optimistic/caring/traveler
quiet/writer/dreamer
poet/teacher/friend

What's this say about us? An optimistic bunch, I guess.

It's been a good first week, overall. I'm glad to be back in the classroom, though my adjusting to the role of Honors Director is distracting me from fully focusing on my classes. That'll get better as I settle in. To my students: apologies if I've seemed distracted these first few days. I'll get better, I promise.

So far, so good

Halfway through the second day, and the semester's chugging along nicely.

The first meeting of my Complex Variables class came off without a hitch yesterday. I've got a relatively small group (15 students), comprising math, physics, and engineering majors. We had a lively first class, in which, after a brief review of operations on and properties of real numbers, we encountered the basic definition of a complex number. Tomorrow will tell if the structure I've designed for this course will work out well. I'm doing a sort of "flipped Moore method," wherein the students will be presenting only certain of the problems they're assigned, while they'll be submitting written solutions to them all. From the second problem set on, they'll be required to submit their solutions in LaTeX, and I'll be giving them all the option of taking part in the study my colleague Beatrice and I have put together for this coming year's Conference on College Composition and Communication (viva, Las Vegas!). Our goal will be to understand the effect that using LaTeX has on students' composition processes.

Meanwhile, I'm busy settling into the Honors office and meeting with Honors students as they drop in. I'm beginning to realize that much of this job entails putting out the dozens of little range fires that pop up on an almost hourly basis. (Welcome to administration, I suppose...?) It's not often the same thing twice, so far, so there's enough variety to make the job interesting. Moreover, the students are fantastic. I'm particularly enjoying meeting majors from departments very far removed from my own (Accounting, Health and Wellness Promotion, etc.).

It's going smoothly. Things are settling quickly enough that I'm already starting to look ahead to my next round of trips. First I'm off to Texas A&M International University in Laredo, where I'll be leading a day and a half of faculty development workshops centering on writing in the disciplines. Next, it's up the mountain to the Wildacres Retreat Center for my fifth Carolinas Writing Program Administrators fall conference (love those people!). Finally, a week later I'm off to my first North Carolina English Teachers Association conference (featuring my first official book signing!). I've got a couple more weeks to get ready, but need to get on it, especially for that first trip.

Speaking of which, let me get back to it...

Day One

My first (official) meeting of my HON 179 course on "Metamorphoses in Math and Language" met just a half-hour ago. The students, almost without exception brand-spankin' new, first-semester students, are a bit quiet, still shy about speaking up in front of one another, especially when called on to talk about hifalutin' things like one's personal sense of purpose and vision.

"Why are you here?" I asked them to reflect on, after reading them Billy Collins's "Monday" and suggesting that the poet seems to presume that everything be in its right place. "Why are you here right now?"

While the students wrote in response to this intentionally vague prompt, I reflected in a brief freewrite in my daybook (my colleague Libby will be delighted to know that I'm asking all of the students in this class to keep daybooks this term):

"Why am I here? I'm here to share some wonderful words, to learn how they affect others (do they affect you the same way they affect me?). I'm here to help you all begin to discover your academic selves, to adjust to expectations, new environments, new settings.

"We've seen so much; we've seen so much, now let us see it all together, let us unpack it, sort it through, try to understand what we can make of it. What do we have here?

"What can you bring? That is what I'm here to discover. That is what I'm here to learn.

"What can we do together?"

It occurred to me just moments ago, sitting here in my new office, across the quad, buildings away from my long-time community in the Math Department, one floor down from my adoptive  home in Literature & Language, the sort of changes I'm making right now. They outwardly appear dramatic ones, a break from my old department (a metonym for the discipline), a move across campus into new functions and duties, a new set of colleagues and coworkers...but it's much as though I've consummated a marriage that followed a long engagement with cohabitation: I've done enough interdisciplinary work for the past several years, and in that time I've worked with so many people across campus that this new move doesn't seem all that new.

I've got this. I can handle it.

Now to get ready for my second first class of the semester, Complex Variables...could I be teaching two more different courses this term?