New Year's resolutions

Happy new year, folks! As I write this it's already 2009 in 11/24 of the world, with just a few hours left in 2008 for me and mine in North Carolina.

I'm not overly eager to see 2008 go, as it's been a pretty decent year for me (economic downturn notwithstanding). I am looking forward to 2009, though, as I've got a number of irons warming in the fire that should be nice and hot before the new year is up.

What's gone on this past year? What's to come in the year that begins tomorrow?

2008 Teaching Highlights (in no particular order)

1. I'm still high from my work with this past year's crop of REU students. They were smart, quick, and immensely talented. I truly felt humbled by some of the work they put out this summer.

2. I received my third nomination by my students for a university-wide teaching award. I. Am. Honored. My thanks go out to all of the wonderful students who make this job such a pleasure to perform.

3. I'm very proud of having survived my first-ever teaching of Precalculus. It presented new challenges to me, ones that I feel I met rather well. I'm incredibly grateful to my Precalc students for their seemingly limitless patience and cooperation; they taught me innumerable tricks and techniques. I've learned much from them.

4. My first full calendar year of service on the Writing Intensive Committee has taught me boatloads about the many manifestations of academic writing. In attending my first two writing-related conferences, I've learned what a welcoming and supportive bunch the composition/rhetoric community is. I look forward to developing further ties with many of that community's members.

5. I've been intrigued and excited by the possibilities I've begun to study for interplay between math and poetry. What I've seen so far, I'm sure, is little more than the tip of the iceberg. What will the coming year bring?

2009 Coming Attractions (in no particular order)

1. Spring 2009 will be my first ever semester with four preps. However, I've taught every one of these classes before, so none of them are new preps, and I've already got the structure of two of them pretty much completely worked out. Is it going to kick my ass? We'll see.

2. In the coming semester my Super Saturday class will be on-line for the first time since I've been leading it. Now that I've got a solid curriculum and a number of good resources to back it up, I'm more confident than ever as I go into my sixth semester with the program. If things go well, I'm thinking of using the course materials as the basis for a children's book on hands-on advanced mathematics.

3. I'm excited to find out how the LaTeX module is going to work out in our Foundations course. It'll be difficult to assess the overall impact of this move right away, but I hope that by introducing the students to the software early in their careers it'll make them stronger expositors of mathematics down the road.

4. I'll be submitting several non-mathematics articles this coming year, comprising a few on the scholarship of teaching and learning in various settings. I'm eager to see how these are received.

5. The third summer of the REU is fast approaching, and with six of our past two years' alumni presenting at JMM, I'm wondering how we're going to top our past successes. I hope we can come through, though, as by June 5th I'm going to have to submit my application for continued funding from the NSF.


All that and more. But I'll leave it for tomorrow. For now, it's off to the celebration!

Chapter 4. How am I writing?

This essay, the fourth of an intended twelve-part series on writing instruction (and its parallels with math instruction), deals in part with an issue raised in the last essay in the series. Namely, what happens to writing instruction when first-year composition courses are done away with? Whereas the emphasis in the aforementioned essay lay on the changing roles of faculty in the event of severe shake-ups in curricula and course scheduling, the emphasis here will lie on writing instruction.

Several years ago, when its Integrative Liberal Studies (ILS) program was first implemented, our school opted to scrap half of its first-year composition program. In compensation for the lost semester of writing instruction, all first-year Liberal Studies Introductory Colloquia (LSICs), which are taught by faculty in disciplines and departments across the university, were automatically designated as Writing Intensive (WI) courses.

How good a substitute for the missing semester would these courses prove?

Some of my colleagues objected (and still object) to these courses' WI designation, claiming that faculty who are not trained to teach writing have no business in fact so doing, and that trained rhetoricians will do an incomparably better job of imparting writing skills on young college students. On the other hand proponents of writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines indicate that the LSICs expose students to authentically discipline-specific writing conventions, and that no one could do a better job at this than the practitioners of the respective disciplines in which the LSICs are run. (The next essay in this series will have a bit more to say about these points of view.)

Nevertheless, the sentiment among the WI folks of late has been that the LSIC instructors have as often as not been failing their students when it comes to providing meaningful writing instruction: where intentional instruction is given at all, it often focuses on the mechanics of writing (e.g., grammar and spelling) and not on substantive issues such as audience, tone, writing as a means to learning. Evidence for this failing comes not only from student/faculty scuttlebutt but from various data collected during the first year of the writing assessment study my colleague Lulabelle directed. (In particular, the rubric constructed by the participating LSIC faculty was weighted quite heavily towards mechanical issues, and the syllabi collected from these faculty showed little evidence of robust writing instruction. In fairness, the rubric constructed by the participating writing-in-the-disciplines faculty suffered from critical weaknesses of a different sort, and these faculty members' syllabi were little better, by and large, than those of their colleagues leading LSIC courses.)

Why these weaknesses? I.e., why is it that these courses' instructors are often providing what composition theorists would describe as substandard writing instruction? There are microcosmic issues at work here, as well as some broader macrocosmic ones. The former affect individuals and departments, and ultimately determine which faculty members end up leading the LSIC courses; the latter affect the nature of the LSIC courses themselves and the response that the faculty, as a body, has to them. Ultimately both of these kinds of forces stem from the structure of the ILS system as a whole.

What of the microcosmic forces? As I just said, their genesis in the structure of the Integrative Liberal Studies program itself: as it is desirable that LSICs be offered in every conceivable discipline, and as it is desirable that all of the university's faculty bear an equal share of the burden of providing the LSIC experience, every department in the university is expected to offer its fair share of LSICs.

But who in a given department is going to teach them? While there are some who will gladly volunteer to teach an LSIC, there are as many or more who will resist doing so. Given that the ideal LSICs will have minimal prerequisites (thereby making them accessible to as many first-year students as possible), offer authentic engagement of rich course content, and fulfill the university's WI requirement, they are challenging courses to teach and even more challenging ones to teach well. Moreover, the ideal LSIC instructor will show true passion for the subject matter the LSIC treats, but crafting a course about which ones feels truly passionate while remaining within the confines of the LSIC's structure can be a challenge. (For example, regular readers may recall an anecdote related by my CWPA colleague Leona back in September, as retold in the second of this series of essays, and in which she told of a fellow instructor of writing who lamented that she'd not had a chance to teach a literature course, despite her earlier assertion that she was all about first-year comp courses.)

Another, more pragmatic factor: those students enrolled in LSICs who have yet to choose an adviser are by default assigned as advisees to the instructor of their LSIC course. As a result, those faculty teaching LSICs are laden with considerably higher numbers of advisees, and in particular, more difficult-to-advise non-major advisees, than are their non-LSIC-teaching colleagues.

As a result many department chairs find themselves twisting their colleagues' arms in order to get enough LSICs on the books to satisfy the administrative powers that be. It doesn't take a learning theorist to explain that a willing instructor is going to do a much better job of teaching a course than a nonwilling instructor will do.

And what of the macrocosmic forces? Well, as I hinted at above, not everyone has bought into the ILS system in the first place. Proponents and opponents alike will agree that the ILS system is unwieldy and cumbersome: to explain it in moderate detail takes eight full pages of the latest course catalog (see pages 51-58 of the on-line version of the AY 2008-09 catalog). Not counting the required intensive courses, the student will put 47 credit-hours of work towards fulfilling the ILS goals.

In fairness, some credit-hours can be double- or even triple-counted; for instance a student might enrol in a single 3-hour course in order to satisfy simultaneously a Quantitative-Intensive requirement, a Cluster requirement, and a Lab Science requirement. However, "accounting tricks" like this make course selection seem more like a game or a strategic military move than an exercise in personal or intellectual development.

Nevertheless the ILS system is byzantine and often arbitrary; many feel it was implemented too hastily, while others bemoan the fact that it was implemented at all. The opponents of ILS are numerous and some are powerful, and I believe that some of these folks promulgate the view that the system's components and requirements are not to be taken seriously.

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I am not an opponent of the ILS system as a whole, as one might expect knowing that I serve on the ILS Subcommittee for Writing-Intensives. I do, however, feel that the program was implemented too hastily: it was thrown together in its entirety all at once, without sufficient attention paid to its outcomes and impacts. I feel that certain of its components have proven more successful than others, and I would recommend phased elimination of some of the less successful aspects of the program, in particular the Cluster system. On the other hand, I feel that the Intensives (Diversity, Information Literacy, Quantitative, and Writing) all serve useful roles and should remain in place, although I believe much more careful management and oversight of these Intensives must go on. To put it bluntly, some of these Intensives need to get their shit together.

So what's the upshot of all of this? What havoc do these forces wreak on the writing-instruction that goes on in LSICs?

Because LSIC instructors are as often draftees as they are volunteers, and because they do not actively have to seek WI approval for their courses as instructors of any other WI course would have to do, and because they interact with often influential and powerful peers who pooh-pooh the importance of the ILS system as a whole, a good number of LSIC instructors are simply overly complacent about their duties as instructors of writing. I don't claim that this is the case of every LSIC instructor, but undeniably a fair number of our first-year students are receiving writing instruction (or, tellingly, are not receiving writing instruction) from faculty who see little reason for providing that instruction in the first place.

How widespread is this phenomenon?

I don't know.

And I don't think we're going to know any time soon.

We're a year and a half into a two-year assessment of our school's WI program, yet I don't believe we could even hope to answer that question through our study: those LSIC instructors who took part in the first year of the program (and those who are likely to take part in the final semester during Spring 2009) were highly self-selected; they're the ones who already recognize the importance of writing instruction and are therefore likely not among the ranks of the complacent.

For the time being let's assume that complacency exists, regardless of our powerlessness to measure its extent. What can be done to combat this complacency?

In May 2008 Lulabelle and I put together two day-long faculty development workshops on writing instruction; one day focused on writing in the disciplines, the other on writing instruction in LSICs. We tailored the goals and activities of each workshop to the audiences we hoped to reach. For instance, in the LSIC workshop we focused our efforts on helping participants understand the role that writing serves as a learning tool (emphasizing writing process over writing product), on guiding participants through construction of well-staged writing assignments, and on providing meaningful (not simply mechanical) feedback on students' writing.

It was a start. As one might expect, the LSIC workshop participants were noticeably less engaged than their colleagues in the disciplines workshop, but I still feel that the former get-together was a fruitful one. Similar and frequent faculty development opportunities exposing LSIC teachers to the ideals of first-year writing instruction will be crucial. My colleagues and I on the WI Subcommittee also hope to schedule meetings with interested departments in order to apprise them of resources we and the University Writing Center can offer their faculty as those faculty begin to craft WI courses, including LSICs. Moreover, through the nascent IWIn (Integrative Writing Initiative) I've been working on for a while now with several of my colleagues from across the campus we should be able to nurture further support in the form of Faculty Writing Fellows (at least, if Lulabelle has anything to say about it).

It's a tough row to hoe, but hoe that row we will.

Before I end this essay I should acknowledge that much of what I've written about here applies as much to WI courses in the disciplines as it does to LSICs; the primary difference between these courses and the LSICs is that for the former writing-intensive status must be actively sought and thus the petitioning faculty member has taken it upon herself to craft a well-structured writing experience for her students. Even if she has not taken part in any formal professional development related to writing instruction, she has submitted her plans for a WI course to a body of her peers who have been recognized as able assessors of writing instruction. Moreover, those faculty who have not themselves applied to receive writing-intensive status for the WI course they are teaching are generally apprised by their department chairs of the nature of writing instruction expected in a WI course. This circumstance arises, for example, when the instructor is one of several people who teaches a course that has received "blanket" WI approval, regardless of the course's instructor.

My next essay in this series will treat an issue that relates closely to the one dealt with here, namely, the Reluctant Instructor of Writing: how is it that someone not trained in formal composition theory can serve as an expert instructor of writing? As you may expect, my response to this question will deal primarily with writing in the discipline, the sort of writing any disciplinary expert should feel eminently confident in approaching. Moreover, I will do what I can to establish parallels between writing instruction and mathematics instruction. In so doing I will bring up a question about which I've given a lot of thought: who makes the better math teacher, the weaker mathematician or the stronger one?

Until then, as always, I invite your comments and your feedback.

Déjà vu

It's raining outside, Maggie's asleep on one of our new couches, it's the perfect day for updating the blog.

I've just returned from the second of my three May conference-season journeys, this one to Nashville, and I'm spending the day recuperating before a new busy week-and-a-half that ends with me taking off to Austin, Texas for the 9th biennial International Conference on Writing Across the Curriculum. Most of the next week will be spent preparing for my presentations there, and in applying our team's newly-minted rubric to piles of papers from Management and French Literature courses taught by my colleagues participating in the study.

I could have it worse: my friends Cordelius and Lulabelle have to wade through a stack of my 280 students' papers as they try to apply the rubric to nearly a hundred pages of intermediate mathematics. I spent a few hours making up a "primer of mathematical writing" to help them begin to read math. Therein I indicated that most mathematical notation is little more than shorthand, that mathematical terminology, though daunting, has the advantage of being precise and unambiguous, and that the most unfamiliar genres of mathematical writing (namely, definition, proposition, and proof) are fairly straightforward and exhibit clear idiosyncratic qualities that make them quite accessible to someone patient enough to examine their stylistic elements.

I hope it helps.

Wednesday and Thursday of this past week were spent in faculty workshops on writing, led by me, Lulabelle, and a handful of our colleagues. Wednesday's focus was on writing for freshmen, particularly those in our "liberal studies introductory colloquium" courses in which new students are exposed to the liberal arts tradition through seminars on a variety of subjects spanning the school's academic spectrum. I felt Wednesday's session was a bit lackluster, I sensed only tepid commitment from a number of the participants, I myself was still getting over a cold that had knocked me flat the week before, and I was having a hard time granting myself the authority to speak as a "writing expert." It was the first workshop outside my discipline I've ever had to run, and I felt like something of a pretender or a charlatan, standing in front of a roomful of my colleagues and trying to convince them that I knew what in the hell I was talking about.

By Thursday I felt better, both physically and psychologically. What's more, the audience seemed a bit more receptive: I sensed much firmer conviction on the part of that day's participants than on that of their colleagues from the day before. Thursday's crew was there to talk about discipline-specific writing, the sort that (presumably) goes on in higher-level coursework. I felt good about Thursday's workshop.

Immediately after the workshop ended on Thursday I hit the road to Nashville, arriving at my hotel just before 9:00 Central Time. I called up Titania, my friend from grad school, and we met for coffee at Fido (greatest coffee shop on Earth), my home away from home much of the four years I'd lived in Nashville.

We talked for a few hours, sounding like we were a hundred years older than we were five years ago. We talked about students and committees and conferences and enrichment programs and research and course design and assessment...we talked like the real university faculty that we are.

She, like two or three others of my colleagues who graduated from Vanderbilt within a year or so of me, has just received tenure.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't wish I were in the same boat. I'm starting to feel anxious. It's not that I'm worried about dismissal; I passed this year's reappointment process with flying colors. I'm just looking forward to the symbolic stability that tenure confers. I'm looking forward to the sense of permanence that comes with it. Yet I lost three years on the tenure clock in moving from a research postdoc to a tenure-track gig at a liberal arts institution, so I've got at least another year to go (likely two). Don't get me wrong, I can understand the powers that be not wanting to credit me with three full years of time served, but I'm a little disappointed that I wasn't able to get at least a year or a year-and-a-half of credit for the teaching I did in grad school and afterward in Illinois. It would be one thing if I'd gained nothing through that experience, but in all immodesty my talents speak for themselves.

I'm sorry, I hope you'll grant me this brief bout of pridefulness.

As Fido was prepared to close, Titania and I took to the street and headed over to Vanderbilt's campus. We continued to talk as we walked, reminiscing on our time in grad school (which time both of us enjoyed immensely), updating one another on mutual friends' goings-on. After a while we found ourselves at the math building, Stevenson Center's Building #1, and happily the doors were unlocked.

Our first stop was the first subfloor, where still stand the math grad students' offices. I know three of the current grad students (one's an ex-mentee and coauthor, a second's research path has crossed my own, and I was the reviewer for a paper by the third), the rest were just a smiling sea of young mathematicians who happened currently to be squatting in the offices we'd once called our own. We wandered through the dimly-lit office suite, trying to remember who was in which office in our own time. We were able to place most of our colleagues, but one or two offices were hard to fill.

We inspected the classrooms farther down the hall. "I had semigroups in here, with Gould," I told Titania.

"I had topology," she replied.

"I defended in this room," I said in another.

"Why'd you defend down here? I was in one of the rooms upstairs."

"I don't know."

She told me about how she once broke the sliding blackboard in the larger lecture room at the end of the hall. "I grabbed it from one side only and pulled it off the track," she explained.

Not much had changed.

After a bit we went back down the hall and took the stairs to the third floor, the first one above the ground. We stopped for a moment to peruse the list of faculty, most of whom we recognized. I mused that the Fields Medalist had no office number assigned to him.

At the end of the hall on the left was the room in which I first taught a course of my own, about which I blogged back in September 2007. It's changed very little since the night on which I went to campus to prepare for class the following morning: the blackboards are the same, the desks are the same, there still superfluously hangs from the ceiling above the side board an ancient set of maps of the world. "I never figured out why those are there," Titania said.

Half of the countries depicted thereon no longer exist.

That classroom remains, though.

I don't believe I ever led a class in that room after Fall 1999, so it's been over eight years since I've taught there.

Odd.

I shudder as I think back to the first writing assignment I made up for my Calc I kiddies back in 1999. Its prompt was little more than "Write a 5-10 page paper on a mathematical topic of your choosing. This is due on November eleventy-first." Granted, I gave my students hints on how to go about picking a topic, how to get started on their research, how to vet and cite their sources, which is more than many faculty would give. (Hell, most math faculty don't even think about assigning writing projects.) But I did next to nothing to structure or stage the assignment, to allow for rough drafts, to incorporate feedback, to provide writing instruction. The completed papers I returned to the students were line-edited, as much attention paid to misplaced commas as to thematic vacuums and ill-used evidence. Small wonder the products of my students' efforts were so hit-and-miss.

Ouch.

I've come a long way as a teacher in the past ten years. I wonder what experience the next decade will bring?

For now, I'm off to fold some clothes and rearrange our bookshelves. I'll be back soon, I hope.

In the meantime, if you've got something to say, please say it.

Run down

As I was rounding the south-bending curve of I-240 West on the way home this evening I caught a quick glimpse of a dead possum. He wasn't the first of his kind I've seen dead at the side of the road, and surely not the most brutally beaten. I sped by at fifty miles an hour and never came closer than fifteen feet from where he lay, so my view was only brief. Somehow, though, the sight of his body keenly and clearly connoted death: final, absolute, without ambiguity.

This past Monday I laughingly offered to shoot myself after bowling a disappointing 113 in league play. "Just shoot me," I said to one of my teammates, making a gun of my hand and aiming it at my right temple. A split-second later I thought of Elmer, and I felt like an ass.

Elmer was a student in my 365 course, the one for which I began writing this blog nearly two years ago. He was a fantastic student in all three classes I shared with him (Calc II, Calc III, and Linear Algebra), and I'd grant that he had stronger mathematical aptitude than any other non-math major I've yet taught at UNCA. He had a promising career as a research chemist, and was a favorite with all of his faculty here. He was on his way towards stardom at UC Berkeley.

This Monday afternoon I found out that Elmer had hung himself last week.

Death stalks, watching from the wings. It's never far away.

Reminders of mortality have been thick of late. Two of my best students have lost loved ones in the past two weeks: one a brother's father; the other a childhood friend. One to sickness, death coming unsurprisingly on steady-stepping feet; to the other death came with blinding rapidity, swift and startling.

We do what we can to cope, to go on living, to make do, and each of us makes do in our own way.

I realize after re-reading the last few (scattered and infrequent) posts I've made to this blog that I've said little lately that's purely pedagogical. All semester I've been preoccupied with matters one could only describe as "personal," even as they effect my teaching: "I feel" this, "I sense" that...

A funny thought occurs to me: yesterday I was charged with writing up an evaluation form to be used in our capstone course (MATH 480), which I'm coordinating this semester. (Context: we currently don't solicit from the students course evaluations for this class, though I've often wondered why this is. We're hoping to offer the students a chance to give us more feedback on the course, thus the eval form I wrote.) I resisted a colleague's suggestion to do away with the Likert-scaled items "How confident would you now feel in preparing a presentation on a mathematical topic?" and "How confident would you now feel in researching an unfamiliar mathematical topic?", indicating the need to assess not only cognitive learning goals, but also affective ones. In the items stayed.

Exercise #1: Complete the sentence: "I feel..."

...as though this semester is best characterized by improved awareness of one's self in one's teaching. Last semester the lesson I best learned was one dealing with intentionality: if one hopes to improve students' ability to write mathematically, one must intentionally design one's course to address students' writing abilities. If one hopes to encourage students to work well as members of an academic team, one must intentionally design activities that bring students together as a team.

This semester I've learned (as a reading of my recent posts should suggest) that the "me" that I am outside the classroom is never very far from the "me" that I am in it.

My frustrations follow me when I walk through the classroom door. So do my annoyances, my pet peeves, my likes and dislikes, my (sometimes overly) generous and giving nature, my distractibility that leads to entertaining tangents. What you see is what you get: I prefer harmony to conflict, and the carrot to the stick. I'm bad at playing The Heavy, and when I play that part I do it clumsily, erringly.

Exercise #2: Complete the sentence: "I am confident that..."

...I've learned a lot from my students this semester, perhaps more than they've learned from me.

More than anything else, I've learned about perspective.

A Brief History of Perspective

Once the world was flat,
and folks were formless blobs.
Life was dull, to say the least.
We knew little of each other,
and cared even less.
We wandered around clumsily back then,
always bumping into one another.
"Excuse me," you might say.
"Harumph," I might reply: "Watch your step! I was here first."
"I didn't know..."
We'd argue, but it wouldn't matter anyway, for
there was no telling who stood where in relation to
this
or that
or another.
Then angles rose up, ministers of space,
connoting volume,
motion,
action.
All at once I could be
behind you, or in front of you, or at your side,
and in any case it would be clear where I meant myself to be.
"She was barely seventeen," you tell me.
"Fresh as a lavender bud,
clean as April air."
Who was she?
She wasn't numbers derivatives integrals sequences series...
...She was, however, day lilies dalliances mischievous winks curfew-breaking cruises down
the highway at unimaginable speeds.
Angles did her in.
They gave her room to move about, they let her up from the page...

What do we mean to each other, in the end?

"Let's do it," I told Cassio at the end of this semester's Parson's lecture. Prof. Mary Lou Zeeman had just finished her talk on mathematical modeling in biology, and Cassio had asked her afterward about how modifications of her models might look in the context of global economics and politics.

"Let's look into it." He was excited.

Exercise #3: Complete the sentence: "I feel that..."

...I've done my best work this semester when the lines that mark the borders between my teaching self, my research self, and my self self have been most indistinct.

I feel good about the undergraduate research projects I've helped to get underway this semester. Several students have begun meaningful, original, authentic research projects as a consequence of being in the right place at the right time. They've been excited by the potential of mathematics to answer questions they themselves have asked, and I've been lucky enough to be there, in the right place at the right time, to steer them on a course towards their respective goals.

I feel good about the work I've done this semester with the Super Saturday program, particularly that done with the help of my student assistants. I'm proud of them, I'm proud of their dedication, their sense of purpose.

I feel good about the work I've done with the Writing Intensive Subcommittee, and with my colleagues on the Writing Assessment Pilot Project. I'm proud about our findings, and I enjoy our meetings immensely. (Am I sick for looking forward to them?)

I feel good knowing that more than once this semester I've touched students' lives in a positive way. I've excited them about mathematics, I've helped them to access hidden talents, and just by being myself I've managed to make a difference.

Is it ever enough?

Exercise #4: Complete the sentence: "I want..."

...to work with my students and colleagues to create the perfect learning environment, an edenic haven in which the woes of the outside world can be forgotten long enough for us all to come together and put together some beautiful math.

Towards this end, I want to be a hero: I want to be able, singlehandedly, to fend off stalkers and suicides and seasonal affective disorder. I want to be a human restraining order. I want to walk tall and stand firm.

I want to be strong.

Exercise #5: Find meaning in your teaching.

How did I come to teach at a liberal arts college?

I'm not sure my decision to come here was a fully conscious one.

From my adviser, six years ago, after I'd just accepted my postdoc at Illinois: "it's not hard to get your first postdoc. Getting the second one is the trick."

From my wife: "I'm just not convinced you wouldn't be happier somewhere where you had graduate students!"

From my mother-in-law: "I think you should get a job at Princeton. Their campus is beautiful."

Why me, why here?

The past three years have taught me a boatload about who I am and what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

I'm here because I'm a people person. It's here only that I have a chance to know the students as well as I do, and to work with them so closely. I do what I do here because...

...well, because there's nothing in the world I'd rather do.

I. Fucking. Love. My. Job.

I am still amazed that I get to do what I do well and willingly, and that I get paid to do it.

I am still amazed at the satisfaction I get out of my work: the thrill of a new theorem, the wondrousness of a student's sudden epiphany, the warm fuzzies that come from a productive committee meeting.

I'm sick, I'm telling you.

I'm also making less and less sense as I near the end of this post.

And I am nearing the end.

Indeed.

And I've as yet said nothing about the talk I'm giving at Wake Forest tomorrow (on research of which I'm very proud) or the conference I'll be attending in West Virginia this weekend.

There. I said it.

Oh well.

Like other recent posts, this post has been not so much about my teaching as it has been about me. I hope you've made it this far without gouging out your eyes with a butter knife.

I'd like to end with a brief (assuredly incomplete and mostly anonymous) list of my heroes this semester. Maybe you'll recognize yourself.

Before I go, let me make an intensely personal exhortation: if you're reading this, please write to me. Write anonymously, write with your name in big, bold letters. Write comments, dialogues, diatribes. Write poems, stories, confessions. Write apologia, hagiographia. Write pompously, funnily, sarcastically, banally. Write in streams of consciousness, write in haiku. Write however you'd like to, just write. Write, write, write. Tell me I'm right on, tell me I'm full of crap. I'd like to know that you're out there, I'd like to know what you think. It's comforting, it gives me perspective: if I know where you are, I can better know where I am, and I hope that once we all know where we stand in relation to one another we can work together to make our ways meet up in the middle.

Heroes, Spring 2008 Edition

• The Calc II student who, since he cleaned up his act about a third of the way through the semester, has fought his way from an almost certain failing grade to within striking distance of a B. His homework's often messy, but his exam grades have skyrocketed. I'm immensely proud of him.
• The several first-year students who make up my Unofficial Freshman Graph Theory Research Group. Their passion for mathematics is evident and unassailable. They've already made several new discoveries, and I have no doubt that before they leave this school they'll make many more.
• My wife, for putting up with my workaholism, for often being satisfied with seeing me only one hour here, another hour there. Without her help and support I would have gone insane years ago. Without her love I wouldn't be able to make it through the day.
• My Super Saturday assistants, who labored week after week at the thankless task of corralling hyperactive ten-year-olds, convincing those kids that math is a worthwhile endeavor.
• The student who was brave enough to acknowledge that this semester she's been a sub-par scholar, that she's had neither the time nor energy she'd like to devote to our class. I respect her and admire her perseverance, and I hope I'll get a chance to work with her in a future class, when she'll have more time to commit our common cause of learning.
• My best friend, for inspiring me with new teaching ideas, entertaining me with stories of her own classroom, and letting me kvetch to her about whatever it is that's bugging me. Sometimes I think I work as hard as I do just to keep up with her.
• My Graph Theory class, for standing by me through my first fully Moore-method course. My thanks go to them for all of their hard work, and for sticking with it and trusting me enough to put together a halfway decent discovery-centered course.
• The dead possum I saw on the roadside on the way home this evening. He was more than a dozen pounds of bruised flesh and broken bones: he was fragility, humility, mortality. He was, in a sense, me. He brought me here, and here I am. I am now who I'll be tomorrow when I'm talking about my research in Winston-Salem, when I'm working with my students on Friday morning.
  

I'll be there. Will you be with me?

Overdue notices

I'm overdue to post (so saith a few faithful readers, including my mother-in-law, my wife, and two of my most diligent students). Enough, already! So here I am, I'm writing.

I've been here, I've been busy. The last few weeks have been exciting ones, and next week promises its own supply of hecticness (hecticity?).

What's new, pedagogically speaking?

Well, yesterday was the deadline for applicants to this year's REU. This afternoon I counted up the number of distinct applicants from whom I've received at least one document (application, statement of purpose, transcript, or letter of recommendation): 64. Not bad. That's about what we had last year, though I believe the ratio of men to women is higher this year than last. I've yet to break it down geographically, but I think this year's pool is more widely distributed throughout the country than last year's. I'll probably begin looking at the applications in earnest over Spring Break. No sooner: next week's going to be a bear. Tuesday brings a colleague from Davidson College to campus (hello, Twyla! thanks in advance for making it out! and sorry again for the confusion in scheduling!) for the Research Seminar. Then comes the Math Literacy Summit we've been planning for several months, highlighted by the public lecture and keynote address given by Dr. Robert P. Moses. That's Wednesday night and Thursday day. Saturday sees the start-up of Super Saturday once more (I'll see if I can enlist some student helpers...the downside is the onset of Spring Break, taking many students away from campus). By Saturday afternoon I'll be beat.

What else is new?

This past Friday my Graph Theory gurus had their first exam, an in-class ditty that represented my first attempt in almost two years at writing an in-class exam for an upper-division course. It's known far and wide that I'm not a big fan of such a format for seminar courses, and it was hard for me to write an exam that I felt made fair demands of the students' knowledge and was doable within the alloted time. The end result, I feel, was a hair (and no more!) on the long side, and a tad too easy. (I'd be interested in knowing how the students feel about both of those appraisals.) As it is, the students went down to the wire time-wise, several staying for an extra ten minutes to finish up, while the average was high, around 86%. Maybe I didn't ask for enough proofs? Maybe I was a little light in grading? I don't know. The only question that seemed regularly to ensnare the unsuspecting was the problem asking the students to compute the number of homomorphisms from the star with 3 vertices to the star with 4 vertices: there was a broad array of answers to that question.

How's the day-to-day activity in that course been? The students' presentations of solutions are getting tighter, more succinct, more precise. For the most part their diagrams are more descriptive and intuitive than they'd been during the first few weeks, and their proofs are more straightforward and understandable. Most interesting are the differences in presentation styles between the various members of the class. Some are silent until all has been written on the board; their presentations then consist of little more than "voilà! Pas de lacune a remplir!" Some are so verbose they can barely put chalk to board to draw a single tittle without prefacing it with a megillah of mathematical exposition. I wonder to what extent they find others' presentations are affecting the style of their own? (This sounds like a perfect question for a mid-term evaluation!)

We've gotten to the point where the students have a grasp of the basics, I can probably branch off in whatever direction I'd like to in terms of the ground material. The most recent problem sheet (the seventh, available here), deals primarily with components, paths, and chromatic polynomials. I believe I'll make trees the focus of the next sheet, unless someone has a better plan. Lorelei mentioned the other day to me that she'd like to see more applications, so I'll do what I can to work those in (colorability has many applications, and they'll soon be ready to take off in that direction). Markus came to me on Thursday, indicating that his relatively light schedule is granting him plenty of time to take on some independent study in graph theory, so I gave him some reading on graceful labelings, maybe he can join Trixie and Sieglinde in their pursuit for new graceful trees.

Speaking of which, we'll soon have our strongest showing at an MAA Southeast Sectional meeting since my arrival at UNCA: at least five faculty members and four students have indicated interest in going to the meeting, and I'm trying to get three of these students (including Trixie) to present in the student poster session.

And speaking of Trixie, how's Calc II? They too completed their first exam this past week, and overall the grade distribution was pretty fair, with a course average of about 76% after corrections were made. Oddly enough, though, there was a profound difference between the two sections of the course: the first section's post-correction average was about 68%, the second's around 86%. I kid you not. After corrections 12 out of 16 students in the second section got either an A or a B (8 As, 4 Bs), while only 10 of 30 students in the first section earned that bragging right.

What, as they say, is up?

Could it be class size? Admittedly I find it much easier to engage the second section as a whole and as individuals, owing largely to the fact that it's got about half as many students. Moreover, the students are less intimidated by speaking up in front of one another, and by presenting on the board. They're also much less reluctant to get into groups and work on problems together. Whether any of this has anything to do with the size of the class, I don't know, but I can't help but think that class size plays at least a small role. (Incidentally, I'm happy to report that I'll be teaching two sections of Abstract Algebra I next fall, each considerably smaller than the traditional single sections that have been run in the past. Our program has been so successful in courting majors that we're having to run two sections of the upper-division courses. America gonef! [You'll have to excuse the Yiddishisms, I've been making my way through Leo Rosten's delightful Hooray for Yiddish: a book about English. I'm easily influenced].)

Could it be the time of day? But one might think that the sluggish 9:00 a.m. class would be more ideally situated in that regard than the post-lunch but usually-punchy 12:45 p.m. class. Or maybe I just think it that way because I'm a morning person. Perhaps there's something to it: the morning section's usually slow-to-rile and torpid, the afternoon section's much more get-up-and-go.

Could it be...the luck of the draw? I've got great students in both sections, but they're just more highly concentrated in that smaller second section. Maybe it's just coincidence that the second section's so much more lively.

Whatever the cause, the difference between the two sections is as that between night and day. I love both of them, but I find myself often wishing wishing wishing that the first section would wake up and stop dragging its heels!

What else?

Faculty talks have ended in the Senior Seminar, I capped them off with a presentation this past Wednesday, on open problems in graph theory. I'm proud of the fact that we had three speakers from off campus, and that we'll soon have at least two more visitors coming to speak in the Research Seminar. I truly believe that our department should attempt to cultivate a more active research environment, and I think we're well on our way towards achieving that goal.

Student talks begin in the second week after Spring Break, two-by-two they'll fill up the last six weeks of class. I'm looking forward to those talks, the topics look to interesting.

What else?

The Writing Intensive committee (well, technically it's a subcommittee, but who's keeping track?) has sprung back into life, continuing our analysis of WI applications and beginning our conversation on the assessment of the success of already-WIed courses. This is a sticky wicket of a tricky schtick: How are we to judge whether a WI course has met the goals it laid out for its students? What materials must we demand of the course instructors in order to perform a proper assessment? How many of a course's learning goals relating to writing must be met in order to call the course a success? And if a course is less than entirely successful, what consequences do we as a committee mete out? It's unrealistic to aim for the ideal right out of the gate (assuming the ideal can be articulated from the outset anyway): all but the perfect instructor is going to stumble here and there, and no course is flawless in design and execution. Therefore it's pointless to pull someone's WI away should perfection not be attained. We don't want to smite those who fail in providing this or that element of their class's purported learning experience. Instead, we wish to encourage the instructor to look carefully at her course's goals, to look at the students' products in attempting to meet those goals, and say, "this was done well. But this, when asked of the students, proved unrealistic. Better I ask that they reach for the moon with their hands at their sides!"

How many of us are so reflective? I'd like to say that I am, but who am I to say?

In the first of what will be several meetings of the writing assessment project this past week (didn't I say I've been busy?) I told my colleagues that last semester's 280 course taught me to be truly conscious of the role played by writing in my own particular discipline...indeed, I think I learned more in that class than my students did. My approach to writing as a tool for learning has changed because of that class.

Writing is playing less of a role in my Calc II class this semester than it did in either of last semester's classes, and while I've not shone a spotlight on writing in Graph Theory, it's ever present. (The work I've done in 280 over the past year is most evident in the structure of the students' proofs on the blackboard: I'm thrilled whenever I see clear statements of hypotheses, an explicit indication of proof technique, summarizing sentences that indicate when and why a proof has been concluded, and so forth. In all only two or three of that class's students didn't have 280 with me, and almost daily I see elements of my own idiosyncratic style that have rubbed off on them.) I'm going to take a few minutes during this coming week to refocus the students' attention on writing and encourage them to keep an eye on the criteria for solid mathematical writing as they put together their solutions to the problems selected for written submission.

What else?

Um...hmm...giving a recruitment spiel on the upcoming REU and speaking ongoing graph theory research to a wonderfully receptive and warmly inviting crowd at Morehead State University in Kentucky (y'all were great, thank you so much for having me!), writing about a dozen or so REU rec letters for current and old students, joining a couple of colleagues in a presentation to the university's Foundation Board, agreeing to help organize this coming May's Writing Intensive workshop, and shaking off a nasty cold that took me out of commission for a few days...see? There's a reason I've not been around!

If you'll now excuse me, it's Maggie's birthday (which one, I will not say, though I doubt she'd mind if I did, she's not embarrassed by her birthdays), and we've got to go celebrate it in the manner of her choosing.

As usual, all comments, questions, queries, suggestions, insinuations, epiphanies, innuendi, graffiti, scritti politti, revelations, retorts, ripostes, and recriminations are welcome on the comments page.

Until next time, live well, and try to learn something new today.

Random thoughts, volume 2

I had a few interesting conversations today, with colleagues and with students. I also found myself unfairly piqued during my second section of Calc I, and I feel an apology is in order to my students.

Let's start there: Quiz 4 came today, asking for a brief rundown on the two fundamental interpretations of the derivative. As I would soon forcefully point out to my students (post-quiz), it's not as important to me that they memorize the formula for the derivative, nor that they master every one of the rules for differentiation we will soon study, as it is that they understand what derivatives mean, and how it is that we can see them in nature, and put them together to help us understand natural phenomena. As I put it to them, Mathematica can do all the derivatives for us, and much more quickly than we ever could. What Mathematica can't do is study a natural process, recognize that there is an interrelationship between two or more dynamic quantities, chart those interactions over a long enough course of time to posit a model that describes the way they depend on one another, and use that model to put together the derivative that gets fed into Mathematica at the end of the line. Mathematica, in this sense, represents the mathematics of the past, when it wasn't yet the case that there was a handy formula that one could apply to find the derivative of a given function. That was then. This is now, and the future is yet to come. The mathematician of the future needs to know more than a mechanical rules for finding derivatives (as important as they are to be able to apply well); she needs to know how to use derivatives, how to interpret them.

Of course, when I said all this to them, it came out ne'er so fluently as it did just now, above. Figures, huh?

Performance on the quiz was...meh. It wasn't horrific (I've given harder quizzes), but it was by no means stellar. A couple of my best students cornered me after the second section and asked if they were going to be okay from this point on. Tallulah: "because I didn't do well on that quiz." "I doubt anyone did," I told her. "The folks in the first section pretty much biffed it. It was a hard quiz, largely because you're not used to being asked questions about concepts rather than computations." She's a fantastic student, she'll recover splendidly.

I realized even as it was happening that I was (unfairly) letting my frustration with my students' conceptual misunderstandings get the best of me for a few minutes during that second section's class. I threw markers and punched the board like I always do, but I did so with more vigor than is typical, partly to dissipate my frustration. "How dare they not get this? Damn it, what, they think they can coast in this class if they spit up a formula or two?!"

My righteous indignation subsided as the class went on, and I realized by the end that if they'd not focused on the concepts over the calculations, it was as much my fault, and my colleagues' faults, as it was the students', for not asking them to refocus their attention elsewhere in the first place. I've got to try harder at that myself. For some reason, I have to admit, Calc I has proven the most resistant of all courses to redesign along the lines of discovery and application-based learning. Only now am I beginning to understand what a truly problem-based Calc I class might look like, and I admit that this semester I'm falling far short of that mark.

I promise a less angry, less frustrated tone tomorrow, folks: you really are a great bunch of students, and I enjoy working with you very much. Let's make tomorrow's class a good one, huh? I'll bring some donuts tomorrow morning, and we'll start off with a couple of conceptual exercises to get our creative juices flowing. Sound like a plan?

Good.

From the second section of Calc I, it was off across the quad, to the second of the semester's Writing Intensive meetings (the first was this past Monday) for me. As I anticipated, I'm enjoying working on this committee, conferencing with a group of peers who feel as strongly and as passionately as I do about writing-to-learn and writing-across-the-curriculum and writing in general. I'm starting to get a good sense for the way writing is integrated academically, campus-wide, rather than simply in my own courses and in those of my math colleagues. The bar is quite high; the quality of writing instruction university-wide is solid. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement, and I found myself in a heated exchange of hallelujahs with Lexington, the WI committee's acting chair, as we walked back to our shared building after the committee meeting.

We agreed that the university has made tremendous strides forward in terms of embracing writing-across-the-curriculum, undergraduate research initiatives, outcome-based curricula, discovery learning opportunities, and so forth...but that there's also a lot of work to be done before perfection is reached. "If we're going to advertise that we're using discovery learning," Lexington said, "we've got to start doing just that, and to do that we're going to have to get serious about giving people the resources they need to do that." We agreed that we need to try to drive class sizes down (I mentioned my conversation with my own Chair last week regarding getting my Calc I classes capped at a lower level), we need to offer kids the opportunity to engage in alternative classrooms early and often, we need to make a focussed, directed, campus-wide effort to provide these opportunities to students from the get-go.

After a brief stop at my office and a moment in the Math Lab to unstick the stuckness of a few of the Calc I kids in computing the derivative required of them in the team project, I was off across the quad again to 280. Davina caught me before class with a few concerns about her service on one of this week's homework committees. For one, she wasn't sure about what to write on a person's submission if he said something like, "I'm stupid, I can't figure this out," or something along those lines. "That's a hard one," I agreed. More substantially, she wasn't sure she was giving the right kind of feedback, and she felt like she was being hypercritical, telling people to reword this, change that, and so on. I suggested that she might try to balance positive and negative feedback, and to offer comments like, "I'm having trouble understanding this, could you make this more clear?" or "This is a really good insight, it really helped me to see this point more clearly!" I later reiterated some of these ideas to the whole class, and wrote on the board: "Recall that the purpose of the committee work is not to homogenize, but rather to help people to clarify their own individual ideas."

The subsequent committee reports were good ones. I was particularly impressed with Davina's discussion during the presentation she and DeWayne gave on the homework problem they'd been assigned. I admired the way she was willing and able to come out and say that her serving on the committee definitely helped her to better understand the concepts involved in the problem they'd reviewed: "seeing how other people did it made me see how I could make my own writing more clear and more concise." I'm glad she came out and said that, and I hope her sentiment is shared by the others. I'm certainly going to ask the students about their committee experiences explicitly when I pass out midsemester evals in a week or so.

Came then (after another half hour of set theory) the trek back to Robinson Hall, where I'd spend a few more hours before heading home. I finished grading the second section's Quiz 4s, on which they did marginally better than the first but still not wonderfully. I also got a chance to work with a number of the teams as they struggled through their projects (they're all doing quite well, from what I can tell), and I met up, one-on-one, with several of the 280 students, helping them to polish various drafts of homework problems. They're definitely developing an appreciation for more and more subtle nuances, meanings of stereotypical mathematical phrases ("thus...," "for every...," and so forth), and clarity, clarity, clarity in writing. (A funny, and very heartening note, if I may: at the close of today's committee reports, I reminded the students to keep an eye on the rubric I'd handed out last week as they worked on their math writing, and I asked them if they could remember the "four Cs." In nearly complete unison, they intoned: "correctness, completeness, clarity, and composition." I didn't have to say a goldarned thing. I was a happy man.)

While I was finishing off those Quiz 4s, Cuthbert, Chemistry colleague of Lexington and a big, big man in undergraduate research, came by to ask me if I wouldn't mind providing him with the titles of the projects the REU kiddies worked on this past summer: he was putting together material to take to a regional conference on UG research, indicators of the sorts of things that can be made to happen in a liberal arts science curriculum. I was happy to oblige, and not an hour later I'd send him a list of the topics. We then got to talking about the inclusion of research components in UG courses, and he asked if I'd done much of that. "Depending on how you defined research," I told him, "I do that in nearly every class I teach." I told him a bit about the course that spawned this blog (MATH 365, Linear Algebra I, taught last Fall semester), and he asked if he could have information about the projects those students worked on. I obliged him there, too, sending him the prompts for a few of the research projects (Monopoly, Traffic Patterns, and Come on, Feel the Noise).

We hit a few more points in our short conversation, enough to give me a sense of déjà vu, feeling as though I was reliving the conversation I'd had earlier with Lexington. We talked about the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of scientific study; the need for broader, deeper, more meaningful implementation of discovery learning in our courses; the need for more robust interdisciplinary course offerings than an occasional and disingenuous cross-listing: we need team-taught classes, classes that provide a true interface between one field and another, like one Cuthbert mentioned that took place at his previous institution, in which beginning chemistry students learned their ways around a lab while generating real, unprettified data that could be fed to statistics students who would put it through realistic rigorous analysis, the results of which analysis could be funneled back to the students who ran the lab experiments in the first place in order to help refine their techniques. We agreed that a course that combined the concepts of physical chemistry with those of linear algebra would be a tremendous boon to both the Chem and Math departments; I have no doubt that we'll be talking about this again soon.

Thence, from my office, to dinner at Sorrento's (offering the best Italian in town in a cozy out-of-the-way den halfway to Oteen that sadly never seems very busy), and then home. Once home, I finally had a chance to call Bedelia, my colleague late of Harvard, now of Lesley University, and catch up with her. As it was bound to be, our conversation turned to...teaching! Imagine that! We talked for a bit about a program she's like to get off the ground, a sort of summer prep course to get local (in her case, Bostonian) college-bound kids up to speed on the math skills they might need to succeed in a challenging entry-level math course, while providing them with some useful advice on making the transition to college more smoothly. I compared the program she was describing with UNCA's own SOAR program, and she seemed to agree with the comparison, only she emphasized the local nature of the plan she envisioned. Then we talked shop for a bit, I about my own six courses (if one counts the senior seminar and my three independent study students), she about her Quantitative Reasoning and Pre-Calc classes.

We're both having a good time.

Hey, I've rambled on long enough, it's time to stop. I'm going to make a smoothie, maybe watch an episode of Mr Bean or some other such nonsense, and call it a day. Thanks for reading, I hope you'll free to comment, I always appreciate your feedback!

Spring Break!

Well. Yeah.

Here we are.

Here in the South (where they wouldn't know real winter weather if it smacked 'em upside the head with a two-foot blizzard and subzero wind chill) it snowed yesterday, and though there are two weeks left before spring actually begins, we're on Spring Break.

For me this means it's a good chance to get ahead in class prep, since March and April are going to be busy travel months for me (two conferences, two colloquia on the schedule so far), and I'm not going to want to fall behind while gallivanting about the eastern United States. It's also a good chance for me to post here for the first time in a looooooong time...

The funny thing is, I'm less busy this semester than I was last semester, despite the fact that I'm doing three preps this time around (and for the first time ever). Most of the slack is due to the fact that 365 is not one of the classes I'm teaching...I put so much of myself into that course, and I let so much of myself (including sense of self-worth, I fear I must say) get wrapped up in how well I pulled it off. Even when I was done getting ready for 365, I was never done worrying about it.

I have to say that I'm enjoying this semester a lot more than I did the last, perhaps to a large extent because I've managed to distance myself personally from my classes. That's not to say I'm not being myself in class, as I am, and it's not to say I don't care about the students, their learning, or their welfare. I mean only that I recognize that the success or failure of the class, however that might be measured from day to day and week to week, reflects in no way on me as a person.

And the funny thing is, I think I'm doing a much better job with both of my upper division classes this semester than I did with 365 in the fall. Things are running a bit more smoothly. I've found in both 280 and 368 a good balance between me standing at the front and yammering like a talking head and the students working the entirety of the class period with minimal direction from me.

368 is purring along particularly nicely. The text is fantastic, and eminently suitable for the manner in which I'm teaching the course. I've found that by distilling each chapter into a short worksheet I can ask the students to do most of the computations and the bulk of the simpler proofs, leaving me to stand off to the side to lend a hand on the trickier arguments as they arise. The presentations are rotating nicely in that class, and I've had no trouble convincing people to volunteer to present. Right now we're off-text, working our way through a couple of weeks of analytic number theory. We spent the last week on divisor sums and Dirichlet convolution, and the coming week brings an estimate of the average number of divisors for large numbers (a value that tends to ln(x) in the limit). After that we'll return to the text to do a little cryptography before heading off towards elliptic curves and more about Fermat's Last Theorem.

280's easin' on down the road, too. Freeing myself from a text was the right thing to do for this class, I believe. Though it's meant that I don't have a ready reference immediately at hand, it's also meant that I can run the course using the in-class worksheets without having to defer to a text that covers topics in just such an order, that provides at-best weak explanations or overly difficult exercises. I'm happy with the day-to-day goings-on, though people aren't nearly as eager to present HW solutions as the 368 students are. (I'm chalking that up to the relative mathematical inexperience of the 280 crowd; it's nothing unexpected, nor is it to be sorely lamented.) I'm very pleased with the improvement I'm seeing in a lot of the students' work. I'm thinking particularly of folks like Neville, Sylvester, and Una, a trio whose first homeworks were lackluster, but in whom there was definitely potential. In the past few assignments from them, I've seen much stronger structure, clearer arguments, cleaner logic, better use of notation. All three of them have put in long hours in the Math Lab, and it shows. Kudos! Of course, I'm getting stellar performance from people like Fiona and Elmer, folks I knew I could count on to do well. From everyone, there are struggles to be won, but I think overall we're at a good place to be by midsemester. Right now the order of business is combinatorics: combinations and permutation rule the day, and by the end of next week we should begin talking about functions and relations.

Oh, yeah, and the University's Writing Intensive Committee has ruled: 280 is now officially a WI course, from here on in!

Finally, I'd be remiss if I left unmentioned my Calc I class. They're a laid-back bunch, and after 280 and 368, which are often hectic and fast-paced, it's often nice to wind down the day with the 191 folks. We're moving a bit more slowly than I typically do, but I truly think it's the right thing to do. There are a number of people in this class who haven't had math for quite a while, who aren't so confident of their math skills as they might could be, and the slower pace is letting them absorb the material more meaningfully than if we were simply blazing through it. We're just now working our way through the Product and Quotient Rules, and by next week's end should be ready to consider some interesting applications.

So that's the score.

Big-picture-wise, I'm still waiting to find out whether or not I'll be getting this REU picked up for the coming summer...the fact that I've not yet heard could be a good thing. Ever the optimist am I. If we don't land that big fish, I'm going to try to rustle up a couple of research assistants for the summer so's I can have a crack at a couple of problems from geometric group theory I've had on the back burner for several months.

Hear ye, hear ye!

Harken, all ye! Good news is in the offing!

I was informed just minutes ago by the illustrious chair of our great university's Writing Intensive Committee that...the recently-applied-for WI status for MATH 365 has been approved!

You may commence rejoicing.

I'll see you all this evening, or, barring that, tomorrow.

Late in the evening

I'm just about to wrap up another day, and I thought I'd check in on the ol' blog, not having written anything for a couple of days.

Things have been going pretty well in MATH 365, as far as I can tell. I spent a couple more hours on Sunday morning putting together some Mathematica programs to help people deal with various issues (visualizing vector addition and getting practice with matrix multiplication), and then writing a brief somethingorother for Wednesday's class on mathematical writing: I should be all set for that class's "Write a Bad Paper" exercise. I'm looking forward to it!

I was pleased to get a chance this morning to work one-on-one with Irene, one of the students I'd not met before this class. She's putting a lot of effort into the class, and I admire her courage, because I know she was a little hesitant about her preparedness for the course. I look forward to learning more about the other students in the class with whom I've not yet become acquainted.

I experienced a minor setback in getting the course to qualify as a Writing Intensive course this afternoon, when I was informed by our school's diligent WI committee chair that I'd inadvertently filled out the wrong form in constructing the WI application. No worries: some relatively minor modifications and my current document will serve, with a few frills added for trim. I hope to finish that up tomorrow, depending on the busyness of my schedule.

Class today (Monday) went well, as far as I could tell. I had a better feeling about it than I did about last Friday's class: Friday seemed to go by so quickly, and I got the sense that on that day we didn't get to the heart of the topics we discussed. Today, on the other hand, there was just a single focal topic (the use of matrix multiplication and matrix powers in understanding a simple stochastic economic model), so our attention was more singularly drawn. Although I had originally planned on using the PDF outline I'd posted on the course website as a guide through the trenches, I decided after all to just throw them into the pool and see if they sank or swim.

And they swam, every last one of 'em. Not a single team failed to come up with and elaborate upon the idea of matrix multiplication. I wish I'd had more chance to work with each team individually, but from the floating and flitting about the room I was able to accomplish, I noted a good deal of creative work on the part of many students, and for the most part there was robust communication within each team. (After class, a few folks noted a kink or two here and there, owing to relative reticence of certain team members, or to unfamiliarity with one another, but these issues should not be hard to resolve. On no one's part was there any malice or animosity.)

I spent about half an hour earlier this evening in sending e-mails to a few of the folks in the class, polling them to see how they felt their respective teams managed today. Every response I've received so far has been positive, so I'm heartened. I've been informed by one of its members that even the one team I was a little concerned about fared quite well today. Rejoice!

And so, happily, here comes sleep. More tomorrow, to be sure!