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Notes from a pre-Halloween trip to Erie

• For craft stores: A large hanging Halloween decoration should not be termed a "Jumbo Dangler." There's only so much I can take.
• I went into one store because the sign said a "Giant Halloween Blowout" was "going on now," and I'm still looking for a few things. I found a few small islands with some discounted Halloween merchandise, and approximately 47 billion aisle filled with Christmas merchandise. (I thought about getting some fake cobwebs, but decided it would probably just confuse all the real spiders that live outside my door.)
• I'm still frustrated by the lack of Halloween clothing for men.
• I found nice materials for my horns this year. While perusing the gory stage makeup at the party store, I saw a boy about 10 or 12 drawn to the kits for a costume. His mother immediately told him "We're not doing any of that" and dragged him off to the rest of the costumes. I always like the sort of gruesome stuff for Halloween, because that's sort of what it's about. C'mon mom; let the kid have some fun. (I just hope she's not making him dress as a fairy princess or something...)

Contest Updates

This year I managed to organize our first ever Putnam team, and even got students together for practices. Unfortunately, the students dropped like flies. Two dropped after the first practice, and two more after the second. I ended with enough students to make a team, so we were going to be officially represented--but then one more student dropped at the last minute.

I enjoyed Putnam practice sessions, which I ran a bit like a Moore method class (with me in it). I didn't look up solutions to the problems; we just tackled what we could and tried to come up with ideas. It was interesting and moderately productive. (These are hard problems.) Unfortunately, two very strong math majors chose to participate because they are involved in too many other things. In the end, our Putnam team did not score any points, but our school does appear on the list of "Schools which took the Putnam exam", which I still think is cool. I also feel pretty good that I solved a few of the problems on the exam this year myself. (Did I mention these are hard problems?) Perhaps we will do better next year.

I also got together our department's "College Bowl" team, with significant help from another faculty member. We needed four players plus an alternate, and unfortunately we only had five people come to try out, but we did have some fairly good people. I had some schemes for this year, too. It basically tests how much useless trivia students have memorized, so I obtained for our team used copies of a great popular book on memory systems (to stuff pointless facts into their heads with) and a copy each of An Incomplete Education (full of pointless College-Bowl-style trivia to start stuffing). In the end, we did very respectably in our school; we almost made it to the finals.

I also had fun this year "consulting" with the programming contest team. The programming contests frequently involve some interesting mathematics, so I've been coming to practice sessions and helping them figure out how to tackle the mathy problems. The problems are often pretty cool. Between that and the Putnam, I enjoyed doing some occasional math last year. I also like working with the programming team because it lets the students see professors "bridging the gap" between math and computer science. For some reason, we seem to have a division between the math and computer science majors in the department, which is pretty weird, because there isn't much gap I've noticed among the professors.

So what new contests will the "I-don't-like-competition" guy find himself involved in? Funny you should ask; I actually thought about trying to get together a team for a mathematical modeling contest in the spring. Of course as with the Putnam, what I'm really interested in is getting together students to do some math, not really to compete. I didn't do it this year, but I'm looking into more information about mathematical modeling for next year.

FAR, FAR away...

For about a month or so I've had a deadline coming up to turn in a notebook about how great I am and why the school should keep me on. My last school called this a Faculty Activity Report, or FAR, so I keep calling it that here too. When I wasn't tenure track faculty, I didn't feel much need to worry about them. Now I feel sort of like I have to write "Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No--it's... SUPER PROFESSOR!" Able to teach hundreds of under prepared students elementary mathematics every semester while contributing heroically to the department and university, and maintaining an active research program at the same time!

On the plus side, I had a few presentations, attended some conferences, have a lot of interesting new thoughts on teaching (partly from one of the conferences), and have picked up a few new activities in the department. On the other hand, I didn't manage to get a paper published (pushed off now for a while longer) and had a fairly weak spring semester. So maybe this year is a wash.

But in any case, the notebook was turned in last week, and I took part of the weekend to go out and have fun, which I haven't felt like I had time to do much of. It was nice to take a break. Now when is the semester over? Actually, that's not enough of a break. When is summer here again? You know, so I can take another crack at those papers for next year's FAR.

Summer is over (Oh bother)

I did get to spend a little over a month all told with my other half, including about a week spent up here with me. (He hadn't been able to come up before.) That was really good on the one hand, but spending so much time together also made me remember I miss him a lot. I was pretty bummed when I had to leave.

It doesn't help that he had lots of adorable kittens living with him at the time, before they were going to go off to homes. One in particular decided I was the best bed EVER. I'd feel a couple of little paws grab my ankle and hear a "mew!", which I discovered translated to "Sit down so I can lay on you and go to sleep." That's hard to leave behind, too.

In terms of productivity, I went to a conference on Moore method teaching, tried to get back into some research, got (partially) ready for classes, and worked on some projects related to our library. (In particular, given the large temporary budget we had for books last year, I wanted to find ways to encourage students to go visit the library and take out some books. This ended with what I personally consider a rather nifty poster I made and hung in our hallway featuring cool new books we have. I plan to keep swapping out the featured books periodically.) I suppose I could probably count that I did clean the apartment pretty well, even though you can't really tell anymore...

But classes started last week, so I'm through my first week. Highlights from that first week:

• I discovered two students in one of my classes who had taken another class which duplicates it. On being informed that no one can receive credit for both, one was surprised (it turned out her advisor had specifically selected the class for her), and the other said she already knew that but thought she just had to take this one anyway.
• Get the impression our registration system is a little goofy? It is. One of my colleagues and I have conjectured that it does not actually enforce prerequisites at all. Her analysis class contains several students who have not taken one or the other (or both!) of two prerequisite classes. Some of these managed this by simply failing the prerequisite the previous semester, so that they registered before the system knew they failed, but others seem to have been able to slip in some other way.
• I helped with an introduction to the computer software Mathematica for a group of students on Friday. When we arrived at the lab, it turned out that the software was installed (as we had been promised), but that the license had expired. The first twenty minutes (in a fifty minute class) were spent talking the students through the registration procedure.
• One of my classes went more smoothly than it has before, I think because I successfully managed to cut a lot of stuff out of the class time and just leave the students to read and do it. I feel like I need to add a line to the Tao Te Ching: "I teach nothing, and nothing is left untaught." (This actually goes along really well with the Moore method conference I was at this summer, come to think of it.)
• I seem to have become the "contest" guy in the department. I'm trying to organize participation in one national mathematics contest, seem to have volunteered to take over a college bowl team, offered to help with running a small local math contest one professor is organizing, and have signed on to consult with a computer programming contest team. All this from the guy who basically doesn't like competition. One of my favorite authors is Alfie Kohn. Go figure.

It was a busy week, but I guess not too bad. I'm sort of glad it's a long weekend (even though I normally only teach one class Monday anyway). But it seems a shame this all has to start all over again now.

Terrible realization

I realized that I now prefer short sleeved cotton shirts which button up to T-shirts in the summer because they do a better job of hiding that I'm getting fat.

On the plus side, I've found tons of really cool Hawaiian print shirts over the past year or two, which I love. I note without comment that Homer Simpson says of Hawaiian print shirts, "There's only two kind of guys who wear those shirts: gay guys and big, fat party animals."

Lessons from Cleaning

After the school year ended, I had time to do some cleaning. I uncovered evidence of a bed in the back bedroom early on, and what appears to be carpet all over my floor.

Years ago, I used to do a cleaning of everything about once a week. Now granted, at the time I had an apartment that was probably a third the size of this one, and I had motivation because my then boyfriend would be coming over on the weekend. In fact, part of the reason cleaned this time is because the partner was going to come up here in a week or so. (And he did... yea! Yes, I know; I buried the lede on this one. More later.) It gradually got to be longer and longer between thorough cleanings. I'm not sure how I got to be so bad at it.

I realize now that most of my time is spent picking up something, looking at it, and wondering "What the hell do I do with this?" I keep hoping that if I clean one room at a time, and keep moving the miscellaneous undetermined junk from room to room, the piles will get smaller. Oddly enough, it seems to work.

I've also learned that I've slipped into being a Disney fanatic. I realized an alarming amount of stuff I was picking up and looking for places to put was Disney related. Plus I was listening to an audio stream of music from the parks while I cleaned. It just started getting a little funny when I thought about it.