Another academic year has finished. The majority of the students have made the exodus out of town, while families of the degree candidates are starting to come in. We instructors are just trying to make it through grading final exams, meeting with panicked students, nervously entering grades into the system and hoping that we don't get flooded with emails from students asking if there is anything to be done about their grades. In a few days, Aggieland will be quiet. Summertime in a college town.
I will be teaching business calculus during Summer I. Despite the fact that this class was my foot in the door to the job that I love, I have not yet felt fully satisfied in the job I have done each time I have taught calculus. When I teach finite math, I feel like I do a good job making the material interesting and relevant. I do a good job of making math fun. I haven't found my method for teaching calculus that does the same thing. I am working very hard right now trying to make my materials for business calculus accessible to the non-math-major. I am debating different methods to teaching. Should I try to include activities or use that time to cover more examples? What if I gave them all of the activities at the beginning of the session and asked them to turn them in at the end? What about quizzes? Should I have them every day? Should I not have quizzes at all? When should homework be due? The evening before each exam? Or every couple of days? I realized that I don't like the way my notes on Exponential Functions are currently done. How can I improve them to make base e make sense to students? How am I going to cover all of this material in 5 weeks? I have done it before. I know I have. How did I do that? This is what is going to be taking up my time between now and Memorial Day. On June 2, Summer I starts and it will be too late and too chaotic to make any changes. At that point, we will be running the 400m race. A long sprint to July 7.
Summer II will be the first time in several years that I will not be working. I have some anxiety about this, but at the same time, I am very excited to have a break. My schedule is already starting to fill up. My mother-in-law and youngest sister-in-law are coming to Texas. There are plans in the works for a trip to Louisiana to see my other sister-in-law, her husband, and our niece and nephew. There is talk about a family reunion late this summer. Our neighbors are moving and will have a newborn baby, so I will be helping them however I can. I also have plans for lots of reading and cooking - two things I haven't made time to do in the last few years. I am excited for this time of recharging for the new year and all that it will entail.
It is shaping up to be a busy summer, but I have made a list of goals. If you have read this far, then I would venture that you care enough about me to hold me accountable to these goals:
- Work Goals: My job is very important to me and I want to continue to improve myself in not just teaching ability but also contributions to the department and the university.
- Course Coordinator: I want to create some basic teaching materials for instructors and graduate students teaching Math 166 for the first time. It is hard knowing exactly what to cover and where to start in building course materials. I also want to create expectations and guidelines for Math 166, such as guidelines for using graders, submitting drafts of exams to the coordinator early enough for review and to allow the coordinator to offer suggestions, the necessity of providing exam statistics and exam keys, and other issues that may come up in the course of the semester.
- Teaching: I got a lot of very good feedback from my honors section. The area that needs most improvement are my labs. I didn't do a very good job of making the connection of the lab to what we were doing in class. On the other hand, they really enjoyed the research paper and presentation we did at the end of the semester and the labs that involved real-life applications, like financing a house and car. I want to overhaul my labs to make them more practical, that makes them get out in the real world and use math.
- Intellectual Goals: I am finally far enough out of school that my brain is ready to learn. There are a lot of classes I didn't take in college. There are also a lot of things I have learned that I need to refresh on because I haven't used it in so long. A big motivating factor for the subjects I picked to focus on this summer are that they are very common courses for my cadets to take and I want to be as useful to them as possible. With that said, I want to learn:
- Physics! I won the Physics Award in high school and then never took physics in college. Also kind of strange that a math major didn't take physics in college. Time to remedy the situation.
- Refresh Calculus II - Towards the end of this semester, I got to relearn some series materials and volumes. It was fun seeing how quickly it came back. However, it is not very efficient for my cadets to come to my office for help and have to wait several minutes for me to reteach myself before I can help them.
- Spiritual Goals: I want God to be my highest priority. I love Jesus. However, I am terrible at putting him first in my life. I often don't even know where to begin! This summer, my goals are:
- To study How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Our church uses this book in one of the classes they offer on Tuesday nights that I can't ever go to. I want to read it and apply what I learn to reading the Bible. I hope it will help me dig deeper.
- Have daily devotional: Always sounds so simple, but something I have always failed at. Pray for fortitude to follow through and that God will meet with me during those times and fill my heart with a desire for Him.
- Attend homegroup whenever we are in town. I love my homegroup. Why am I not going? Why is it so hard to set aside work, exhaustion, and my introversion to go to something that I know will minister to me and give me energy.
- Physical Goals:
- Lose 16-32 pounds. I normally am all about "it's not the number on the scale that matters." However, something needs to change and that is a quantifiable measure of how well I am doing. This is going to maybe be one of the biggest challenges for me this summer. My body is stubborn. It is resistant to losing weight. (There are medical reasons for this that I may go into in a future post.) I am going to have to be very deliberate in working out daily: cardio and strength training. I am going to have to be very deliberate in meal planning. I am going to need a lot of support and encouragement in this area. A lot.
- Take multivitamins daily. Seems simple enough.
- Drink more water. I think I walk around in a constant state of dehydration. That probably doesn't help to convince my stubborn body to play along. I bought water bottles. Now I just need to use them. Two to three of my Academy bottles of water every day.
- Home:
- 30 minutes of cleaning a day: I am tired of feeling like a bad wife. (My own thoughts, not my husband's.) I can do a lot in 30 minutes and that isn't too long. It's one episode of a TV show.
- 1 load of laundry a day: I don't want the laundry to pile up so that Saturday is lost to the mountain of laundry.
- Make dinner at home at least 4 nights a week. We eat out a lot. Our food budget is completely out of control. It is probably the number one way we are not being good stewards of the physical blessings God has given us.
What plans do you have for the summer? Do you have any summer goals? What do you think about my goals?
Thanks and gig 'em!
While you are thinking about teaching, one fact from the scientific literature might give you some guidance. Students have an attention span on the order of 10-15 minutes. So every 10-15 minutes you need to switch it up. For a 1:15 minute class, that means maybe 6 "active thinking" activities interspersed with what you are trying to teach them. I'm still working on this in my own teaching.
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