The first set of things I'll be working on are course revisions in several areas for several schools. Here at Gordon I'll be updating my physics courses to take advantage of some new software we've acquired over the last year and to bring them in line with the slow shift in my pedagogy that's taken place over the last five years in knowing what does and doesn't work for my courses. I've decided that the trend I've followed of late in slowing some things down will be reversed as it hasn't helped the students who seem to do poorly and it seems to irritate the students who actually are willing to work. I'll also be taking a course on Chaos I've been teaching for some time fully on-line this summer with the intent of developing it into a more reading and conference with lots of writing and moderated dialogue. I've done a little of this and I think the course is well suited to the methodology. We use Gleick's book, Chaos for the course and it can be tough sleeding for a lot of students so I hope to add additional resources to that that will help clear things up. The Gleick book is an excellent treatment of a lot of things including the history of the study of non-linear systems, the way science works in the real world and the culture of science in academia. The problem is getting freshmen and sophomores to appreciate that. I'm hoping that having a strong writing component to the course will help them see both the richness of the subject and the additional information.
I'll also be working with the National Teacher's Enhancement Network to update a course I've been teaching to in-service high school educators for several years now. The plan is to include the data archives from the Spitzer IR telescope in the course as well as update the activities that allow the students to access and analyze simple Hubble image and spectrometer data. The course is an interesting mix of process issues (How do you teach this stuff in a relevant way?), content (What is a H-R diagram and why is it important?) and discovery (How is it that astronomers know this stuff anyways?) Finding the right balance is tricky and I'm hoping to get some input from some colleagues at the University of Arizona on how to do it. The great side benefit is that it should help me do some really exciting stuff with my Stellar and Galactic astronomy courses that I teach here including the attempt to do it on-line for the first time.Thirdly, I'll be creating a hybrid physics course for a local technical college. They've had me teach the fully in-class version but I can't continue to do that and they can't find an adjunct to replace me that has 18 graduate hours in physics. So we decided to do the course as a part on-line course and part in-class course. Hopefully that'll help me deal with the issues of time and still teach the class.
On the student services side I'm going to put together a set of four seminar type things on student skills to be taught in the dorms the first month of so of classes here at Gordon. The Geek has helped me out by getting some sweet materials sent to me from publishers that should give me lots to work with. I'd like the seminars to be about two hours long and to include lots and lots of activities and only a minimum of lecture material. I'm thinking of sessions on note-taking/concept mapping, test preparation/test taking, time/life management and goal setting/principle centered living. I'll look at offering the first two in weeks one and three and then the other two in weeks two and four. The key idea is to actually hold the seminars in the dorms in the evenings to make it really easy for the students to come if they want to. I may offer a short one hour session the very first week of class called "Intro to College: The Real Scoop Inside the Classroom" or something like that to help students adjust their attitudes and settle in more quickly.
I'd also like to do some planning with the student organization I'm involved with for an event we'd like to do in the fall semester. We see it as a sort of "Poverty Day" kind of thing where we'll challenge the student body here to think about poverty from beyond their narrow Americanized window. We'll ask the campus communiy to join us in living on $3 for a day. We'll show the movie, "Invisible Children". We'll bring Compassion International on campus and maybe see if some performers or artists want to help us out by providing a compelling artistic take on what it's like to live in the third world. We'll focus the campus' attention on homelessness by asking students to join us in sleeping outdoors for one night someplace like the green in the central quad. There's a lot of work to be done to pull this off but I think we can do it. One night at our Bible study this Spring I challenged our small Christian group to become relevant and to make Jesus relevant on this campus of postmodern, relativistic, wounded by religion students and this is what they came up with after reading a portion of Blue like Jazz.
Looking it over, there's a lot of work to be done but that's the great thing about summer; there's a lot of time to do stuff. Right now I need just a bit of downtime to recharge a bit but I can get that while setting some of this in motion by sending out emails and setting up meetings. Once that is done, I can get to work on these things. The plan is to treat this summer like grad school: very flexible schedule, lots of work to do, fairly informal structure on most of it. I'd like to be able to get into a rhythm but I doubt that will be very easy. I also have to decide how to schedule my time. Do I work on one project intensely for a while and then move to the next or do I work a little bit on each one each day. I'm leaning towrds the first with some of the second sprinkled in. If I do that then I'll probably have to prioritize my work in terms of due dates and the like. Maybe I'll devote three days to intensive work on one project and leave Monday and Friday a little more flexible to take care of things that come up in terms of the other projects like meetings and such.
Anyways, thanks for reading.
