Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Well, my semester finally wrapped up at the end of last week and there was good, there was bad and there was, unfortunately, ugly. In the final evaluation, this semester was better than last fall in that I had two classes that had enough students who wanted to learn that they were a lot of fun to teach. To me that's the key thing: do the students want to learn or is school something they endure with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. One of the difficulties at a open access two year college is that far too many of our students are of the second variety. I understand that you'll have unmotivated students at every institution but we seem to have a surprisingly large number of them here. What's more surprising is the number of them that get into their sophomore year in math and science before they hit material hard enough to expose their laziness. Still, it was a better semester and I'm looking forward to having two classes where I continue with some of the same students in the spring.

For the next couple of weeks I'll be trying to unwind and relax some. I've got a number of reading projects I'm undertaking which will be nice. I really like the thought of doing some reading on several different topics each day. I've got a couple of books on chaos theory/non-linear dynamics I'll be reading as part of one project, I have two books on the calendar and measuring time I'll be reading while I travel and I have a couple of theologically oriented projects I'm going to try and get through. Lots of different inputs that I'm really looking forward to. I think the one I'm most curious about is the calendar/time one as I'm looking at creating a colloquium about mankind's quest to measure time. Maybe I can partner with a colleague in the humanities department to examine time from both a scientific and a literary perspective. I wonder who might be interested in partnering with me on a project like that?

The weather here is going to be warm again after an extended cold snap so I'll be doing a lot of riding. With the break giving me more free time, I have a lot more leeway to explore and try new things. Hopefully I can take advantage of that some before I have to go back to work in January. I'll be doing some prep work for the Spring semester as well so that I don't get crushed with too much. The big thing I need to do is rework the online enhancements to my courses.

Anyways, I hope this finds all three fo my readers in good spirits. Here's to warm tailwinds!

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