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

Friday, May 02, 2008

It's the end of the semester, the end of the year, the end of a training block and the temporary end of my last New Year's resolution.

Classes are wrapping up for the semester today. As I write this, my PHYS1111 students are taking their final exam. I can say that student/classwise, it's been a pretty good semester. My engineers struggled a bit at the end of this semester but none so badly that they won't get to pursue their dreams and maybe they'll learn to work just a little bit harder in the future. Wednesday night I took them all out for wings at a local restaurant and we played the trivia game and chatted. An alumnus that has gone on to Georgia Tech even stopped by. It was really a great time to celebrate the class' achievements and enjoy the students and their success. It's times like those that make all of the frustrating moments worthwhile. As I drove home from the gathering I just felt an enormous sense of pride in my students and hope for their futures.

Today will be the last Faculty Senate meeting wherein I will act as the Senate's Chair. It's been a very busy year with lots of things passed. To be honest, while I've been honored to serve, I'm more than happy to pass on the institutional mace to next year's Chair. For me, the most important thing I think I learned is that I don't think I really ever want to become an administrator of any sort. My "first, best destiny" (a gold star for anyone who can identify the movie quote) is to teach and mentor students. I have appreciated the respect and praise of my colleagues as I have carried out my duties but I honestly derive much more satisfaction from meeting with a student, as I did this morning, and finding out that my interaction with them, either in the classroom, as an academic adviser or in a more informal way, moved them towards their dreams and goals.

Also, I'm at the end of a three week training block. My body is ready for a rest week. I'll do a couple more days of training level rides and a hard century on Sunday and then I'll give my body a rest for a week before going on vacation to the North Carolina mountains and a sort of "training camp". My power numbers showed improvement throughout the first two weeks and my even show some more improvement this week. I'll start doing a significantly deeper analysis once I start the next cycle because I'll be able to start doing cycle comparisons. My next set of racing looks like it'll be the Tour of Atlanta over Memorial Day weekend. Lots of crits (I hate crits) but there's also an ITT and, more interestingly, a team time trial. Now that I'm officially an "associate member" of the Security Bank Cycling Team I'll ride with those guys. The team is shifting some of it's over 35 riders into the category I'm riding in which will make racing a lot nicer because I seem to handle pack dynamics a lot better when I've got friendly faces to ride with. It also helps me mentally when I know that I have a job to do in a race and that the success can be measured by more than what I do individually.

So at a time of endings I hope to find a chance to rest and recover a bit before setting out on new adventures.

Thanks For Reading.

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