My stats class is going well, I think. Except I brought the wrong quiz today for my students. (Ch 4 instead of Ch 3) So no quiz. Until next Wednesday. They were happy!
Two funny student stories:
(1) One of my students sent me an email saying he missed class and could he turn in the worksheet late because he had to "chase down a cow". I gave him the extension just on the sheer entertainment factor of the excuse alone! I can honestly say I have never before received that as an excuse. I laughed so hard when I read that!
(2) I overheard another GTA talking to someone and he was saying that he asked students to bring up their add slips this morning so he could sign them. He said one student walked up and said, this isn't my add slip, it is for my roommate but he was way too hungover to come to class this morning! >> Ok seriously?!?! Wow. I don't even know what my response to that would be!
I asked all of my students to post an introduction on our class discuss board. It is amazing how many can NOT spell their major correctly! I think the worst misspelled major (or at least the one with the worst consequences of misspelling) was: Organismal Biology which is studying plant or animal biology at the whole-organism, species, population, and community levels. And I will leave it at that as to what the misspelling resulted in.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Westboro Baptist Church plans picket at MSU?!?!
Members of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Kansas have announced their intentions to picket for 30 minutes each at Montana State University and at Bozeman High School on Monday, Sept. 9.
WBC's website says the group is picketing MSU because "MSU doesn't teach anything that will benefit their students on that great and terrible day of judgment! MSU teaches to [sic] worship yourself!"
The email that came out from the school said:
We at MSU adamantly reject the group's actions and positions. MSU is a place that welcomes diversity in all of our actions every day across our campus. WBC's message could not be further from our own.
As a state university, we are bound by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and we will honor the right of free speech and the right of people to assemble peacefully.
The Dean of Students and the leadership of the Associated Students of MSU are working collaboratively with a number of campus and community groups on how to best communicate a message that celebrates true commitment to diversity and inclusion at our university.
We at MSU believe that the response to hate speech should always be respectful speech. The answer to violence should always be healing, and the answer to ignorance should always be education. We hope that our response to this event is something we can all learn from and one that will make us feel proud.
WBC's website says the group is picketing MSU because "MSU doesn't teach anything that will benefit their students on that great and terrible day of judgment! MSU teaches to [sic] worship yourself!"
The email that came out from the school said:
We at MSU adamantly reject the group's actions and positions. MSU is a place that welcomes diversity in all of our actions every day across our campus. WBC's message could not be further from our own.
As a state university, we are bound by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and we will honor the right of free speech and the right of people to assemble peacefully.
The Dean of Students and the leadership of the Associated Students of MSU are working collaboratively with a number of campus and community groups on how to best communicate a message that celebrates true commitment to diversity and inclusion at our university.
We at MSU believe that the response to hate speech should always be respectful speech. The answer to violence should always be healing, and the answer to ignorance should always be education. We hope that our response to this event is something we can all learn from and one that will make us feel proud.
Monday, August 26, 2013
First Day of School
Today was the first day of school. I teach at 8 AM, and I was actually awake and alive! I might be turning into a morning person :) The class went well and I enjoyed teaching. There was a little difficulty (because of first day chaos) of switching from my class ending to the next professor's class starting, and I did the very adult thing and went and found him later in the afternoon and just chatted about how we want the changeover to go. He was impressed a GTA had the wherewithal to do that and said he was going to try that approach in the future with other professors since just taking the time to communicate (and not between classes, but an actual face to face chat) was going to make things so much better and less frustrating for both of us. So I am finally learning to tackle problems head on before they become drama :)
What else? Oh yes. Excel doesn't make histograms. Don't ask me why, but it is like a zillion step process to get a somewhat legitimate histogram. Plenty of bar charts, just no histograms. But in researching I found a FREE add-on to Excel (made by some awesome person who just shares it with everyone) and it works great. So fast and easy. I love it!
And now it is time for funny stories from Topology. Just a few words about the prof: he is our new department head, I had him last semester for Linear Algebra, he is insanely intelligent, and he speaks several languages (English is NOT his first language).
Story #1 At one point he writes a word on the board. We aren't sure what the word is because he is talking so fast it is hard to understand. Then he steps back and stares at the word and announces there is something wrong with the word because there just aren't enough letters in it. I wanted so badly to laugh, but I managed to keep a straight face. And then he asks us how to spell the word correctly, but we still had no idea what the word was because he had been talking so fast, and he was like c'mon guys - you should know how to spell this. (At this point I am thinking to myself: this. T - H - I - S.) He did figure it out and we were all like ohhhhhhhh - that is what we are talking about!
Story #2 When he comes into class, he starts lecturing at record speed. I mean lightning fast. At one point he looks up at the clock and he says, wow - I am behind. I only covered 40 pages of the textbook in 40 minutes. That is only a minute per page, I need to be teaching faster than that! (I am thinking to myself, are you serious?!?! Each page takes me many minutes to read, reread, digest, and try to understand. And he thinks he can cover them in like 45 SECONDS per page?!?! Oh dear! At that rate we will be done with the book before Halloween!)
Story #3 He tells us that even a 3 year old can do a bijection. (A bijection is where each number is paired with one, and only one other number. And it has to be unique. So for example you could put 2 and 4 as a pair. But then you could never again use 2 as the first number and never again use 4 as the second number. Typically this is what you think of as a straight line on a graph. So it is more or less like matching the items on one list to a unique item on another list.) I am thinking to myself, really, a three year old can do a bijection? Good thing I didn't ask the question with the amount of dubiousness and sarcasm I was thinking in my mind, as he proceeds to enlighten us. He is like sure - ask a kid how old they are and they will start counting on their fingers. So they pair being 1 year old with their index finger, 2 year old with their middle finger, and 3 year old with their ring finger. So they hold up three fingers and tell you they are 3 years old. They just matched each year of age with a different finger. (Yes, feel free to groan here and shake your head because I am pretty sure almost no parent says to their child, ok kiddo - today we are going to learn bijections - 1, 2, 3, .... as they count on their fingers!)
Story #4 Last but not least. He talks about equivalence classes. (This is kind of like where you make some rule about how items are related to each other, and this rule allows you to break up the list of items into groups and each item can belong to one and only one group). So he proceeds to compare equivalence classes to cliques of high school girls. He says that girls are really cliquey in high school and they each belong to only one group and they don't socialize with people from other groups. Ok. I can see that. And then he proceeds to try to expand on this analogy. Well there are 3 properties of these relationships. So he starts with the first property, which when translated into his analogy would mean that a high girl likes herself or is friends with herself. He stands there for a second and says. Well actually that isn't always true. I don't think many HS girls like themselves. He says ok - second one would translate to if Mary is friends with Suzy then Suzy is friends with Mary. Again he pauses and he is like, well actually that isn't true either. Mary might treat Suzy as if she is her friend, but maybe Suzy only tolerates her presence and doesn't consider Mary a friend. AND then he reaches the third property which would be if Mary is friends with Suzy and Suzy is friends with Heidi, then Mary is friends with Heidi. And then he just shakes his head and says wow that is definitely not true. This is a terrible example! None of these properties hold up! The whole class was laughing at this point. I will say though that his insight into the typical HS girl and HS girl relationship dynamics was quite impressive!
So that is my day in a nutshell.
What else? Oh yes. Excel doesn't make histograms. Don't ask me why, but it is like a zillion step process to get a somewhat legitimate histogram. Plenty of bar charts, just no histograms. But in researching I found a FREE add-on to Excel (made by some awesome person who just shares it with everyone) and it works great. So fast and easy. I love it!
And now it is time for funny stories from Topology. Just a few words about the prof: he is our new department head, I had him last semester for Linear Algebra, he is insanely intelligent, and he speaks several languages (English is NOT his first language).
Story #1 At one point he writes a word on the board. We aren't sure what the word is because he is talking so fast it is hard to understand. Then he steps back and stares at the word and announces there is something wrong with the word because there just aren't enough letters in it. I wanted so badly to laugh, but I managed to keep a straight face. And then he asks us how to spell the word correctly, but we still had no idea what the word was because he had been talking so fast, and he was like c'mon guys - you should know how to spell this. (At this point I am thinking to myself: this. T - H - I - S.) He did figure it out and we were all like ohhhhhhhh - that is what we are talking about!
Story #2 When he comes into class, he starts lecturing at record speed. I mean lightning fast. At one point he looks up at the clock and he says, wow - I am behind. I only covered 40 pages of the textbook in 40 minutes. That is only a minute per page, I need to be teaching faster than that! (I am thinking to myself, are you serious?!?! Each page takes me many minutes to read, reread, digest, and try to understand. And he thinks he can cover them in like 45 SECONDS per page?!?! Oh dear! At that rate we will be done with the book before Halloween!)
Story #3 He tells us that even a 3 year old can do a bijection. (A bijection is where each number is paired with one, and only one other number. And it has to be unique. So for example you could put 2 and 4 as a pair. But then you could never again use 2 as the first number and never again use 4 as the second number. Typically this is what you think of as a straight line on a graph. So it is more or less like matching the items on one list to a unique item on another list.) I am thinking to myself, really, a three year old can do a bijection? Good thing I didn't ask the question with the amount of dubiousness and sarcasm I was thinking in my mind, as he proceeds to enlighten us. He is like sure - ask a kid how old they are and they will start counting on their fingers. So they pair being 1 year old with their index finger, 2 year old with their middle finger, and 3 year old with their ring finger. So they hold up three fingers and tell you they are 3 years old. They just matched each year of age with a different finger. (Yes, feel free to groan here and shake your head because I am pretty sure almost no parent says to their child, ok kiddo - today we are going to learn bijections - 1, 2, 3, .... as they count on their fingers!)
Story #4 Last but not least. He talks about equivalence classes. (This is kind of like where you make some rule about how items are related to each other, and this rule allows you to break up the list of items into groups and each item can belong to one and only one group). So he proceeds to compare equivalence classes to cliques of high school girls. He says that girls are really cliquey in high school and they each belong to only one group and they don't socialize with people from other groups. Ok. I can see that. And then he proceeds to try to expand on this analogy. Well there are 3 properties of these relationships. So he starts with the first property, which when translated into his analogy would mean that a high girl likes herself or is friends with herself. He stands there for a second and says. Well actually that isn't always true. I don't think many HS girls like themselves. He says ok - second one would translate to if Mary is friends with Suzy then Suzy is friends with Mary. Again he pauses and he is like, well actually that isn't true either. Mary might treat Suzy as if she is her friend, but maybe Suzy only tolerates her presence and doesn't consider Mary a friend. AND then he reaches the third property which would be if Mary is friends with Suzy and Suzy is friends with Heidi, then Mary is friends with Heidi. And then he just shakes his head and says wow that is definitely not true. This is a terrible example! None of these properties hold up! The whole class was laughing at this point. I will say though that his insight into the typical HS girl and HS girl relationship dynamics was quite impressive!
So that is my day in a nutshell.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Spent my day resting and working on lesson plans. Since I am teaching stats again, I am taking the opportunity to tweak and improve my lesson plans, homework, quizzes, and activities. I am pretty excited about some of the changes, which were inspired by a class I took this summer when I was working on my online teaching certificate. One change is having the students look for examples of statistics, charts, graphs used incorrectly (there are an abundance of them everywhere, newspaper, news, magazines, etc). They will post a picture of it and write a few sentences about it. But by having them post it to the class website, we can all smile and enjoy the errors, rather than just me enjoying them. And each student needs to reply to at least one other student's post, which will help build connections with their classmates. Just stuff like that....
Other than that, even with the intermittent rain, it is so dry here. I am drinking tons of water and still feel parched. And using lots of lotion. I guess my new cactus plant will feel at home here though. At least until it snows! :)
Other than that, even with the intermittent rain, it is so dry here. I am drinking tons of water and still feel parched. And using lots of lotion. I guess my new cactus plant will feel at home here though. At least until it snows! :)
Friday, August 23, 2013
So good news - I am teaching Stats again this fall! :) Ok - the bummer is that it is 8 AM, three days a week, but hopefully it will help turn me into more of a morning person! And I only have classes and meetings and whatnot on M/W/F, which means I can stay home T/Th, which is a blessing because by the time I take the bus or drive to campus, park and walk in, and do the same thing on the return trip, it eats up an hour to an hour and a half of my time.
So I have been working on my stats class, improving things from when I taught it in the summer. Making my own worksheets, finding better examples, and even incorporating some ideas from the class I took this summer on how to be an online instructor. I am pretty excited and think it will benefit my students a lot. There is an online gallery where they can post badly used statistics and graphs and charts. Investigative tasks where they work in groups finding the odds for Vegas games. Designing research plans for tractors and backhoes. All kinds of fun!
School starts on Monday... So a few more days of freedom and then back to the grind! It is raining here with thunder and lightning. So amazing! I love it!
So I have been working on my stats class, improving things from when I taught it in the summer. Making my own worksheets, finding better examples, and even incorporating some ideas from the class I took this summer on how to be an online instructor. I am pretty excited and think it will benefit my students a lot. There is an online gallery where they can post badly used statistics and graphs and charts. Investigative tasks where they work in groups finding the odds for Vegas games. Designing research plans for tractors and backhoes. All kinds of fun!
School starts on Monday... So a few more days of freedom and then back to the grind! It is raining here with thunder and lightning. So amazing! I love it!
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
My plant and I made it safely home :)
Let's see.... It rained a good chunk of the way or was overcast. Two of the more interesting things I saw on the trip: (1) taped up on the door of the restroom stall at the gas station was an ad which, among other things, featured a blow dart gun available for purchase at the gas station!
(2) someone had a GIANT bumper sticker on their car which read: e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0. For those that aren't math enthusiasts, that is a fairly famous result! But I was surprised to see it blown up into a huge bumper sticker on a car!
For those that don't know, I don't typically eat candy or drink soda, or chocolate or anything of that stuff. Baked goods I will have a little. But I don't know, this summer I just completely lost the taste for those things (which I used to LOVE to eat all the time, so that is a good thing). I ate skittles to try to stay awake while driving, but my body is so unused to sugar it was like ugh! And I ate a bite of a chocolate bar and that was all I wanted to eat. I thought wow - how my life has changed! I used to live on that stuff and now I can't hardly stand it.
It was SO nice to walk into a totally apartment! I forgot how nice I left it and how much I had done organizing stuff. I unlocked the door, and walked in to the light scent of candles that had been warmed in the sun, and a spotless kitchen, vacuumed floor, and everything all neat and tidy. No one has ever seen me have an apartment like this. And it is WONDERFUL :)
Monday, August 19, 2013
Sunday, August 18, 2013
My dad got down the boxes of clothes I have been storing in their attic. Many of the clothes fit now, which is such a blessing because with the amount of weight I have lost, everything I have back in MT is laughably huge on me. I haven't weighed this little since high school, and thankfully I have always been somewhat immune to fashion trends, so most everything I wore back then looks fine today. We are still hunting for one more box that has slightly smaller clothes still, from my last year of high school which was the smallest I have been in my adult life.
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Bike Ride
I survived a two-hour bike ride to and around Sebastopol. The first time I have really ridden since I got RSD. I was surprised I did so well, but I am definitely hurting some. I wouldn't have ridden so far on my first ride, but I forgot what 'weekend warriors' my family can be, and the ride was their idea. It was nice to ride again - I have a nice road/racing bike that I used for commuting in Portland, San Francisco, and for a short time in Santa Rosa before I got RSD. I didn't realize how much I had missed riding my bike. I'm hoping that my RSD will allow me to continue riding.
People have been telling me that they bet my leg isn't as painful since I lost weight. Sigh. It isn't that type of leg injury. It is damage to the nerve, so weighing less, while it does reduce impact to the body overall, isn't helping my leg a whole lot. In fact, some things are more painful since I lost weight, like sitting for long periods of time because there isn't as much of a buffer of a layer of fat for cushion. And as I gain more muscle mass, it actually impacts the nerve more, especially when I work out. I know that whenever I get stressed out or depending on what else is going on with me health-wise, then it can be killer. For the most part though, it is the lack of stress that has made the pain not as bad. The weight loss does feel good overall on my body though :)
Savory spice shop
I went to Savory Spice Shop and got some new mixtures and rubs to try. I took some cooking lessons over the summer, and have gotten to be a little better cook. Still not great, but better. Finally learned how to cook hamburgers! :) And I cook pretty decent chicken now, among other things. Excited to have something new to cook with.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Art at the Winery
Tonight I mustered the energy to have a picnic at a nearby winery (Paradise Ridge Winery at Fountaingrove) with my parents and look at some of the art. It was pretty neat, although I am tired... |
| View of Santa Rosa |
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| Standing in the "Stargate" |
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| There are 4 pictures of this artwork, each from different angles. At first look, it appears "flat" or 2-dimensional, but as I got closer, and looked from different angles, it is truly a 3-D piece of art. This is one of my dad's favorites. |
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| A 'mushroom' house. My mom liked this one. |
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| This just made me smile. Not sure why, but it did :) |
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| Time to go home... |
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Hail Storm
So we had an EPIC hail storm. Ok. Not quite epic. But serious hail. Nearly the size of golf balls! Unfortunately, it caught me as I was walking home, so I have some pretty awesome bruises. It broke a window at the apartment and the outside light fixtures. But my neighbor helped me put cardboard up over the window, and then I cleaned up the glass. So it is all taken care of! It was the most amazing hail I have ever seen! And the rain that came down with it was so fast and so heavy that the water was more than ankle-deep on the walk home, and with it moving so fast over the asphault, it was quite disorienting because it was hard to tell if the ground was moving, or water was moving or what. I have never experienced anything like it, but wow! Even though the apartment suffered some damage, it was still really neat!
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