The Things That Fill My Busy Days

1. Grading. My calculus students are very trainable. The class average on the max/min test was an unheard of B+. I am not teaching the type of calculus that challenges students to be independent thinkers; I teach straight-forward calculus for fulling prerequisites for majors that never use calculus in their upper-division courses. This semester my students understand how the system works. I tell them what they need to know and how to do the problems. Also I think that part of the secret is WebAssign. With homework worth the same percentage of their grade as the final exam, they have some motivation to actually do the homework. This also improves their ability to solve routine calculus problems.


2. Talking to The Topologist about his class. He had a cheater in his class in the past. Cheater is taking also in his class this semester. Cheater is suspected of cheating.


3. Napping. It is 80F in my office. Also heading out for cold beverages.


4. Bandaging. Had to make use of my impressive shoulder flexibility in order to affix a band-aid to the area of my spine between my shoulder blades.


5. Knitting. Mistakes be damned! I'm going to finish those damn socks! And then I'm going to knit more socks! And I'm not going to buy any more sock yarn until I use up at least half of the sock yarn that I currently own.


6. Renovating. Making decisions about my kitchen. Looks like construction will start next month.


7. Photocopying. I think I may be done with all of my photocopying for the rest of the semester.


8. Reading. Way too many books, both work-related and leisure.


9. Spamming. Finding internships for my summer students. Know anyone who does research on anything science-y in the Boston area who wants to support science education by mentoring a very awesome student on a research project? These students are very awesome. This counts as "outreach" to grant-funding people. In the past 24 hours I have cold-emailed about 40 mechanical engineers asking them if they want a student. Engineers, biologists, physicists, whatever else, I have students.