I am … unhindered by talent

photo credit: brianwallace
Three different not-in-Morris people were kind enough to ask today in one form or another if I was dead. To quote one

All OK? You’ve been soooooo quiet.

Many, many thanks for asking. It’s nice to be missed :-).

And yes, all the big things are OK, even if some of the details are a little stressful at the moment.

My wife and son are still amazing people, UMM is still home to some incredibly cool folks at all levels, and institutional corn dogs at the Student Activities Fair remain one of my favorite start-of-the-school-year rituals.

On the other hand, I’m still scrambling with some school stuff like syllabi and planning — I’m seriously crap at almost all of the mechanics of teaching, which makes my career choice unfortunate at times. (At least I like my job, though, which puts me way ahead of lots of folks.)

Computer Science at UMM is also really swamped because a search failed and we’ve got 3 faculty doing what 5 faculty (actually 6 people, two of which were half time) were doing four months ago. We canceled a couple of things, and moved a few other things around, so I think it will all work out fine, but it’s a challenge.

And on top of that, it turns out that I have arthritis in my neck that is causing my vertebrae to poke at my spinal cord in ways that express themselves annoyingly in my left arm. I got a steroid shot in my neck last week up in Fergus Falls that was (I think) helping. Unfortunately I pulled an almost-all-nighter night before last doing course prep, and may have undone much of that progress. Damn. It would be useful if I remembered that I’m no longer 18 at key moments… On the neat side, though, I’ve got the MRI images, so I have lots of cool pictures of my spine which I can give to Len Keeler’s physics course on medical imaging. So there will be a bunch of physics students marveling at what a complete mess my back is, and getting college credit for their trouble!

So in short, everything big is all still fine. Some of the details are a pain, however, and that tends to draw energy from all the “optional” pieces of my life (blogging, Flickr, people who aren’t standing in my office door looking confused or unhappy or just glad to see me again). Hence a fair amount of Twitter, but very little that moves any closer to the paragraph form.

Sorry, and thanks for asking. Hopefully things will settle down in the next week or two. If you can’t find me in my office, I might be taking a nap on the couch in the computer science lounge.

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I have taught sections of UMM’s First Year Seminar (FYS) course pretty much solid since it was created back in 1999. My topic has been American Roots Music, a subject I love dearly and have greatly enjoyed exploring with my students. I’ve met a host of really wonderful folks through that course, including some of my best student connections outside of Computer Science. That topic has drawn in a broad range of students, many of whom have gone on to play major roles at the radio station and in the open mic night series, and it’s been a great excuse to buy, listen to, and talk about some really wonderful music.

Thus it is with very mixed feelings that I am considering changing my FYS topic for next year when I return from sabbatical. I’ve taught this for a long time and feel like I’m running out of steam on it. I also continue to struggle with lifting the subject from being about “entertainment” to being about human life and culture; I’ve found it difficult to convey my belief in the vitality of the subject. Another issue I’ve struggled with has been critical thinking. FYS replaced a course called Inquiry that had critical thinking as one of its core elements; I always thought that was very valuable, but never really felt like I included that in a consistent way in my roots music course.

So I’m considering changing topics.

In particular I’m thinking of something like “Climate change: Global crisis, or a tempest in a teapot?”. I think this is one of the (if not the) major questions of our age, and that it can be damnedly difficult to make sense of all the contradictory things said on the subject. My vision is for the class to be an exercise in critical thinking, using climate change as the underlying source of questions and material.

In a one semester, two credit course it’s clear that there’s only so much that we’re going to be able to address, so they’re not going to become experts on the subject (just as I would never claim to be one). Hopefully, however, they’d have a better understanding both of this subject, and of how to approach complex subjects like this in the future.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

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This wonderful little video (produced by some U of M Twin Cities mathematicians) has apparently been viewed over 1 million times now, which is a lot more views than it would ever get in class. I frequently run into faculty that are very intent on holding on to their teaching ideas and techniques, and certainly not sharing them openly with the world. They see those ideas as “their property”, to be guarded and controlled as much as possible. It’s a weird attitude, because almost none of them will ever see any money from those ideas, and the potential for wider viewing and usage is just so much greater if they open up (as in this case).

A good video like this takes a lot of time to produce, but faculty often put in huge hours on their lectures, labs, and demonstrations. Get it out there!

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