Next times

The University of Georgia has a 15 week semester. We are now in the second half of Week 13. At this point in the semester I have plenty of ideas of things I will/would do differently the next time I teach Calculus. The difficult thing is getting myself to actually execute or carry through on those ideas the next time around. Anyway, here are a few.

1. Have a clearer policy on cell phone use in class. As in, I expect you not to use your cell phone in class. Students seem to be quite brazen about their texting. This is the second semester in a row I’ve had texters sitting in the front row. C’mon, if you’re going to be doing this sort of thing, at least try to hide it! I haven’t said anything to the class about the courtesy of not texting, but I guess it’s never too late to start knocking heads.

2. Start working on optimization problems much earlier in the semester. Perhaps on day one. Actually, this was a piece of advice I received from a senior faculty member before this semester started, and now I see the wisdom of it. Perhaps it was my teaching mentor Will Kazez who pointed out to me that the ability to read and understand a word problem is probably the most useful skill my students could learn in this/any math class. Their future employers aren’t going to care if they can compute a derivative or evaluate an integral. Computers can do a much faster and better job. The real skill will come from being able to read and understand, say, a technical paper or research article, and then interpret it in a useful way.

Perhaps if we started working on setting up word problems on day one, then by the time the students learned enough Calculus in order to be able to actually solve the word problems, we could do some of the really interesting (i.e., hard) ones.

3. Provide more specific instructions and expectations for the Interview Project. This is an item I touched on before. I just wanted to mention it again.

4. Insist on students turning in homework assignments of higher than rough draft quality, with multiples pages stapled, ragged edges torn off, and work presented in a linear fashion (i.e., work is written from left to right, from top to bottom). It’s totally my fault for not insisting on this every time. I need to make a big deal about it and set some very strict standards from the very first assignment.

5. Work on getting students to use correct mathematical notation. Equals signs are all over the place. Students treat them like commas. Perhaps they don’t even realize that the things they wrote as being equal are not in fact equal. I need to find some way to get them to realize their errors.

You can’t understand the content of the course if you can’t read and write the language. And mathematical notation is the language of Calculus.

Pants

Sunday before last I bought two new pairs of pants at Sears. They were both the same brand. They were both marked as the same size. One was tan, and fit fine when I wore it last week. The other was green, and, as I discovered yesterday when I wore them to school, at least two inches too short. It’s hard to concentrate on work when every time you sit down your pants ride up to the top of your socks.

I got so fed up with the pants that in the middle of the school day I went home and then to Sears to change my pants and to exchange the defective pair. I briefly thought about skipping the part of going home and changing my pants first, and just going to Sears to exchange the pants I was wearing, a la Kramer (or was it Peterman?), but that didn’t seem practical. Besides, I probably would have slipped in a puddle and ruined the very pants I was trying to return.

Back from Bama

I just got back from Alabama this afternoon. I think my colloquium talk on Thursday went fine, and my algebra seminar talk on Friday went even better. I have a critical view of how my talks tend to go, but my hosts were generous and thanked me for doing a good job. I’m supposed to give a talk in the VIGRE graduate student seminar two weeks from Tuesday, and I think I may give to them the same talk I gave in the University of South Alabama colloquium. (The next time I’m supposed to give a talk at another school, I think I’ll try to give it at UGA first, not second.)

In other news, I received an invitation to join Google Wave today. I wonder if I can convince anyone at UGA to give it a try. Maybe use it to help collaborate on the projects of the algebra research group?

Leaving on a jet plane

All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go to the Mobile, Alabama. Cornelius Pillen invited me to come visit him at the University of South Alabama, to give talks for their departmental colloquium and the algebra seminar. Do they realize they’re getting a five-month-old green PhD, who has never given a departmental colloquium before?

I have an outline for the colloquium talk. Between now and tomorrow afternoon I’ll need to go over it again and refine things a bit further. I’ve been to plenty of colloquium talks over the past five years, some excellent, some good, and some not as good. I’m hoping to achieve good. I’ll be happy if everyone goes away thinking that I know what I’m talking about.

I’ve chosen to talk about cohomology and support varieties, since these are the topics I’ve been researching lately. The topic is large, and I’m only familiar with some small corners, so my talk will be on cohomology and support varieties as I see them. It’ll be very rooted (no pun intended) in the theory of algebraic groups and quantized enveloping algebras. I have a couple of concrete examples in my pocket, so I plan to throw those out there, and hopefully that will satiate the masses.

As for the Friday algebra seminar talk I’m supposed to give, I don’t have any actual notes written out yet. I have an idea of what I’ll be talking about (some results Dan, Brian and I came up with this summer, as well as some of my own work), but I’ll have to write some formal notes once I’m actually in Mobile. At least it’ll be fresh in my mind.

Jobs, papers

The math department ran a jobs workshop today, as part of their postdoc mentoring/training series. I forgot to go. My excuse is that I was too distracted uploading my paper to the arXiv. I don’t anticipate going on the job market again for least another year or two, but it would probably be good to keep all of my job application materials up to date. As someone pointed out at lunch today, if a listing for my dream job were posted today, I should go for it.

In other news, I’ve uploaded my first paper to the arXiv. Technically, it’s the second paper on the arXiv with me as an author, but it’s my first paper as the sole author. All (two) of my papers are visible here. The arXiv recently implemented a new system of author identifiers, and the link I just gave you is part of that. I think the author identifier system is supposed to help distinguish between authors with the same first and last names. There isn’t another Drupieski on the arXiv at the moment, and unless my brother starts writing Computer Science papers, I don’t anticipate any in the future, so there’s unlikely to be any confusion over my papers. But I can see how this might be useful for other people.

Calculus projects

My students finished their Calculus projects last weekend. More accurately, I announced that I would not give credit for any work done after last weekend. Either way, work has stopped.

The task of the Calculus project was for the student to interview a professor in their major field and learn about how Calculus is used in their major. The goal was to motivate the student to learn the Calculus course material, and also to learn about their own major.

Student performance on this project varied from excellent on down to merely adequate. Some students obviously put off working on the project until a day or two before the rough draft of the blog post was due. In other cases, the quality of the report probably had more to do with the quality of the interview. Some professors might have just given a laundry list of the courses in the major that use Calculus content, but didn’t explain at an elementary level how those concepts are applied to specific problems in the major. Other professors obviously went much further and were better resources to my freshmen students.

I’m grading these projects on a credit/no credit basis. If you did all of the required parts of the project, you get credit for it. If you didn’t do the project, then you do not. I made the project worth about 2% of the final course grade. Amazingly, some students didn’t do the project at all. Perhaps they’ll wish they had if they’re in a borderline grade situation seven weeks from now.

I would definitely give this project again in the future, but I would make some changes. I would give the students more guidance on how they should write their blog post reports. Maybe I would instruct the students to provide specific examples of applications of derivatives in their major. (We’re up to derivatives by the time the project is due.) Every major involves studying some kind of rate of change, and that’s what derivatives are all about.

Another thing I’d do differently is to provide some kind of grading rubric up front. I think I’d want part of the student’s grade on the project to be determined by their peers. I had the students read each other’s posts this semester and provide comments on the blog, but I didn’t do anything to make sure the comments were actual constructive criticism, or that the comments were heeded.

Finally, I’d make proper spelling and grammar part of the grade. I thought freshmen were better writers, but maybe that was just the people I hung out with when I was a college freshman.

Writing binge

I have been crazy busy these past two weeks writing things. First I was writing a paper based on the research I did this summer; a completed draft is on my web page. The proof of the very last result needs to be amended slightly, but other than that I’m not yet aware of any errors.

Now I am busy writing an NSF postdoctoral fellowship proposal. The deadline is October 21, but I promised my letter writers that I would try to get them a draft of the proposal this week. It’s looking like they’ll get the draft tomorrow, but it could be very late tomorrow by the time they get it. The main part of the proposal is limited to five pages, and I’ve already type three and a half. I’m not sure how much more material I’ve got in me, so maybe I’ll hit five pages exactly. Or maybe I’m going to have to go down from 12pt Computer Modern to 11pt Computer Modern to get it all to fit. I was hoping for this proposal to be much better than the one I submitted last year, but I’ll be happy if it turns out to be merely somewhat better than the one I submitted last year. At any rate, I think I’m doing a better job of adhering to NSF grant proposal guidelines this time than I did before.

Oh, and today I received my first invitation to go give the algebra seminar and colloquium talks at another university! More as it develops.

Johnny Apppleseed

I am the Johnny Appleseed of laser printers. Wherever I go, I leave them in my wake. One in my office at UVA, and soon one in my office at UGA. This morning I had some trouble printing on the department’s main laser printer, so this afternoon I finally asked Jerry about expending the rest of my computer budget on a printer for Seyfi and me to share. I didn’t care what features it had, as long as it could duplex. Double-sided printing is a deal-breaker for me.

Anyway, Jerry was going to order the printer today. Maybe it’ll come in next week? Not sure where we’ll put it once it gets here. We need to get a table large enough to accommodate a printer plus a coffee maker, because that’s another thing I ought to bring to the office soon.

I suppose since N, K and J are coming to visit in a week and a half, I could bring an old computer cart from home in to the office, and that would create some room in the spare bedroom, where I expect some people might want to sleep, especially after a 9.5/8.5 hour drive from Charlottesville/Richmond.

Homework and Rain

How much written homework is too much homework? I sometimes worry that I might be assigning too much. I’m not really convinced that students would spend more time per problem, or more meaningful time per problem, if I assigned less homework. And Jennie says it’s not busywork if they’re not already good at it. I might rephrase that as, “It’s not busywork if they’re getting some benefit out of it.” Anyway, I hope the students are getting some benefit out of all the written homework I’m giving them.

On the other hand, I’m not worrying about it raining too much. According to WeatherUnderground, we’ve had over 6 inches of rain this month, and over 2 inches of rain this week alone. Just today on my drive home from school we had a tremendous downpour. I got as far as the Publix when I saw the cars ahead of me all stopped. Then the car just in front of me turned around and went back towards Atlanta Highway. When it got out of the way I saw why: the road was flooded. I saw some cars pushing through, but I couldn’t tell how deep the water was. It looked to be many inches deep. I decided to turn around a find a new way home. Luckily my other route home wasn’t flooded.

I hear it’s supposed to continue raining for the next few days. I’m ready for it to stop.

It’s Alive!!!

Garfield works again.