More union organizing and early-career reflections
Craziness the week after spring break
Notes from the Union Forum Meeting
In attendance: Lorraine, Lisa, Carol, Ethan, Rita, John, Sandra, Heather, and Victoria, the latter of whom reacted with surprise to David Neumann's morning email announcement, elevating him to Vice President of the PTFU.
Report back from Heather on her experience getting interviewed for full-time music faculty:
The reshuffling of department chairs has generated strong opposition among English adjuncts. Ellen Olmstead was asked by the dean to step down, presumably to make way for another professor who's more willing to play "toady" for the administration. Olmstead has long been seen as an ally to the part-time faculty.
Lorraine shares her heartwrenching story of downward mobility in her department. Despite contributing almost single-handedly to the growth of the course offerings in gender studies and women's health, Lorraine is now barred from teaching online courses, and even some face-to-face courses due to a new policy on the required credentials. Again we see that adjuncts have almost no job security, even after 10+ years with the same employer.
Victoria proposes two themes around which we can build a fall semester event: tuition-free community college, and pay parity. Why just one big event, rather than several smaller events? We saw with the gubernatorial panel discussion how difficult it is to attract a critical mass of adjuncts. A series of smaller events offered at different times of the week might better serve our purpose of growing the union membership.
Victoria's preference is to avoid wearing ourselves out with too much planning. One big event maximizes the ratio of impact to "investment of energy and time."
One concern with having a single event to address both themes (pay parity and tuition-free community college) is that the audience members attracted by one theme might have total apathy about the other. How can we ensure that every minute of the event engages equally the "two factions" in the audience? As a test run, let's go around the table and hear what these dedicated union members think about the proposed topics.
On free community college:
1. Our classes are already heavily populated by students who tune out and show no interest in the educational opportunities we're providing. Some of this disengagement can be traced to the absence of "skin in the game," as happens with veterans whose entire tuition is paid by Uncle Sam. How much worse would this problem become if even more students were given the option of not facing the costs of their education?
2. Adjuncts are pressured by some departments not to insist on high expectation from their students, in order to keep the DFW rates low. Would this pressure increase if community college were made free, thereby opening up the gateway courses to larger numbers of underprepared students?
3. The lack of academic preparation is more evident among recent high school graduates, who have been used as guinea pigs in various experiments to reform the high school curriculum. Nontraditional college students come to our classes with greater self-discipline and soft skills, but they won't be able to benefit from the free college bill passed in Annapolis.
4. The "sheepskin effect" says that most of the economic value of a college education comes from earning the degree, not simply from passing a number of courses. If the result of this free college bill is a greater enrollment in gateway courses but a much smaller growth in the number of associate's degree recipients, then the return on the state's investment might even be negative. A better use of taxpayer dollars might be an experiment in universal basic income.
5. Let's be optimistic and assume that everyone who takes advantage of the free college bill actually does go on to earn an AA degree. Although there are intangible benefits to society from a more educated citizenry, for the individual AA holder the economic value of having a degree is reduced, since the labor market now has many more AA holders from which employers can choose. The credentialing arms race will simply escalate to the next level, leaving all these new AA recipients no more employable than when they and their peers were content with a high school diploma. Witness Lorraine's story of downward mobility in her department, perhaps due to a glut of higher-credentialed candidates for faculty positions currently on the labor market, and the decline in rankings that the college might suffer if it had to report a low percentage of terminal-degree holders teaching in this discipline.
On pay parity:
1. The compensation gap between part-time and full-time faculty includes not just salary but also benefits. With external providers of services such as health care and legal advice, the college can justify its stinginess in limiting the pool of beneficiaries, but for in-house benefits such as tuition waivers and fitness classes, this stinginess is less excusable.
2. (citing Mitch Tropin) Action on the pay parity issue is unlikely to come from winning the sympathies of college administrators. Other institutions that offer pay parity had it imposed on them by state legislators.
3. (added July 28 thanks to a comment from Caroline) The most realistic scenario for an internally-driven move to pay parity is by building stronger bridges between part-time and full-time faculty. Low morale on the latest equity and inclusion survey stems partly from worries among the full-time faculty that their jobs might be cut for budgetary reasons. This insecurity suggests an opportunity to build allies for pay parity, by pointing out that greater equality in compensation between them and their part-time colleagues will weaken the financial case for eliminating a full-time position and hiring adjuncts to provide the same services.
After the union forum meeting, I took a detour through the Clifton park neighborhood and the Long Branch Trail, finally arriving home to be greeted by a more vigorously dripping faucet in the kitchen. Mom and I tried to call Moen to order some replacement cartridges, but the hold time would have been about an hour, so we hung up and kept filling vessels with the drips from the leaky faucet.
To escape the annoying sound of dripping water, I biked to the college and took a late afternoon swim. The act of pushing aside large volumes of water to propel myself up and down the lane restored somewhat the sense of control that had suffered a blow from the leaky faucet.
Excerpts from: "Timequake" and "Beyond Civilization"
I remembered labor history, too, because the first effective strikes by American working people for better pay, and more respect, and safer working conditions, were called against the railroads. And then against owners of coal mines and steel mills and textile mills, and on and on. Much blood was shed in what appeared to most members of my generation of American writers to be battles as worth fighting as any against a foreign enemy.
The optimism that infused so much of our writing was based on our belief that after Magna Carta, and then the Declaration of Independence, and then the Bill of Rights, and then the Emancipation Proclamation, and then Article XIX of the Constitution, which in 1920 entitled women to vote, some scheme for economic justice could also be devised. That was the logical next step.
And even in 1996, I in speeches propose the following amendments to the Constitution:
Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity.
Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage.
What we have created instead, as customers and employees and investors, is mountains of paper wealth so enormous that a handful of people in charge of them can take millions and billions for themselves without hurting anyone. Apparently.
Many members of my generation are disappointed.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, "Timequake", pp. 175-176
Ordinary businesses don't burden themselves with tribal obligations. Most obviously, they don't "take care" of their workers; to do so would introduce them to a whole suite of problems in which there's no profit watever. Instead, they pay salaries and expect workers to take care of themselves. One worker may thrive on a given salary, while another languishes on it. From the company's point of view, there's no injustice in this if the salary is fair in the first place. It's not the company's fault that the second worker has a large family to support or an ailing parent to take care of--or is just a bad manager of money. The company can afford to be hard-nosed about this; it doesn't risk losing this second worker to a competitor, because its competitors are equally hard-nosed about it.
This unspoken agreement among businesses to limit their obligation to issuing a paycheck is precisely what gives our society its prison ambiance. Workers have 'no way out.' Whether they move from company to company or from nation to nation, their employers' obligation ends with the paycheck (an arrangement that obviously suits employers very well). Prisons are always arranged to suit the wardens. That's the anticipated order of things. No one thinks that prisons are built to suit the needs of prisoners or that businesses are built to suit the needs of workers.
Stepping into a tribe means stepping out of the prison.
-- Daniel Quinn, "Beyond Civilization", p. 107
I arrived at the Math Learning Center half an hour before it was scheduled to open. As it turned out, a campus-wide lockdown in response to a suspicious gun-wielding man delayed the opening of the learning center until almost 10:00. In the brief time I had before the end of my shift, I got to work with a MATH 150 student on calculating derivatives using the power rule. Throughout this session the words of Prof. Wang echoed in my head, "an entire class period devoted to teaching them how to subtract 1."
Wandering around campus after my shift at the learning center, I uncovered more details about this morning's incident. Finding a satisfactory resolution to this drama, I relaxed in the library with the national and international news stories. I wonder if Trump is thankful to Brett Kavanaugh for distracting Americans from Trump's embarrassing performance at the UN meeting this week. Tomorrow's testimonies by Kavanaugh and his accuser Dr. Ford are likely to dominate the national conversation through the weekend and possibly into next week.
A mid-day presentation by Angela Nissing gave me the opportunity to ask how she sees the employment landscape in coming years for people entering the ESOL profession. In her response, Prof. Nissing lamented not being able to offer as many courses this semester as in years past, and she encouraged the students in the room to help boost enrollment by recruiting their friends and family members into ELAP classes.
At 2 p.m., acting president Dr. Cain hosted a Town Hall in the Cultural Arts Center. Much of the discussion focused on security issues, although plenty of questions addressed class cancelations, union contract negotiations, and the financial health of the college. Michael LeBlanc, entering late, gave a frank and impassioned recap of the breakdown in negotiations between the college and AAUP over salary increases. My own question, about the pitch that college administrators use in Annapolis to lobby for state funding, received from Dr. Cain a response along the lines of "collaboration, not competition," which response Prof. LeBlanc was not present to hear.
I had the good fortune to run into my dean at this afternoon's Town Hall. I pressed him to explain why the advertised full-time faculty position in the Takoma Park math department was not filled this year. Dean Hamman deflected the question with an assurance that the vacancy would be re-posted over the winter break. In response to my question about how my application might stand a better chance of surviving through the final round, he said "you're teaching, which is great" (quotation possibly mangled due to the noisy room), but that highlighting my extracurricular student engagement would strengthen my application. This outside-the-classroom interaction is already somewhat documented on my ePortfolio, but I might insert into the cover letter a passing reference to these unique experiences:
On my way to the Part-Time Faculty conference yesterday, I heard from my carpool mates that we might be emerging from the latest trough of the enrollment cycle as early as next fall, thanks to a larger-than-usual cohort of MCPS graduates anticipated in Spring 2019. I wonder how well they'll adjust to college coursework after the epidemic of grade inflation that the Washington Post recently reported. Kojo Nnamdi of WAMU had a show last week in which some callers brought up the idea that grades should carry some standard meaning across institutions, a goal that we hoped to address with SBG.
After two semesters of teaching statistics with traditional grading, I'm wondering whether an attempt at Standards-Based Grading would be helpful this coming semester. I'm worried that I've been spoiled by the five-hour-a-week face time of last semester (when I had a section or 017 linked to each 117 section), and the reduction in contact hours will be enough of a challenge on its own, better not to be compounded by having to explain and implement a novel grading scheme.
Not only will I be meeting each statistics section only three hours a week, those three hours are spread out over Tuesday/Thursday. If college is closed due to inclement weather on either of those days, I lose half a week's worth of instructional time. My first semester teaching statistics, I was lucky to have a MWF 11am section, so that each snow closure took away only a third of our weekly instructional time.
Over the course of several conversations this past fall, my colleague Lucious Anderson gave explicit expression to an often-unstated objective of college education, namely the ability to deliver a finished product on deadline. He had to make this objective explicit for one of his own statistics classes, whose students treated due dates almost like gentle suggestions. His background in workforce development and continuing education prompted the example of a team tasked with designing a spacecraft, but one team member shows up two months after the spacecraft has launched and asks to be given full credit for the meticulous work she finally completed for her part of the project. I don't like the idea of encouraging a flippant attitude toward deadlines among graduates who will eventually have to carry their weight on team projects. A flippant attitude toward deadlines is one of the messages Lucious suspects we might inadvertently send by adopting SBG, especially if we allow students to dictate the reassessment schedule.
Even if I don't end up implementing SBG for MATH 117, I'd still like to have frequent assessments to provide students the constant feedback that they'd get with SBG. This consideration is leading me to imagine an assessment regime consisting of weekly quizzes, one midterm exam, and a final exam. I haven't tried such a strategy in almost six years, and back then it only applied to evening sections of precalculus and calculus. If the population served by daytime sections of MATH 117 isn't used to studying for a small number of higher-stakes assessments, then this plan might backfire. Carving out a dedicated review day leading up to each exam is how some professors get student buy-in to the seriousness of the midterm and final, so that's how I'll structure my calendar when mapping out the semester.
A better candidate for SBG adoption might be my MWF section of MATH 150. I haven't taught this course in over six years, and since then the course workgroup has selected a new textbook. The change of textbook is less worrisome than the change in student preparedness, as illustrated by Alice Wang's comment of lately needing "an entire class period to teach students how to subtract 1." Lisa Vaughnn is equally pessimistic about the typical MATH 150 student's algebra skills. With standards-based grading I won't be tempted to lump multiple skills into any given assessment, perhaps to the benefit of those students who lack the desired procedural fluency with algebra.
Thinking through these possibilities out loud would have been better suited for yesterday's scheduled breakout session on "Effective Grading" than for this long-winded blog post. As it happened, the session ended up being canceled. I couldn't even get the would-be attendees who converged on the room to stick around for an informal sharing of best practices from our collective experience, because they were worried about not getting professional development credit if the room wasn't supervised by an ELITE-sanctioned presenter.
This exclusive focus on "grades" rather than learning is precisely what SBG was designed to suppress. If the faculty tasked with supervising our students' learning are themselves more motivated by official institutional credit than by the chance to improve their pedagogical skills, is it really so unexpected that our students also absorb these lopsided values? Once again we see an instance of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
My calculus students entered their fifth week of the semester having seen limits, asymptotes, average and instantaneous rates of change, and the power rule for differentiation. So far we could have been following either the Barnett, Ziegler, Byleen textbook (BZB, as currently assigned), or the Goldstein, Lay, Schneider textbook (GLS) that I used when I last taught this course. This week we finally have to choose which approach to take: (i) an early exposure to interpreting the derivative, in word problems, tables, and graphs; (ii) further expansion of our library of functions with differentiation formulas for exp and log; or (iii) more symbolic manipulation via the product, quotient, and chain rules. Approach (i) is favored by GLS and agrees with Sanjay Rai's admonition to get students to think about the meaning of the mathematical objects they encounter. Approach (iii) is more compatible with the BZB text, but might follow too quickly on the heels of the basic differentiation techniques that some students still need more practice to master.
Approach (ii) is traditionally considered more appropriate for STEM majors, and would not even be a contender were it not for a curious legacy from Mary Kay Abbey's tenure as a math professor in our department. Thanks to Professor Abbey, even our intermediate algebra for liberal arts course (MATH 093, formerly MA 097) was structured to give students early exposure to transcendental functions. This innovation was intended to allow cumulative review throughout the semester of what might otherwise have received only a two- or three-week treatment late in the semester when students are unable to process new material as quickly. Although none of my calculus students this semester are coming directly from an intermediate algebra course so structured (seeing as MATH 093 was retired from the catalog last year), the rationale for early transcendentals is just as valid in the calculus context as it was in intermediate algebra, and perhaps even more so when business majors make up a significant proportion of the class. The Harvard calculus text (Hughes-Hallett et al.) makes a similar appeal for early transcendentals, so I feel well-backed by precedent in choosing this direction for week 5.
More radical still would be the choice to follow the Harvard calculus text even in the early introduction of the definite integral. While the historical development of calculus supports this parallel introduction of the two key problems (slope of a curve at a point, and finding areas by exhaustion), the BZB homework exercises if assigned in this order might produce far too much confusion. Still, if my next chance to teach elementary applied calculus is several years away, I can't pass up the opportunity to collect data on how well this approach fares with the latest cohort of students.
Accordingly, on Monday I gave a rough overview of the area problem and the construction of Riemann sums. Then I sketched out a scaling argument to show why the function that accumulates area under the unit hyperbola xy=1 satisfies the same key properties of logarithm functions. We worked through a few review exercises on algebraic properties of logarithms before moving on to the differentiation formulas.
Today we rewrote on the board the basic differentiation formulas for powers, exponential, and logarithmic functions, and then set ourselves the long-run task of differentiation a composition. Along the way, we would derive the connection between logarithms, relative rates of change, and the product rule. Borrowing from Stephen Maurer's MAA article on hat derivatives, a motivating question to frame this investigation went as follows: "In country X, the population is growing at 2% per year, and the per capita beef consumption is growing at 3% per year. How fast is the total beef consumption changing?"
Most students seemed unfazed by the use of local linearity to expand C(t+1) and P(t+1), the per capita consumption and the population, respectively, one year from now. I had hoped that the use of the distributive law would be similarly trivial, but a couple questions on that manipulation did arise. It's encouraging that this group had enough self-advocacy skills to not suppress these questions out of fear of embarassment in front of their peers.
The use of MATLAB animations of composite functions, to explain the chain rule in terms of multiplying the slopes of two different curves, did not go over too well. Too many students seem to lack the skill of reading carefully the axes of a graph, as I'll no doubt learn again when I ask them to interpret the graph of f' to locate the relative extrema of f. Adapting the context-free MATLAB animations on Youtube, to draw by hand the graphs of Population versus time and ln(P) versus P, in the context of national beef consumption and a relative population growth rate of 2%, seemed to make the connection more intelligible.
I have to be careful to distinguish between a narrative that is everywhere locally intelligible, versus one that is globally intelligible. While each individual step in this development towards the chain rule and product rule might make sense on its own, the sheer number of new ideas presented this week is a significant obstacle in seeing the big picture. In subsequent weeks I'll probably have to address a number of questions on the homework assignments because of our limited class time to demonstrate examples of all the techniques.
Currently reading:
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game,
translated by Richard and Clara Winston
The introduction in this printing of Hesse's novel draws a distinction between the genre of Bildungsroman, exemplified by his more straightforward novellas including Siddhartha and Demian, and the genre with a more global, civilization-spanning ambition. The latter genre found itself a visionary exponent in Daniel Quinn, especially his Ishmael series and a later volume called Beyond Civilization, which treat the actual anthropological record as their subject matter. Hesse's contribution imagines a divergent line of history, in which a hierarchical realm of intelligentsia finds its prospects for peaceful existence threatened by the widening gap between its scholarly inquiries and the concerns of the wider world. The protagonist of this novel, a Master of the Glass Bead Game called Joseph Knecht, finds himself increasingly disenchanted with these esoteric studies and tries to extricate himself from the duties demanded by his office.
Hesse falls back on familiar elements of the Bildungsroman genre to portray the life of Joseph Knecht, from a first encounter with higher learning through the Music Master who comes to visit his local school, to the study of Eastern traditions in a retreat to the Bamboo Grove. Secondary characters in the novel, by contrast, are given much less room for personal development. One of these characters is Fritz Tegularius, another adept at the Glass Bead Game and one whom Joseph Knecht consults for advice on designing games and plotting his abdication of office. Here is how Hesse describes this character:
Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable, for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace. He cared nothing for peace, had no regard for the hierarchy, hardly minded reproof and isolation. Certainly he was a most inconvenient and indigestible component in a community whose idea was harmony and orderliness. But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestibility he was, in the midst of such a limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an admonition and warning, a spur to new, bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd. And, to our mind, this was the very reason his friend cherished him.
The word that most strikes me from the excerpt above is "indigestible". However common it might be in the original German to apply this adjective to a person, this usage in English calls to mind an image of society as a continental-scale metabolism whose inputs are individual humans and whose outputs are cultural artifacts like the Glass Bead Game. To the member of a community whose ideals include harmony and orderliness, being called "indigestible" would constitute either a reprimand (if offered in the spirit of correction) or an insult (if offered in a spirit of contempt). Knecht is applauded for being able to see past the obvious mismatch between his friend's personality and the community's ideals. Knecht demonstrates this managerial skill by finding innovative projects to which Tegularius can contribute, instead of simply allowing him to serve as a model for the Castalian scholar of some future age, when the outside world has ceased to value Castalia's unique cultural outputs.
As a model for the managerial talents with which an "indigestible" element of the community can be usefully employed, Joseph Knecht has no obvious parallel in the workplace experience of my part-time faculty colleagues. All attempts to engage our supervisor in discussions of resume-building opportunities seem to run into a brick wall of unhelpfulness, with such opportunities apparently parceled out on the basis of favoritism or insider connections. Next fall's early college course, for instance, is not being offered to any of the part-time faculty who expressed interest at the January 17 department meeting, despite the potential of such courses to enhance adjunct professors' resumes and more quickly catapult them into the ranks of full-time employed. If the department chair desires a pool of adjunct faculty who are all content with their part-time employment, the question "what would Joseph [Knecht] do?" should immediately suggest the answer of giving the "indigestibles" more growth-oriented assignments, so that they sooner become somebody else's problem and don't remain "unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd."
Joseph Knecht's treatment of Tegularius did not aim to make him "somebody else's problem" in the way we might hope of an open-minded department chair. Instead of "indigestible" Tegularius being asked to leave, it was manager Knecht who voluntarily abandoned his post in the Castalian hierarchy. The story then follows Knecht into the humble one-on-one teaching assignment he found through his outside friend Designori, and the reader is left to infer that Tegularius remains in Castalia under a supervisor with less personal history between them. Under such a supervisor, perhaps Tegularius meets the fate typical of all "indigestible" personalities, as suggested by the Japanese proverb "the protruding nail gets hammered."
At least while his friend Knecht was a Master in the Castalian hierarchy, Tegularius could avoid the fate of the "protruding nail" and remain a thorn in the side of the community, tolerated despite disharmonious manners yet admired for his sparkling wit. Once his friend and collaborator leaves the hierarchy, Tegularius cannot be assured of even this limited place in the community, let alone the prophetic role laid out in the famous epigram by George Bernard Shaw:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world.
The unreasonable man adapts the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress is due to the unreasonable man.
As an allegory for the weakened position of community colleges in the current long-lived economic expansion, The Glass Bead Game adds little to the straightforward analyses already present in the pundit classes. Its portrayal of the reaction that Knecht's circular letter receives from fellow Masters bears striking resemblance to the empathetic but ultimately non-committal response given by college administrators when faculty seek clarity on course cancelations or delayed pay raises. If I were forced to squeeze a lesson out of an imperfect allegory for the state of higher education today, I would take away from the novel the suggestion that agency for change might only be attained by leaving one's cloistered community and rejoining the wider world. Hesse only grants this decision to someone in the upper echelon of the hierarchy, while individual agency at all subordinate levels remains elusive. On the question of what individuals at the bottom of the pecking order might do in the face of threats to continued existence, Hesse is silent. Their places in the community are secure as long as the community itself endures, but the struggle for continuing their overall way of life plays out far above their pay grade.
Why should the decision to exit Castalia and serve as liaison to the wider world not be open to all ranks in the community? Certainly the province would feel less of a loss if one of its rank-and-file were to depart. On the other hand, the wider world might take little notice upon receiving such an emissary as the "indigestible" Tegularius, whose subsequent worldly acts are unlikely to compare with the legend of self-sacrifice that emerges from Knecht's final assignment. For the novelist's purposes, only the departure of an elite, likeable Master can adequately illustrate the seriousness of the threat faced by Castalia's increasing inscrutability to the outside world. This departure is sought cheerfully by the Master himself, rather than by angry barbarians storming the gates of the province, as a modern twist on the story of Jesus' self-sacrifice reconciling the heavenly kingdom with fallen humanity.
Its deliberate parallelism with the Christian story of atonement keeps Hesse's novel from seriously questioning the central premise behind atonement. Hesse pulls no punches in his criticism of self-righteous communities painting outsiders as lost or misguided, but his desired solution seems to be reconciliation by a singular self-sacrifice rather than a steady state of ongoing low-level conflict. The latter option is a stable equilibrium found in both interspecies and intraspecies competition. We call it a naturalistic fallacy when we try to find in the "what is" of nature a lesson on "what ought to be" in human society, as if humanity were somehow separate from nature and impervious to the selection pressures that settled on these equilibrium strategies millions of years before recorded history. Hesse does well to warn his readers against neglecting history in the pursuit of ever-more-specialized knowledge, but the scope of Hesse's history is rather limited in comparison with the deep anthropological and evolutionary record that informs modern authors like David Graeber, Daniel Quinn, and Spencer Wells. To read into The Glass Bead Game any deeper lessons for the current levels of inequality in wealth, income, and opportunity, one must subscribe to the notion that several million years of non-recorded human history are somehow irrelevant to the challenges we face to our continued existence as a species.
In the weeks since my half-semester course at Rockville wrapped up, I've been able to maintain a connection to that campus by substituting for absent instructors. The easiest such assignments to get are mid-morning MWF classes. At that time almost none of the adjunct faculty is available to substitute, as I learned when trying to get my second-to-last Wednesday class covered during my week of jury duty.
Today at 10:00 I found myself back in Science West, covering a section of basic algebra for Professor Chon. I hadn't supervised such a class since the college switched to using ALEKS for computer-based lessons. Based on the first impressions of instructors on my home campus, ALEKS takes a very granular approach to assessing mathematical skills, never requiring students to keep a large number of concepts in mind for any set of problems. I wandered the classroom this morning and saw the ALEKS assessment philosophy for myself, only occasionally having to talk through a particular concept with one of the students. For the most part they worked independently, completely absorbed in the task at hand.
At the end of the class, I delivered the filled-out attendance sheet to Prof. Chon's mailbox and then went upstairs to grab my swimming gear for a final trip to the pool. My fall semester swimming routine started back in mid-September and persisted at least once every other week until today. During my first week using the Rockville pool I remember leaving the facility and holding a hallway conversation with fellow swimmer Brian, whose remarks on Hunter Biden's role at Burisma served as my first exposure to the scandal that evolved into the current impeachment inquiry. As the fall swimming season comes to a close after weeks of unrelenting impeachment news, this hallway encounter brings back happy memories of a less hurried time.
In weeks past I would have gone straight from the swimming pool back to my office in SC 359, especially on days when the outdoor temperature would only permit a brief walk across campus wearing the few layers that the PE building lockers can accommodate. Today I set that consideration aside and went to the library right after my swim. I picked out a few books for a friend who had just applied to a reporting job with InsideHigherEd. It had been several semesters since I passed through that section of the stacks and discovered a book on rethinking American community colleges, but the memory of that chance discovery was the first thought that came to mind when my friend mentioned the desire to do his homework in case he got called for an interview. I checked out three titles at the circulation desk, and then went across the bridge connecting Macklin Tower to Science West. The inclusion of this bridge in the construction of Science West means that even on a chillier day, the short dash from one building to the next is bearable without an overcoat.
In my SC office I said a few words of goodbye to my office-mate, whom I might not see again until next semester. I repacked my bags to make room for the library books and then set out by bike on the homeward trip. The afternoon and evening would prove just as eventful as the morning and mid-day.
A quick late lunch upon arrival at home was the first order of business. It would have to provide enough energy for at least seven hours; I foresaw no opportunity to squeeze in another meal in between my 5pm dentist appointment and my substitute teaching gig from 6:30 to 8:45. I dropped off the library books with my friend right after the dentist appointment. Normally such a visit would be the setting for a prolonged chat and a small shared meal, but time was short this evening, and I didn't want to mess up the dental cleaning so soon after paying top dollar for this service. I allowed myself a 20-minute stay in his apartment to catch up on news and skim through the library books I had checked out, all while rehearsing in the back of my mind the substitute lecture I had to give tonight.
The calculus class this evening was scheduled to learn about tests for convergence of series. At the house this afternoon I extracted some relevant pages from a looseleaf edition of the Briggs calculus textbook, stuffing them into a folder for reference during tonight's lecture. Aside from these pages and the corresponding section in the Stewart e-book, I had no written lecture notes; the mental rehearsal of examples and commentary would have to suffice. Fortunately my recent work writing out solutions for the Briggs textbook made it easy to anticipate which results would need greater emphasis for this class, so the lecture went smoothly and reached at least one example illustrating the Limit Comparison Test.
With the dismissal of the calculus students, my work for the evening is still not done; I have two exams to give tomorrow, and only one of them is actually in a state fit for printing. The statistics exam will have to be composed in the late hours this evening, after I return home and enjoy a well-earned dinner. The backlog of statistics homework papers, which still need to be marked with individual feedback, will have to wait until tomorrow when the students are actually taking the exam.
A look back at this year's milestones