Strings, Rings, and Other Things

Kim and I just got back from a very pleasant trip to see my family in Nebraska over Christmas, which means that it's time for me to buckle down and work hard for a few days. I've got my mid-tenure review portfolio due on the first day of class: the results at this point are purely for my information, but doing a good job so I can get the best possible feedback is tremendously important. (I should probably prepare for my new classes and submit this research paper, too.) It's fairly stressful.

I'm confident that I can do a good job on it: the stress factor comes mostly from time pressure. As I think I've mentioned before, Kim and I leave next weekend to go on a cruise with Jonathan Coulton and a bunch of other cool geeky people. That's awesome (and we promise to tell you all about it, except that we've opted not to pay exorbitant rates for internet on the boat so you won't hear a peep out of us until it's over), but it does mean that the odds of me getting much work done after this week are low. (I could finish a few things up on the boat, but I'm pretty sure that would detract from the quality of both the cruise and the work.) But I'm really looking forward to the trip despite the stress.

Finally, in the "wanna-do" category, I've been trying to figure out how to get a bit more physical activity in my life. While in Nebraska, I visited my old Karate instructor Tim Snyder. (If it means anything to you, our style, Koburyu, is part of the Uechi Ryu family.) It was great to catch up with him, and as I watched a bit of a class I kept finding myself twitching with the urge to join in. My years practicing karate were one of the few times that I've managed to get real exercise on a regular basis, and it was also one of the first activities that convinced me that I could have real success in the physical side of my life, too. Frustratingly, my knee issues mean that a lot of the activities there would be a Bad Idea™ for the foreseeable future. So I'd like to find some injured-knee-friendly activity that can capture my interest as much as karate did. (My teacher pointed out that he has knee problems himself, and that there may be ways of modifying our kata and other exercises to work around such issues. I may look into that.)

Ok. With all that babble out of my system, maybe I can buckle down to work now. Right after lunch. :)

I'm spending this week in Nebraska, sorting through the countless boxes of papers and mementos from my childhood that are cluttering up my mother's house. In looking through my old school papers, I've come to an interesting realization: almost everything from my math and science classes ends up in the trash, but I've eagerly sought out and kept quite a few of the stories and essays and other creative works from my arts and humanities classes. (Assignments to write about myself and my life and my plans for the future have been pretty neat to rediscover, too.)

On the one hand, that makes a lot of sense: those science classes were intended to impart a great deal of human knowledge and, more important, a scientific mindset for approaching the world, and those are things that have remained in my head as a major part of my life ever since. They weren't intended to produce "artifacts" that I'd want to revisit later. But on the other hand, it's a bit disappointing that something so important to my life at the time left so limited a "written record" (tests and homework problems really don't count).

So now I'm wondering what I can do in my teaching that will get my students to produce at least a few concrete things that they'll feel proud of, and that they might feel an urge to look back at ten years down the road. Having some sort of major project or report or presentation is probably a good idea in general, now that I think of it. I wonder if there's any way to work more creativity into the mix, though.

While I was in college, I made the unhappy discovery that almost every time Nebraska made the national news I found myself ashamed to admit I'd grown up there. The time that Lincoln's Catholic bishop issued a blanket excommunication to anyone who looked at a Planned Parenthood clinic sticks in my mind, but it was an all too common pattern.

So it was a very pleasant change to see this recent story: State Senator Ernie Chambers is suing God. I don't entirely understand the context (he's making some sort of statement about recent frivolous lawsuits), but the summary in the article above is hilarious (at least to an agnostic type like me). Some choice bits from the article:( (for those who are interested) )