Back to School

Meetings most of the day today. I've got two hours in the Math108 tutoring center, and got to listen to the whole spiel for about three hours this morning. Yeah, there are new people who don't know the score yet, but it would have made more sense to go through the new stuff first, then the old stuff, so that those who had prior experience could leave. That took most of the morning. Then the Math015/025 meeting took most of the afternoon. There is a lot of new stuff going on there. Two changes: Math025 is divided into two parts now (just don't tell the registrar, as Cathi's trying to avoid committees). Students who are not passing at midterm are now required to repeat the first eight weeks until they DO pass is. THEN they can try the second eight weeks. To make this work, each class is paired. One person teaches the whole course; the other teaches the first half twice in succession. At midterm, those who are passing go into the whole course (or stay if they're already there) and those who are failing get to repeat the first half. Both of mine are the repeat sections. So I get to tell my students that I hope I don't see them after midterm, and mean it in a GOOD way.

I've got all but one of my syllabi mostly done. I need to revamp the Math025 one with some of Cathi's new info (in particular, I'm going to copy her "course objectives" = jargon for administration making up useless rules). The one that isn't done is for the class I've never taught before: Geometry for Teachers. I need to talk to Randa or someone else who's taught it before so I have some idea what to cover.

My schedule is a bit odd this time around. Monday and Wednesday evenings, with the rest of the day free. Tuesday and Thursday most of the morning, plus a class at 13:00. Friday, I'm in the Math025 testing/review center in the morning, and have my hours in the Math108 center from 12:00 to 14:00. I tried to get my hours on Tuesday evening instead, but we had a guy who needed ten hours, and I was the easiest one to move to make it work.

Anyway, that's quite enough school stuff. Here's a partial picture of how my door turned out (hard to get a wider picture because the hallway is too narrow):

Yes, I realize that the Chinese characters are up-side down... I lost track of which end was "up" when I took the door outside to paint it. For the moment, I'm going to leave it as is. If I find a larger stencil of Chinese characters at some point, I might put some on right-side-up, then rebrush with the yellow for an aged effect. My goal was to wind up with a door that looked like it might have been in use for ages and ages and ages. That's why I let the brown bleed through. Oh, you can also see one spot I still need to touch up, right on the door frame. I'm guessing that it got nicked when Mom helped me carry the door back in.