Much of the reason is spending holiday time with family in Southern California. I try to arrange my internet identity so that finding me or my cell phone number is easy but finding my home address is impossible. But I cannot be sure there are no paths from my name (and thus blog) to my home address, so publicly advertising that I am away from the house for a few weeks seems a needless risk. Thus I postpone blogging about holiday stuff until I return home.
I also have been working a lot on the RPG and on math preparations for next term.
The math work is more interesting to blog about. About half the topics from the previous math class are not used in Math 20, but are needed in the next math class. Traditionally all the review topics are dealt with during the first two weeks of class. But this causes two problems. First, the students do not see new material until the third week, which means students that do not have time in their busy lives to handle Math 20 do not realize this until annoyingly late in the term--and too late to receive a financial refund if they drop the class. Second, those review topics that are not needed until after Math 20 are rusty or forgotten by the time they are useful.
So I am moving the review topics not needed until after Math 20 to the very end of the term. This will solve both problems. I am also adding to my lecture slides a lot of the talk about study skills and class pacing that I do aloud each term, for the benefit of students who miss a class.
Today I finished revising the first lecture. The links will change soon, but for now you can compare the old and new versions if you are interested.
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