Let cooler heads prevail

Well, its been a week and I failed in my quest to finally have a 14 dollar week.  That died on Sunday when I failed to work out.  All told, assuming tonight goes as expected, I'll end up with a ten dollar week (could go to either 9 or 11), and I'll take that.  It's a heck of a lot better than I was doing, especially in May.  I might have had a four or five dollar week in there.  I really don't want to talk about that.  I've gotten back into running; it's sad how slowly I'm going for such little mileage but I just need to bring everything back up to speed and not destroy my legs further in the process.  I did yoga again this week and I should probably try to get it in tonight based on the tightness of my lower back.  The big pile of dishes is now slightly smaller but not as small as it should be.  My book, however, is finished so that's good.  Next, I should move on to the math books that are on my goals list but I don't think they'll be page turners quite like The Martian was.  I also finally started a puzzle again, which means I had to clean off the table which consisted mostly of just throwing stuff away but it helped declutter everything a little bit which did take off some stress.  All said and done, I'm happy and want to keep this up.  I won't be headed out to Gatlinburg though as I've decided I will probably just stick around until Lindsey gets back and then head out with her to a few places we had planned.  I have been eyeing some hiking/camping spots in Northern Georgia though for the fall or winter.

I haven't seen my girl for 15000 miles

By the time I wake up, Lindsey, Lord willing, will be in Europe.  Ideally, she'll be in the Netherlands, but depending on how bad the flight issues were today, she might still be stuck in France.  This means that I'll have plenty of time on my hands for the next little bit.  Thusly, I'm dubbing this coming week as "Lee gets his shit together" week.  There's a lot of things I've been blowing off that just need to get done.  I need to get back to typing up differential equations notes for the independent study that I'm currently observing.  There's a giant stack of dishes that my dishwasher decided were clean but aren't really and so I have to wash by hand.  There's a stack of books I should read.  There's a lot of fast food that I no longer need to eat.  I want to get back to being in a good place so let's start that tomorrow.  Here's the goal: For the next 7 days, I want to make them all 2 dollar days.  I've slipped a little in how stringent I am with them, especially in the eating well category.  I want to not go out to eat once in the next seven days and eat right for this next week.  I want to work out every day, including getting back into running.  I have what's hopefully my final therapy session tomorrow and I'm not going to count that as a workout.  I want to read, at least 1 chapter, everyday.  I want to take care of all those dishes that are piling up.  I need to knock out at least the next five sections of differential equations notes.  I need to just clean up my apartment in general.  If I get all of that done, maybe the following weekend becomes "Lee got his shit together and so now he decided to go hike in the Smokies" weekend.  If I can get at least 11 dollars in the next 7 days, it'll be a consideration.

Old but I'm not that old

A couple months ago, Lindsey first approached me about riding ROC Michigan with her.  Admittedly, my first thought was "How do I get out of this?".  Thankfully, I never followed up on that thought and eventually agreed to join the ride for at least the first two days.  Even though I was minimally active in raising money, I'm glad I joined in on the ride and I had a blast.  I got to meet some cool new people and we all helped each other do something a little bigger than we would probably do by ourselves.  I biked 94 miles over the weekend which puts me up to 150 miles on the summer and that means another goal has been accomplished.

As much as this is the year that my body breaks down, its also becoming the summer of pushing myself through new limits.  I ran a marathon at the start of May, followed that up by hiking 30+ miles with 10000 feet of elevation gain in 3 days some two weeks later and then followed that up with this bike ride three weeks later.  I'm not sure how to follow this up.  It feels like I need to get a 2 mile swim in by the end of July.

What do you do when opinions are everywhere?

California was a blast and it went by quicker than it should have.  I'm fairly certain I'll have met my summer goal of at least three awesome pictures.  I am glad to be home though.

I don't want to talk about that trip today though.  I want to talk about the student evaluations that I saw Wednesday morning as I sat in the San Francisco airport, where it was nice and peaceful until a family with four kids came up and one of the kids promptly exclaimed in a loud voice, "Its so quiet in here!" and then proceeded to make it not so.

Overall, my evaluations were positive, but that's with a small sample size.  I only had a total of 17 students respond and only five left actual notes.  This is for two classes combined, mind you.  Of those five, four were very positive.  They included things like "Dr. VG was easy to talk to outside of class and made class interesting and used real life scenarios", "P.S., you're the bomb", "overall was a wonderful professor" and "is always nice to talk to or ask questions".  These were nice to hear and reminds me of why I do this.

The fifth one, however, was not so kind.  To quote, "This class was definitely my least favorite class I’ve taken in my college career. The only way I was able to succeed in this class was to memorize information rather than actually learning it. And when I did try to learn it I felt you were degrading and responded with an attitude of not wanting to help students succeed in your class. I felt like your ego got in the way of actually wanting to help students. I hope this improves for the next set of students you have." Like every good teacher, I'll take criticism to heart.  It sucks hearing bad evaluations, and if you have a valid point, I will take what you say and try to change in the future and I'm thankful you're making me a better professor.  This one, however, I have a harder time believing.  First, I should say, I am 99.9% sure I know who wrote this.  He's a really smart kid and for the most part, a good student, but here he's wrong and I want to defend myself.  I'm not looking to slag him because that doesn't get us anywhere, but evaluations like this need to be discussed.  I agree that memorization shouldn't be the primary method of learning, but in this class, a class covering logic and the basics of proof, memorization is necessary because it's what you will be using for future math.  Not wanting to memorize things in this class is like building a house but complaining that the foundation isn't movable.  Yes, I made them memorize definitions and theorems and then tested them on it for exams but I told them this would be there on the review days.  Had this student shown up on those days, he would realize how uninformed this complaint sounds.  You don't get to half-ass your work and get away with it in everything else and then blame me when you try it in this class and it doesn't work.

His comments on my attitude are what really got me though.  In my ten years of teaching, I've never been called degrading or anything similar.  I've been called a horrible teacher; I've had a student walk out in class in frustration; I've had students refuse to make eye contact with me outside of class; but never have I ever had anyone accuse me of not trying to be helpful.  I once had a student in one of my favorite classes tell me that I shouldn't use that "I can't believe you just asked that" face as much (his words, not mine), but the vast, vast majority of my students would tell you that I'm always there to help.  I will be on your side if you're willing to work and I will always want to do what I believe is best for you and hearing something so significantly different stings.  On to the ego comment.  Yes, I have an ego, I have pride.  I have talked about that on this very blog several times.  No, it does not transfer over to the classroom.  I joke frequently about getting my Ph.D. Survivor-style.  I joke about liking my job because I always get to be the smartest one in the room, but my ego has never brought me to the point that I talk down to a student.  If anything, it's about respect.  Show me basic respect and courtesy in the classroom and I will respect you as a student.  Heck, even if you don't give me that, i.e., everyone who is constantly texting or checking their email, and you'll still get respect from me because my job is to make help you learn.  I'm not there to make you do anything.  You're a college student.  How much you get out of this directly correlates to how much you put in.  Therefore, if you disrespect the class by constantly showing up late or frequently not at all, then yes, I may respond with a little frustration when you ask me what a symbol is when we've covered it several times in class.  That's not what I'm there for.  Check your notes (which you didn't take because you weren't there) or your book (which you didn't buy).  Ask your friends in class.  You want to complain about me, that's fine.  I've certainly warranted it on certain days or even certain full semesters, but please don't blame me when I try to expect more out of you and you're not willing to put forth the effort and then reap the consequences.

 

Tell me who are you

I know I can be hard on myself on this blog, hence the happiness posts from earlier in the month.  The main reason for it being that I'm not living up to the standards (admittedly high) that I've set for myself.  These past few days have been different.  I've been in California (Pinnacles and Yosemite) and Luke and I have hiked the Pinnacles High Peaks Trail, Yosemite's Four Mile Trail/Panorama Trail and Upper Yosemite Falls.  Its been over 30 miles of hiking with 10000+ feet of elevation gain.  This is who I want to be.  I'm active all day and don't struggle with my usual sin issues because I'm too busy being distracted by the majesty of God's creation.  At night, we celebrate with a burger and a beer and if there's any time left, I'll read.  Granted, this would be really hard to do in Indiana with the total lack of possible elevation change and it would also be difficult to do while maintaining a job, but for now, I'm thrilled.  I'm having a blast out here.  I'm also thankful though that we're taking today off to just drive by Lake Tahoe because my calves could really use the rest.  Also, the back of my right heel has been rubbed raw because I didn't switch out of my boots and into my trail runners soon enough, but that's okay because its a small price to pay for the glory that I've witnessed.  This should knock out my second goal of the summer as well as I'm assuming I have some awesome pictures.  They'll get posted later in the week after I get back.

Let's put this town in our rear view mirror

So I bought a bike.  Its a 2015 Specialized CrossRoads Comfort bike so its not quite a road bike and not quite a mountain bike, but more inbetween so I can safely handle roads and some basic trails but there isn't much suspension.  I got my first ride in with Lindsey on Thursday and knocked out 8 miles of the 100 mile goal.  I'm fairly committed to riding the first weekend of ROC Michigan with her so that would actually take out the entire 100 miles right there.  I'm looking forward to riding a lot more this summer.

I'm also entering the period of summer where Julie starts to hate me.  I just got back home from being in Michigan for the weekend so I could see my parents and finally clean out my Michigan checking account.  In the next little while, I will also head down to Brown County for some hiking if the weather prevails, head up to Milwaukee for a baseball game with the family, and then take off for San Francisco to see all sorts of fun things in Central California.  Hooray summer! Hooray academia!

Friday highlights

I don't want anyone to think that I'm skipping out on highlights already.  I'm just getting to it rather late today.  The best part of Friday morning was getting out and running again for the first time since the marathon.  All my muscles were good and my pace was fine if a little slow.  My knee was still a little janked and I might want to get that looked at during my next physical but it still felt really good just to get out there and run.  Friday night, I went over to Lindsey's place and we walked for a while then had a picnic where I got swarmed with bugs and Lindsey did not.  That's not cool.  We then hung out for a while and watched Stand By Me which I had never seen despite it being nearly as old as I am.  There were plenty of good 80s memories though.  By the way, 80s kids >> 90s kids.

Today, I wanted to go out and finally buy my bike.  I didn't do it for reasons I can't fully explain.  I am a little intimidated by this since its just been so long since I've actually ridden a bike and I don't want to go in to a bike shop and admit that I don't know what I'm talking about.  I don't like feeling dumb, but nobody really does.  I don't know if I've been on a bike since 2001.  Its very possible that I've run 3500+ miles since I last did a mile on a bike.

I also watched Fermat's Room tonight to get a start on some of my mathy goals.  There weren't really as many math riddles as I had hoped and all but one was actually explained.  I knew the answers to most, but I did look up the answer to the one they didn't explain.  Without going into too much detail or giving away the ending to a movie none of you will actually watch, the last few minutes did cover the conundrums of mathematical research very well.  I'm glad I watched it even if it didn't go as deep as I would have hoped.