Frequently Asked Questions
Answering many questions that I frequently get after the semester.
Notes and Musings
Recent content on Notes and Musings
Latest posts
Save Century II... from Godzilla
… and ironic image I needed to make.
Solution to: MacOS VoiceOver / reader keeps popping up
Does the MacOS VoiceOver keep showing up when you reboot your Mac? The solution is in a different setting.
Crochet: The Hardest Thing I ever made
Crochet (realistic!) shih tzu dog for a colleague at work.
'Worst Semester Ever'
The hyperbolic title comes from this piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education .
Clock for students taking a test
Adding a clock to a classroom without one, using a screensaver and single line of code
Planning for Finals - Reviewing an Assessment
Reviewing a previous final with the lens of good summative assessment practices.
Planning the shit out of a conference: Emergency Leadership
… in which I describe all the steps taken to ensure the WSU Undergraduate Research Conference goes forward in 2024.
Plans Change - Did a reading, discussed other stuff!
Initially planned to discuss pages 59-66 of the guide on summative assessment.
MAA Instructional Practices Guide - Part 4 of 7
Discussing pages 49-58 of the guide on the basics of assessment.
Why not a math PhD?
Answering the question I’ve been asked a few times. Basically I’m really excited by Ed Psych in ways that Fourier Analysis never did for me.
Mid Semester Feedback and Halfway Celebration
Discussing actionable mid-semester feedback, and having a relaxing agenda
Building a Chrome extension: Visual Student Roster
Getting to know our students thanks to a little help from Github Copilot
Next step: Dr. John Hammond, EdD
… in which I describe the next stage in my career.
Departing the Senate, part 2: positive reflections
… in which I reflect on over five years in the Senate, and explore the good we’ve done the University.
MAA Instructional Practices Guide - Part 3 of 7
Discussing pages 26-44 of the guide on choosing appropriate mathematical tasks.
Departing the Senate, part 1: grumpiness
… in which I reflect on the most disappointing session in my five years in the Senate.
MAA Instructional Practices Guide - Part 2 of 7
Discussing pages 15-25 of the guide on practices to encourage student participation and persistence.
Multiple-stage Midterm Experiment - Part 1
… in which we go even further on the road of non-standard assessments.
Who is FNU?
That’s not their name. It’s just a database placeholder.
Mine vs. Not Mine - Clearly defining your role
First, big shout-out to Dall-E for generating the fantastic ’not it’ image.
Quoted in The Sunflower re: Computer Science Concerns
… in which we see that I am directly quoted in the campus newsletter, and we reflect on what that means. (Image by Thy Vo for the Sunflower)
Mastery Grading in Blackboard - Colors and Letters
A description of what I did in order to get Blackboard’s Gradebook to hide numbers, show letters, and give meaningful and motivating colors.
MAA Instructional Practices Guide - Part 1 of 7
Discussing pages 1-14 of the guide on practices to encourage student participation.
Classroom management and (un)usual circumstances
Aubrey Wolfe and Montana Loibl presented on some common and not-so-common occurrences in the classroom. They encouraged the attendees to work in small-groups to decide how they would handle these situations, and together as a group we discussed them. Here are their slides
Multiple Stage Exams
Measuring student learning not just on a 50 minute test.
Attendance Quizzes
Using short quizzes to check learning and take attendance.
'Ideal' Classroom
What does your ideal classroom look like? During the January ARC, one of the WSU Retention Fellows posed the following question: What does your ideal classroom look like? The plan # (~ 3 minutes) Let’s take a few minutes to really think about this and write it down. (~ 3 minutes) share with a partner / small group about this Report out Next question: What steps can we take this semester in…
An email from [Your Name]
An actual email from a student this semester.
Obsidian as Notational Velocity
A very brief evolution of my note taking apps, and coercing Obsidian to emulate the golden days of 2008.
GTA Training - Winter Workshop 2024
Outlining the three day mini workshop for returning GTAs
Uses
Tools I use, inspired by the community at uses.tech
2023 Reading Counts
Charting the trend of 2023’s reading vs. previous years.
Me and Dad - Teachers of the Year
A brief entry about how I’m grateful to have won a teacher of the year award just like my dad.
How to upload assignments to Onenote Class Notebook
Some video directions for showing my students how to submit assignments on Onenote.
GTA Prep - Two Week Workshop - Fall 2023
An outline of our new GTA prep workshop held in August 2023
End of Semester Frequently Asked Questions
Below are answers to some frequently asked questions I get after the semester is over. What is my grade? #I can’t talk about grades over email due to FERPA regulations. Your final letter grade is on MyWSU. I got almost all of the question right on ___. Can I get credit? #Sorry, no. The grading is, on the one hand, draconian because it is “all right or it’s wrong.” However,…
Allowfullscreen: A lesson learned about asking students
I’ve spent the last week trying to improve my site’s presentation of material for my calculus students. What really irked me was how unprofessional my non-responsive images looked when I’d go in the classroom and see my site rendered on their phones. So I added lightbox2 javascript library, I used Hugo’s automatic generation of smaller images (for faster load times), and…
February 8, 2023
Some notes / links from this week’s teaching seminar
February 1, 2023
Some notes / links from this week’s teaching seminar
Non-traditional Grading: Ungrading
How does a student “get 75%” of a 50 minute exploration that even Achimedes never solved in his lifetime?
Non-traditional Grading: Mastery-based grading
Want students to learn more? Try grading differently.
Getting started with Hugo for course content.
I wanted a “simple” way to write my class materials in Markdown. Hugo magically makes it a website.
Additional Resources
A list of supplemental readings and resources to explore topics further
Assignment 1: Closures
Implement the transitive, reflexive, and symmetric closure algorithms.
Assignment 2: Prefix and Postfix Calculator
Implement the a calculator for prefix and postfix operations.
Basics for the assignments
How are we doing what we’re doing?
Section 1.1
Four Ways of Representing a Function Full disclosure: these videos are produced my another professor, and I’m including them here for review. The following videos are lecture videos covering the material from Section 1.1 in Stewart’s Calculus 8th edition. Each major topic in the section is broken down into a short video. The following video covers the fundamentals of functions…
Section 1.2
Mathematical Models: A Catalog of Essential Functions The following videos are lecture videos covering the material from Section 1.2 in Stewart’s Calculus 8th edition. Each major topic in the section is broken down into a short video. This first video discusses linear models and their associated linear functions. The next video discusses polynomial functions, which are some of the nicest…
Section 1.3
New Functions from Old Functions The following videos are lecture videos covering the material from Section 1.3 in Stewart’s Calculus 8th edition. Each major topic in the section is broken down into a short video. In the first video we investigate the horizontal and vertical translations of functions and the corresponding algebraic relationships related to these geometric translations. In…