Weekend Before Finals

The weekend before finals week is one of the more stressful weekends for students. I’ve been there.

As a teacher though, I try and avoid doing anything related to work, the weekend before finals. I realize that once I start grading finals, I will probably be kept busy until the end of the summer session, which is sometime in early August. I have to grade finals and prep for next quarter over spring break. Then the quarter starts, and ends, and then summer starts the following week.

So far, this has been a fun weekend for me.

It started on Friday, which was not a ton of fun, by having a growth removed from the left side of my face. Fun, right? Lauren and I tried to see Tsotsi that afternoon, but got there late, so we went grocery shopping and came home. I watched basketball that night, and graded a bunch of homework papers (I did actually do some work this weekend). We walked around downtown Mountain View, and that was the evening.

Saturday was a long day…..

The Pre-Game

We had tickets to the UCLA-Memphis game, in Oakland. We wanted to do a couple of other things in Oakland, so we headed out at 1:30, only to realize 5 minutes later, that we forgot the tickets at home. We went back home and got them.

We drove up to Oakland, and looked around Preservation Park, which could be a possible wedding location. It was alright. I can’t say I really loved it, but I didn’t dislike it either.

We then went to Fruitvale (the Mexican part of Oakland), parked the car, and got some great Mexican food (I have to say that Mexican food in the South Bay doesn’t compare to the food in Fruitvale). We got on BART and headed to the Oakland Arena.

The Game

The game started at 4:05, and was extremely dull. UCLA won by being the better of two horrible shooting teams out there. There is a quote from Rasheed Wallace, when he played with the Portland Trailblazers. He didn’t want to talk to the media, so he answered every question with “both teams played hard.” Last evening, both teams played crappy. It was awful to watch. After the game we went to...

The Block Party

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, that is. We saw it at the Parkway Theater. Anyone in the Bay Area who hasn’t been to the Parkway should go. Even if you don’t live in the Bay Area, but ever happen to find yourself in the area, you should go to the Parkway. They have couches, pizza, and beer. We got pear ciders, and were too late to get a couch, so we had to settle for chairs, which was not as nice, but the movie was good, and audience really got into it.

The After Party

My old officemate Rozy (who needs to get a webpage, BTW) invited people to go to some club in the City. We changed at a coffee shop, after the movie, then drove across the Bay Bridge, and found parking. All this took an hour. Crazy!

We got to the club at 11:30. When we got there, the bouncer at the door had just told a couple of people the club was full, but then he let us in. I guess we’re cool looking.

I don’t like these tiny clubs with no space that think they are cool and chic. I thought it was kind of a crappy club, personally. While we were at the club, some photographer came and took our picture. So now, my picture might end up on some club’s website, that I didn’t even like. I told Lauren he probably took our picture to get some color on the website. I had looked at the website earlier, and almost all the photos were of white folk.

Here's the picture...


We left the club at 1:00, came home, and I had toast (I love toast made with Trader Joe’s Shepherd’s Bread – plug, plug.), because I hadn’t eaten anything since 3 that afternoon. We went to bed, and that was the day.

Today, we cleaned the house, and I’m currently watching basketball on TV.

Good luck with finals!

Statistics

I'm in the Mountain View Library, Counting Crows are singing The Murder of One in my ears.

I should be planning stats, but I've been putting that off all quarter. Instead I wrote an exam. I'm being productive, but should really break into stats mode. I've looked at the book, and some of the stuff Diane gave me. It's going to be so different. I knew that material would be different - I knew that from teaching stats in MS^2 (I wonder if I can do superscripts in blogger) - but the format of the whole class seems different. That's what makes me a little nervous. It's always a little scary to teach from a new book, or a slightly different class (with MPS, each quarter has given me those fears, using books I'd never used before, teaching a 2 hour, 5 day a week class), but for some reason stats just has this hold on me.

I think it goes back to the stats classes I took in college.

My junior year I took stats with that jerk of a guy, whose name I don't remember. No one did well in that class, and he made a girl cry one day. I didn't go home for Thanksgiving that year (even though I already had a plane ticket) thanks to that guy. You'd think I would remember his name, but I don't.

My senior year, I took a business stats class. This was the most useful of the stats classes I took (and the most similar to what most people who take stats see in class), and I remember loving it. I got one of the highest grades in the class (there were over 200 people in the class), and tutored some classmates. It must have been easy for me, but I don't remember much about it. I must have been suffering from senioritus, because I don't remember much about that semester, or even what semester that was in my senior year.

In grad school, I took two stats classes. Both of them were way over my head. The first one turned out to be a financial stats class (it didn't say that in the course catalog). CRA-ZY!!! How I got through that one, I'll never know. It was basically for stats and finance grad students (I was neither). The other one I took was also for stats grad students. I know how I got through that one - my officemate was a stats guy.

Anyhow, here I go, avoiding planning stats again. I'll go now...

Work, work, work

I don't think a lot of students have any idea how much time I put into teaching.

A few weeks ago, a student wanted me to put together a review sheet to help them (not the whole class, mind you) with the material we had covered to that point. That's crazy!!! I don't have the time to put together a review sheet for one person.

There is this notion I get from some students that I am there for each of them, not for the class as a whole. It's hard to tell students that I have 80 students, so I don't remember every request made by every student, without being reminded.

Students see me for the couple of hours in class, and I wonder if some of them think that that is the end of my job. If only! I would say I put in at least 2-3 hours of work a day, away from De Anza. I should metion that this week (except for today), I was at De Anza from at least 9am to 6pm. You tack on 2-3 hours onto that, and you get my work day.

I'm venting, because I have to put together a review sheet, an assignment, a quiz, activity sheets, and an exam, this weekend. I have no idea how I'm going to do this by monday, and still have a weekend.

I almost dread weekends at this point in the quarter, because a weekend is by no means time off. If anything, it means more work than any weekday.

I'm in Douce France (a coffee shop in Palo Alto) right now, listening to Alison Krauss, Digable Planets, Jurassic 5, the Amandla! soundtrack, and anything else that comes up in my itunes party shuffle. Some students asked me what kind of music I listen to. For you that asked, there's a sample of what I'm listening to now.

Anyhow, my 9 minute break is over. Back to work.

Tenure!

The Foothill-De Anza Board of Trustees has decided to make me a tenured faculty member of De Anza College.

Woohoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Houses and money

I opened up another mutual funds account yesterday (the internet is so cool - I can open accounts while watching the Oscars).

Looking at my accounts, I realize I could probably put a down payment on a house - if I lived in Michigan. Of course, I don't live in Michigan, and if I was still living in Michigan, I don't think my job would give me the income needed to put a down payment on a house at this point. This just illustrates how expensive it is to live in the Bay Area. To people in this area, I don't make much money at all. In fact, I'm very low on the totem pole. To people in Michigan, I make a ton of money.

What I need to do is work at De Anza for a few more years, and then move to Kansas, or something. Put what savings I have put away into buying a house, and then become a Kansasite, Kansaser, Kansan! I don't think I really want to move to Kansas.

Random events in the near past and future

So, I'm in Red Rock again. I think I posted from here in one of my more recent posts.

What has gone on in the past week and a half since I last posted? Hmmm.... We had issues with our dish and with internet access at home. I think the internet thing has finally been fixed, but I'm not completely sure. I talked to Tim (our apartment manager) about it on Monday, and he said it might be 3-4 weeks til our internet service got back to normal. I guess you can't complain too much, when you get free broadband service with your rent, but it still kind of sucks.

I worked at the flea market yesterday, without Lauren. It was me and Lindsay, who made fun of a few customers, after they left. We were in a crappy location, but business was still pretty good.

Lauren and I saw Walk the Line last night. It was not as good as I thought it would be, but I was doing work while watching it, so I might not have fully appreciated the film.

Lauren found out she will be going to S. Africa in September. I'm wondering if I can get to go for a little while (to leave the country for the 7th year in a row). If I do this MBA thing, starting in the Fall, I don't know if I'll be able to go to S. Africa, because classes start in late August, I think.

So the board votes on my tenure at De Anza tomorrow. Pretty sweet!!! There is a reception I may forget to go to (even though I RSVP'd already). I'm just not into socializing with De Anza folk. I wish I enjoyed socializing with them, but I don't. Oh well.

I was asked by President Brian Murphy to do some kind of thing on Wednesday, but I have a class conflict, and I didn't really want to do it anyway. I don't get why I'm constantly being asked to do things by people in high posistions in the district and on campus. He apparently asked the Dean of our division, then me. I don't know how I am second in line to the Dean.

I feel (and I hope I'm wrong here) that I get asked to do stuff a lot, because of what I look like. I feel like people think "let's put the young minority face out there." If I was some conservatively dressed white guy with a preppy hair cut, I wonder if I would ever be asked to do things like be on committees I know nothing about, with people who are so much higher up the De Anza ladder that I feel like I don't belong in the room. I hope that this is not the case.

I should get back to work now. Back to planning class on Arithmetic and Geometric Sequences. It's always odd for me to teach things I didn't learn very well in my math classes. I like sequences, but every time I teach them, I feel like I'm not an exptert, even though I've taught sequences quite a few times now.