Hello world. (I always chuckle when I start a piece of writing that way because I always think of basic computing programming and how the first program basically anyone learns is to display the phrase “Hello, world.” on the screen. Yeah, I’m probably going to ramble a fair deal in this entry.) Anyway, today is not quite an ordinary day because the building in my basement partially flooded! I was sitting in my apartment and my power went out. I found out it was the whole building and then 10 minutes later, a University Police officer came by and told us that the basement had water up to the officer’s knees. We (the other co-workers who were in the building at the time and I) haven’t heard exactly what happened but we figure something broke and apparently it’s “the worst thing [one of the head people with the maintenance staff on campus] have seen in 40 years”. The few of us are in a hotel for tonight and depending on how long it goes, we may relocate to another res hall on campus sometime next week. I’m just glad this didn’t happen when the students were here – not only with getting students a place to stay, but also that the building alarms can still go off but can’t be silenced when the building loses power.
So, it’s definitely been a while since I wrote a blog entry. I know I’ve had little blurbs here and there, but honestly, I don’t feel like I’ve written much about the spring semester, May session, and my summer thus far. Yes, it’s that time again for me to look back over an entire semester in one blog entry! Be sure to bring a snack.
Spring Semester:
-My wing was pretty good overall. Some of the guys did struggle in their second semester (especially since the classes jump up to be more difficult), but it was definitely a well-connected group of guys. Our building’s layout does make my wing prone to feel disconnected from the rest of the guys, so I’m glad that the guys could be connected to each other.
-The Math Team did well overall in the spring. We hosted a competition in February and other schools actually came! It was nice to have other schools on our campus, and I know some things to improve upon for next year. I was able to take the team to each monthly competition and we had a large group of students qualify for the state competition in Columbia. Planning for state was a logistical tangle (more on that later), but things went off without a hitch, and we had four students qualify for the national level competition (as compared to one student last year). All four students were able to go and I definitely think it was a good experience for them, especially for one of the first-year students that will be one of the Math Team’s co-presidents next year.
-Robotics… to start off, I do enjoy the team name of “Radical Tech” and I think I’m going to just keep it like that for a while (especially since that name gets put up in many places so it can be tricky to change it everywhere). I think I talked about the fall competition in St Louis already, and our big project was of course getting the bigger robot ready for the FRC regional event in Kansas City in March. This year, that included attending the kick-off event, which was held in Olathe. The kick-off event is collaborated throughout the world so all teams can go and watch the competition game video for the first time and pick up the KOP (Kit of Parts) for the season. It’s also a nice time to meet some other teams in the area. I think this was our first year going to the kick-off, and I do think the team should move in that direction (going to more collaborative events with other FRC/FTC teams). I do feel like our team did better than last year, which was definitely in part to the student president who spent a lot of time working on the robot over the entire build season, rather than waiting until the end. At competition, we finished middle in the pack, but I think we earned it. (Looking back to last year, I think we had some lucky breaks with our alliance members and then this year, we had some unfortunate alliance picks/matches and it definitely felt like we earned it more this year.) Now that we have sponsorship, the competition wasn’t the end of Robotics for the year, because we put together a demonstration of the robot in front of the JCPenney’s in town. (We also had an event in the beginning of the spring semester where we were interviewed for the town newspaper.) That definitely gave the team and me good experience on how to put a demonstration together and how to reduce the number of ways Murphy’s Law can bite you in the butt. (Fortunately, one of the ways is to be close to a hardware store for last-minute supplies, which was Sutherland’s for us.)
-I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but I also became the Assistant Coach for our Science Olympiad team. As is the case with a lot of teams, the students are really the driving force behind learning the material and getting ready for competitions, so my work with the team was more so focused on the building events (where students have to build various devices). This year, the build events included a balsa wood helicopter, a balsa wood tower that would have to support a bucket of sand, a remote controlled “sumo bot”, and of course, the “Mission Possible” Rune Goldberg machine. It was definitely pretty fun. So, the team competed at regionals and did pretty well, which included advancing to state. Well, as it turns out, the state competition for Science Olympiad was the same day as the state competition for Math Team... and they were even at the same place (the University of Missouri in Columbia)! As you may be able to guess, a vast majority of the students active in one of the clubs were active in the other one, so trying to figure out how to balance the competitions was on my mind since September. Fortunately, the different organizations made a compromise and they made it possible for students to do an early morning Math Team session before going off to their Science Olympiad events. So, things ended up going pretty smoothly, and oddly enough, having both events on the same day saved us some money (since we only had to go to Columbia and stay in a hotel one weekend that month). Sadly, we didn’t advance to nationals, but we did finish 11th out of 32 high schools from across the state. I do plan to help out the team again next year, so I’m excited.
-In its first year of creation, our Envirothon team went to state! The students took the different tests out at a university-owned farm while the coaches went off-site for the day. I think the students were able to have a good experience in terms of the difficulty of state-level questions, and it’s good to have another way to get our school’s name out there. Our claim to fame was that for the Oral Presentation, our team’s score was .3 points behind the first-place team, out of 100 points possible. We’ll have to see if the student interest is there for a team next year, but I definitely like the concept of getting students interested in environmental concepts and core principles.
-Acadacathalonomania made a return in the spring semester as well. This time, it was “Acadacathalonomania: Revenge of the Day of the Dawn of the Night of the Zombified Living Dead” (and people ask me if I like my job… HA! :-P) I changed the format of the event some since students felt like 8 hours was too long of a stretch, so it became two 3-hour-14-minute halves, with a lunch break in between, and every team got a list of 42 item each half. (Again, it is reasons like this why my job rocks. Just saying.) Since the competition was broken into halves, I did open up the option for a team to just compete in the second half, and some teams did utilize that choice. Without giving too much away, some of my favorite moments included having Ali (the baker in town) call one of the students “honey” on video, LARP’ing an everyday event, and of course, the team’s theme songs. Based on how this year has gone, I’m definitely putting Acadacathalonomania on again in the fall.
-In addition to all the different big events and clubs, there were a lot of little things that spiced up the semester: taking students to Omaha to see Les Miserables, hosting fruit nachos for the winning wing of the end-of-the-semester donation drive, Wednesday night movies with the guys, and everything else peppered in through the semester (get it? Peppered…. Spicing up the semester? HA!!)
-My spring break was spent in Minneapolis with college friends. I also spent some time with a friend in St Olaf, and the week definitely flew by. Unfortunately, bad weather kept Tess from coming down for lunch, but other than that, things were pretty good. My last night in Minneapolis did include swing dancing at the Caves and going to the new BWW’s on campus, which was pretty awesome. (I’m sure I’m forgetting some things that happened during spring break—if I remember anything big, I’ll add it to a later entry, I guess.)
May Session:
-One of the May Session projects I supervised was getting first-years knowledgeable about Robotics, with a focus on getting more programmers for next year. The students ended up building a “Scorpion Bot”, and while I wasn’t able to see it in action, it did give the students good experience with hydraulic systems. The JCPenney demonstration actually happened in May, so pretend I am talking about that now, as compared to earlier.
-My big project during May Session was teaching students how to swing dance. It all kind of started as a whim in previous semesters when I was ask a student “if you had a chance to learn swing dancing in May, would you?” and get a “oh my gosh, YES!” in response. Well, I was able to get some students to lead the group with me and I ended up teaching students the basics of swing dancing for 3 weeks. It was a hodgepodge of material from my UMN class way back, a swing dance book I picked up on eBay in January, and a YouTube account with ‘how to’ videos for a good number of basic and intermediate moves. I really enjoyed teaching people swing dancing and it was always fun to see students practicing in the halls, since that would get more people interested. We ended up performing a swing dance routine in front of the entire student body and as a student put it, “swing fever has hit the Academy”.
-Part of my time in May was spent meeting new first-years during summer orientation sessions. I know I will probably forget their names over the summer, but it’s nice to see a snippet of what next year could be.
-I already mentioned welcoming new students and since it was that time of year, a good chunk of May was spent in graduation mode. The group of students who were graduating started at the Academy the same time I did, so I definitely had that personal connection. Plus, I was able to see so many of them grow over their two years at the Academy. Yeah, it was definitely a very heartfelt time. Every year, we have a cryfest, which is a chance for seniors to all gather and address their classmates one last time before their parents come and they have to deal with moving out and graduation. I think this year’s cryfest set a new record in how long people were outside talking to one another, sharing their stories, and saying how they appreciated and cared for the people around them. Then, of course, the graduation dinner with all the parents, and the graduation ceremony itself (sadly, we didn’t have a band this year, but I was part of the national anthem choir). It’s been a month since the students graduated and I’m still getting sad as I’m typing this right now. Yeah, the Pioneers are definitely a class that I will miss.
Summer:
-After the students moved out for the summer (well, most of them. A few stuck around before their summer research), I had a week off that I really didn’t do anything during… especially that my mom came down and now I own a car!! My mom recently got a new(er) car and I got her old one. So yeah… definitely happy with that outcome. It is so nice to have the freedom of my own car now. I haven’t done too many little fun trips, but I definitely plan to throughout the year.
-As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I’m working with Upward Bound, a college preparatory/summer camp program. Specifically, I’m a Teaching Assistant for the four math classes, one of the four tutors, and an Enrichment Instructor for Behind the Music (a music appreciation class) and… *drumroll* Swing Dancing! Yes, I’m teaching another group of students the basics of swing dancing. (In fact, I’m also working with some recent graduates on swing dancing stuff, including stuff I’m learning myself.) The students are with Upward Bound for six weeks, although Week 6 is a week-long trip (this year the students are going to Chicago). This weekend is between Weeks 3 and 4, so the program is going by pretty quickly. There are definitely good and not-so-good parts of the job, but overall, the one thing I’m pulling away is that it’s different. Yes, I know that’s very vague, but there are different pieces that just make this experience different: I’m working with the students primarily in a classroom setting, the majority of the students are younger, and I’m not living with the students. If I come back next summer, I will see if they are looking for a new Math Instructor, so I can get the full-fledged experience of creating a syllabus and assignments for different math classes.
-I feel it’s noteworthy to mention that I’m developing what could be considered a “normal” sleep schedule. I do have a shift a few hours later during the weekends, but it still seems notable. (While it won’t show up like this online, I am currently staying up late to finish this and the irony is dripping onto my computer. I should probably have that looked at.)
-Oh, as another noteworthy thing, I went to the Bookstop (a coffeehouse/antique shop/used bookstore in town), and I must say that it’s a pretty sweet place. It helped me get in the zone for a project I needed to work on, and it just has a nice atmosphere. I’ll probably be spending more time there in the next few weeks.
Well, that’s basically a recap of things since January. I’m sure I could fill this entry out to be twice as long, but I think this is a good snapshot. As I mentioned way back at the beginning, I’m at a hotel tonight since the basement in my building is partially flooded. We’re hoping that everything will be back to normal sometime next week, but at this point, we’ll just have to hope. Speaking of hope, here’s hoping that I can blog more often so the rambling gets spread out!
Have a great rest of the weekend!
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