Another math competition, another blog entry.

December 10, 2011

Well, here we are again. Another math competition, another blog entry. Don’t get me wrong – I do help grade the exams and with proctoring the tests, but there are some points where we are simply letting the students work and as long as watchful eyes are in the testing area, we can make things work. (In other words, it’s a good thing that I don’t have to be staring at the keyboard in order to type properly.)

In terms of the infamous inquiry “how are you?”, I find myself falling back to the standard “stressful, but pretty good.” The end of the semester has crept up once again, so a good chunk of the current to-do list are those things that should really be done before everyone (including myself) leaves for winter break.

The wing overall is doing well. There are some students who are nervous about finals, some students that are sitting in pretty hot water academically, and some students that are going to kick butt… and really, all of those are normal, so the only thing to do is just to hope that the students that are on the fence are able to kick it into gear and do well. The guys convinced me to plan a winter party on Wednesday with a white elephant gift exchange so that should be fun.

Math Team is doing well (notice how I held off on updating it until the second thing on the list? Hoo boy.) Obviously, the students are testing right now, and the turn-out from the first-year students continues to be good… if only the second-years would come in stronger numbers as well. Even with this competition being on the weekend before Finals Week, we were able to get 9 students together. The students have also been doing pretty well with the Missouri Math League tests (MOMLs). We’ll have to see how the results from last Tuesday factor in, but we’ve been fourth in the state only behind St Louis teams.

I feel like Robotics should have been first on the update list since it had the most exciting month. Last weekend, we competed at the West Des Moines FTC qualifier and finished in 5th place! The scissor lift was giving us trouble throughout the day, but thanks to good teammates and the other ways to score points, we were able to finish with a record of 4-2-0. Unfortunately, we were not able to compete in the final matches, which surprised me a little bit. Long story hopefully short: The way the finals work is that the top four teams are designated as Finals Alliance Captains and each captain picks another team to be the other team member, starting with the top-ranked team. Teams can pick whoever they want as their alliance partner, and if #1 picks #3 and #3 accepts, then #4 will move to the #3 captain spot and #5 moves to the #4 spot. So, having the top teams not pick us? Yeah, okay, I’m alright with that. Having the other teams not pick each other? Was not expecting that one. Hey look, I didn’t ramble on for 10 minutes about that. Yay! Anyway, even with the technical/mechanical difficulties, I feel like we improved compared to last year, and I have a good feeling about next spring with the FRC season.

Envirothon and Science Olympiad… hmm… well, I know I already talked about Envirothon clenching first place at regionals, and neither team have competed since then. I am trying to get sweatshirts for Envirothon with a little caricature drawing of all of the team members (including me with the Biltmore stick).

Of course, this semester goes have the added element of grad school, too. I’m still figuring out the best to balance everything, but fortunately, things have been pretty good. In fact, I now I have my first official final grade with grad school…. 1000 pts/600 pts possible in Practicum! I am living large with 166.67% and this is not a typo. Basically, since the Education department has different “artifacts” with the certification process, there are things that had to get counted twice in the gradebook in order for them to show up in the right places. I’m not sure if I put this in an earlier entry, but I ended up observing 24 hours at Maryville High School and then 6 hours at Village Care (an elderly care facility in town) and both were good experiences. I plan to continue volunteering at Village Care in the spring, since it was a good experience, it lets me give back to the community in some way, and I can tell that they appreciate the help. The Teaching Reading in the Content Area class is pretty good as well, although that one does have a final, which is on Tuesday. Some good things about the class: I gave a booktalk about Flatland on Wednesday, which I feel went pretty well, especially our presentations were supposed to be between 5 and 10 minutes and mine was right around 7’ 20”; I did enjoy being able to pick different self-selected projects for 50 points, and all of those were pretty fun (including writing the biopoem about myself); I can already prepare 16 points of the final (90 pts total) and bring them with me on Tuesday. There was a hiccup in registering for classes in the spring (they didn’t have my MMR immunization files on record), but I hope to get registered for classes before I leave for break.

I’m trying to think if there is anything else I want to blog about… I was off yesterday and ended up going to see the new Muppets movie on a whim. In case you’re wondering, yes, I probably was the oldest person there that didn’t have kids/ the only person who went alone, but you know what, I don’t care. I thought it was a really good movie and I feel like a lot of things were included for the fans of the original Henson movies and the Muppet Show. The Muppet Show was a little bit before my time, but many of the Muppet movies are firmly planted in my childhood, so seeing some old sights and hearing the references did add something that I know wasn’t in there for the little kids’ sakes (like seeing the old car dealership from the original movie when Sweetums starts his epic run across the country chasing after Kermit and Fozzie and then hearing “not again!”). Of course, it wouldn’t be a Muppet movie without random stars popping into the scene and general pop culture references (the most memorable one as I sit here is “say hello to my little friend”… spoken with a Norwegian accent, of course). Wow, I just made a decent-sized paragraph about the Muppets…

OH! I might as well say that I am definitely looking forward to winter break. I’m sticking around Maryville for the weekend after everyone leaves because…. I’m going to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra on Sunday and I’m so excited!!! *Ahem* Yeah, definitely looking forward to it. I hope the weather is good next weekend since I will need to drive to Kansas City for the concert and then I will be going up north the next day. Aside from the normal “go to the farm for Christmas Day” plans with family, I don’t have anything too exciting (or new) planned out yet for there. I will be spending New Year’s with college friends like usual, but this year we are renting a cabin up in the Two Harbors area, which I am looking forward (not to mention that my bestie is finally able to make it work to spend New Year’s with our group rather than staying in Indiana/Ohio).

Hmm…. I’m typing this on a Word document and I’m about to go onto three pages… this seems like a good place to stop. I’ll try to update more often, but it probably won’t happen until all the students have gone home for the holidays and it’s officially winter break. So… until then, stay warm and have a great weekend!