Megan got a job! Woo-hoo! She’s now a teacher1 with the TDSB. This is the end of a long and difficult courting process with her school. We’ve been talking about this for years, literally, and I’m glad it finally landed. She’s got her “foot in the door” to the system, and will remain at her school for the foreseeable future. I got her some Harry Potter swag to celebrate, and we’re headed to Quaker House over the Family Day long weekend.
I went to a parent-teacher interview at Mira’s school. We talked about how Mira’s progressing in reading and writing. I’m grateful that the schools been teaching her so much about reading and writing. Recently, Mira came down from her bunk with “WUOTR HAS MEMRE” written on her tablet. Our big treat was to go to the book fair after and pick up a book.
Not a lot of reading this week.
The mathemagical shenanigans below led to writing up this note on growing linearly independent sets. Other than this sudden project, I have been editing my student’s write-up of our string figures paper for Bridges.
My colleague, Eric Hart, and I got very excited about a SET deck version of the classic Fitch Cheney five-card trick. We’ve been gabbing for a couple weeks about possible SET deck card tricks and I think we might have something worth sharing soon. The piece would be similar to this article that I wrote years ago:
Glynn-Adey, P. & Li, Z. (2021). In tetracycles: a SET deck magic trick. Math Horizons, 28(4), 16–18. DOI
My students in the Magic of Numbers course had their first midterm on Monday. We had about a hundred and fourty people write it. The test was twenty-five multiple choice questions. I am consistently blown away by the efficiency of multiple choice grading.
This time, I actually set a timer on my watch to see how long it took. The entire proces of scanning the papers, uploading them, matching a handful of students to the papers, fixing un-scannable multiple choice responses, grading the papers and returning the grades to students took six minutes and thirty-two seconds. And that includes walking back to my office and putting on some Mulatu Astatke! By way of contrast, a typical first year test “grading party” would take six people eight hours to grade. That is 48 human hours versus six minutes.
I think that I want to convert all my tests, in calculation-heavy courses, to multiple choice and re-allocate the TA grading hours to in-class participation and active learning. The students and TAs would benefit hugely.
Terms and conditions apply. She’s got a 0.5-time contract. ↩︎
Published: Feb 14, 2026 @ 00:01.
Last Modified: Feb 16, 2026 @ 09:12.
Home / Now / Blog / Notes / Reading / Office Camera / Tags / Bookmarks / RSS Feeds / Top of Page
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about the content, please let me know. Anyone can contact me by email.