Mabel is going through a growth spurt and needs lots of night time care. This has left us all a bit zombie-ified this week. Usually, I get up before the whole family. I go downstairs, make a coffee, write a bit, and get everyone’s lunch ready. Not this week.
Rioux, Jo-Anne. The Golden Twine. First edition, First Second, 2022.
Rioux, Jo-Anne. The Mole King’s Lair First edition, First Second, 2022.
Rioux, Jo-Anne. Suri’s Dragon First edition, First Second, 2022.
The author is a great storyteller and a great illustrator. One thing that I especially liked about the series was the “uncanny folk tale” vibe of it. Folk talks often have a strange sort of dream logic. There is a cat that talks. Or one need to spin hay in to straw. Rioux is able to create original folk tale weirdness and it really adds to the story.
The series is quite short and direct. It isn’t a whole world, with a deep lore in the text, but one feels like they’re getting a real peek in to a bigger world.
My Calculus 1 for Life Sciences students wrote the their second midterm this week. Setting up the rooms was a big organizational challenge as we had the students sit in alphabetical order. As described last week, this setup logistically difficult given the way that Crowdmark works.
More importantly, though, the students were quite upset with the midterm. I got roasted on Reddit. And the students are right. The test was quite hard.
The second test to the exam is always a hard slog, especially in the fall. The students will come out of it alright though. I’m trying to send them good vibes. My response is below.
This week, we wrote our second term test, and the reaction from many students has been that it was considerably more difficult than expected. Several students have expressed concerns about the fairness of the test and have asked how they can better prepare for the final exam. In particular, many reported that the Reading Guide did not provide sufficient preparation. We will release solutions, with connections to the Reading Guide, sometime next week.
I want to emphasize that regular attendance, participation, and engagement with the course material are important parts of doing well in this course. Today, only 49 students attended lecture out of a class of approximately 200, and our TAs report that office hours are very lightly attended, with fewer than one student attending on average. These are missed opportunities to ask questions, work through difficult ideas, and develop a stronger understanding of the material.
As we approach the final exam, we will share additional guidance and resources to help you prepare. Our current unit, on antiderivatives and integration, is generally considered the most challenging part of the course, so it is particularly important to keep up with the material and seek help when you need it.
Before releasing the Term Test 2 grades, Tatiana and I will meet to discuss the results and consider what we can do to improve student performance going forward. We want everyone to succeed. A significant, sustained increase in attendance, participation, and engagement would go a long way toward helping everyone in the course succeed.
Finally, the Make-Up Term Test 2 will be held next week. CMS Instructional Support will reach out to students who signed up to write the make-up with more details early next week.
I’m starting to think about Dewey’s Art as Experience with my colleague Ami Mamolo. We both feel like the algebra and geometry stuff that we did a few years back is “all played out” and it’s time to move on. I have pondered “mathematical experiences” on and off for the last couple years. I want to tease out the differences between, say: sharing a mathematical chestnut with a friend, the conversations students have while studying together, people talking after a seminar, a student learning in a classroom, and a mathematician scribbling in their notebook. These are all certainly experiences around mathematics but what makes them distinct?
For me, at a practical level, I’m interested in how to create informal and enriching experiences especially for small audiences.
I’ve started watching a TV show! I never watch TV or movies. I just read Brandon’s Journal instead. (Hi, Brandon!)
This week, I started watching North of North – a comedy about an inuk community. It focusses on a mother whose life is blowing up. Intense family drama with lots of laugh out loud moments.
I bought some art from Zorga Qaunaq, the actress that plays Millie, a few years back at a powwow. During the first episode, when Millie came in, I said to Meg: “Hey! I think I know her!” We checked the credits and I did know her. Turtle Island can be suprisingly small.
This week, I stumbled on to George Hart’s presentation The Math of Thumb-Twiddling. He has a very short version here. It is delightful; exactly my sort of hands-on math-y thing. String-figure adjacent. I’m immediately going to steal this idea forward and do highschool workshops with it. You can get a bag of elastics at any dollar store. So far, I’ve managed to twiddling two digits but cannot get the knack for twiddling three.
Before I was two years old I had developed an intense involvement with automobiles. The names of car parts made up a very substantial portion of my vocabulary: I was particularly proud of knowing about the parts of the transmission system, the gearbox, and most especially the differential. It was, of course, many years later before I understood how gears work; but once I did, playing with gears became a favorite pastime. I loved rotating circular objects against one another in gearlike motions and, naturally, my first “erector set” project was a crude gear system.
— The Gears of My Childhood by Seymour Papert
Published: Nov 13, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Nov 13, 2026 @ 21:31.
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