I came out to some women faculty colleagues and told them about this blog. Sometimes sharing part of yourself is scary. I keep remembering the TED talk by Brene Brown on The Power of Vulnerability, and I am resolved to embrace it. If you are new here, welcome!

If you haven’t seen Brene Brown’s talk, click on the link above and spend the 20 minutes. Well worth it. If you’ve seen that one, then maybe you haven’t seen Kathryn Schulz On Being Wrong. Totally worth 18 minutes. I should watch those videos weekly.
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Wrapping up from earlier:

The student who complained about me met with me and my supervisor. The good news is that my supervisor got a first-hand look at the problems this person brings to the table. I think she was at least as frustrated as I was by the end of the meeting. The bad news is that there seems like very little way for me or anyone to help this student succeed. It became obvious that the student had no grasp on what was required for the assignments for my class or to succeed in my class. I took the student down to the dean’s office to see if the dean can let the student drop my class. (The student is, unsurprisingly, out of drops.)

We made our selections for the REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) program today. I will send acceptance letters out to the students on Wednesday. The amount of REU email I’m receiving has reduced to a trickle of tardy letters of recommendation. For now. We’ll see what happens when the student letters go out. I am still feeling wiped out on this project, but at least there’s some light in the tunnel.

Project 2 (on population) is due in Mathematical Modeling this week. The students all noticed that in the USA, the data point for 1940 is skewed low, under the fitted curves. Some didn’t realize that WW2 didn’t start in the USA until Pearl Harbor in 1941. WW2 is not the cause of that lower value; the Great Depression and Dust Bowl are more likely causes.

Not a one noticed that in the early years of the USA, slaves were not counted fully in our census totals. There was the 3/5ths compromise. I told them they needed to look that up! And who knows what else I don’t know about US history that is important in analyzing census data?