What are you doing on a Friday night? I accompanied my REU students¹ to a pool and pizza party hosted at the campus Recreation center outdoor pool. Aside from the two organizers from Honors and Undergraduate Research, I think I was the only faculty member there.

Sad news was shared that an REU student collapsed and died on Wednesday evening. One of my students met him and was surprised by the news. I still remember when I heard that one of my martial arts classmates had passed away suddenly and unexpectedly, the shocky sense of loss, even though I didn’t know him well. Walking around feeling weird about it for a few days. I was away at a conference; I didn’t even get to mourn with my classmates.

After carting my swimsuit and towel around all day, I was going to swim before heading home. I only got through one lap before getting tired. I did five, then I got out to dry off and watch what my “kids” were up to. To my surprise, I got picked for one of their water polo teams. It felt good to be wanted and maybe even a wee bit treasured, since I was “faculty, SCORE!” when my group outed me. How could I resist?

I didn’t know the rules, but I don’t think I was alone in that. I sure don’t throw or catch well, but a game is fun when everyone is a good sport. Mistakes were laughed off, and victories were congratulated. I had fun despite my inadequacies. They were still going strong when I left.

A friend posted from a speech about leadership on Facebook, “Take care of your people, and your people will take care of you.”

I kept thinking back to our Math Movie Night movie from last night, Stand and Deliver, about Jaime Escalante and how he got his students through the AP calculus exam. At one point, discouraged, he talks about getting a job with better pay and more respect. Jaime Escalante’s wife reminds, “But Jaime, those kids love you.”

While you can’t go into teaching wanting to be loved by your students — that will happen or not as the case may be — you have to go into teaching with a lot of love for your students. Every. Single. Day. No matter what else is going on in your life. The students might learn anyhow, even if you don’t care. They’ll learn a hell of a lot more if you do.

Another quote from the speech on leadership, “The 4 KNOWS: Know yourself; know your people; know your job; know your priorities.”

That’s what I’m thinking about tonight.

^{1. Research Experiences for Undergraduates, an NSF funded program to get students (especially women and minorities) primary from 4 year colleges without big research programs involved in research. In reality, a lot of the students involved are from big research institutions and few are minorities! At least more than half of our students are female.↩}

My final portfolio assignment (this semester; fourth revision, fourth time I’ve taught the course) for the mathematical modeling course is to

1. Identify and include an excellent piece of mathematical writing you did this semester; alternatively select a piece of writing that posed a substantial challenge to you this semester. The writing sample should be between one and two pages long (not including figures).
2. Select some Matlab code you feel represents one of your best efforts at
   using Matlab in one of our modeling projects OR select one to three graphs that you feel represent your best efforts at demonstrating the behavior of a mathematical model.
3. Letter to Dr.Jinx: Write a 1000-1500 word (2-3 page) letter to me
   discussing what you learned in this course. You should include thoughts on
   your writing sample and on the code or graph sample you are including in this
   portfolio.
4. Letter to a friend taking the course next semester: Suppose a friend
   of yours is taking this course next semester. What advice would you give your
   friend to insure his/her success with this course? What study habits, writing
   habits, programming habits helped you the most? Make your advice as specific
   as possible, and give examples from your experience this semester. Your letter
   should be at least 400 words long (1 page).

I am giving myself a solid A in final portfolio assignments. I did it right this time. It helps that I managed the class well; I really concentrated on making a good learning environment (and trusting that if I did that, gave meaningful assignments, and sufficient assistance, that learning would occur).

I have loved reading the letters. I’ve teared up a few times. There many excerpts and quotes that I want to share. Note: these are excerpted and lightly edited (spelling, grammar) unless otherwise indicated. I am only taking excerpts that show deep learning in some aspect of the course.

• “I knew what I wanted from the course: to be able to use the programming skills I learned as a computer science major in a mathematical setting. To this end, I cannot say that I was disappointed. But when I reflect on what I learned this semester, programming is not one of the things that comes to mind. … The primary thing I believe I learned from this course is the process of mathematical modeling as a whole. … I was fascinated by the entire process … I learned that, at the heart of it, math modeling had very little to do with specific areas of mathematics or programming; it is about representing the real world with the tools you have.”
• ” … In every other math class I had taken, the answers were solid and concrete. … But in modeling, the process of arriving at the results was more important than the results themselves.”
• “In terms of the actual mathematical model involved, the first project was my favorite. I really liked how the concept of chaos applied to weather. … This project helped me understand why it is actually impossible to predict the weather. As we were working on this project, I wondered if chaos theory could be applied to small scale wind patterns that are extremely important for competitive sailing. I found all of the same sailing strategy articles I have already seen and studied. As a side note, I watched the original Jurassic Park in 3D when it was re-released and was very amused when Dr. Ian Malcolm constantly rambled about chaos theory. When I first watched the movie some years ago I had no idea what he was talking about.”
• “I am most proud of learning to use Matlab during your class. As a freshmen taking Calculus II, I struggled to finish the Matlab exercises and by the end of the class I hated Matlab. I had taken no programming classes before coming to Texas A&M, so I just did not have the programming mindset. After three and a half years of classes, I have done some programming and learned the basic elements of coding. Taking Linear Algebra also helped a lot. When you said that Matlab actually stood for `matrix’ laboratory instead of mathematics laboratory as I had assumed, I immediately understood better why I struggled so much as a freshmen. Through your class I came to enjoy using Matlab and appreciate its usefulness in many applications.”
• “With that said, I would like to talk about what I learned about writing during this semester. While I am an English major and consider myself to be a very good writer, this class did pose a challenge to me. I am so accustomed to
  writing papers over literary works, such as Shakespeare, that I have developed a method for analyzing something and then determining what it is I want to say and how I should say it. However, mathematics is a long way from Shakespeare and I had to reformulate my analytic approach to my writing. I certainly took more time to understand what was going on in any given situation and took a much longer time in developing my thoughts before ever putting them down on paper. This class helped me develop this different approach and I feel that I am a much better writer than I was before. Discussing mathematics is not a very simple task and I feel that this class has better prepared me to do so in the future.”
• “In my final project, it was gratifying to be able to take what I had learned so far and use it to understand an entirely new and much more complicated mathematical model than I had ever worked with before. I was excited to be able to read and understand a fairily dense scientific paper and make connections with many of the topics and models we had discussed throughout the earlier part of the semester. Wrestling with understanding the bifurcation diagram in the Kirschner and Panetta [1998] paper was also a great learning experience. It forced me to more carefully scrutinize the authors’ explanations of the model and graphs they produced, which in turn really helped me with deciding what needed to go into my report. The understanding I gained through this process is reflected in the writing sample I chose to include in this portfolio.”
• “The final project is where everything got interesting. The idea of providing the prices of a set of stocks as input and getting back an optimal portfolio seemed really attractive compared to the rest of the projects. While programming the Efficient Portfolio Frontier on Matlab, I started getting frustrated by the constraints of only having five different companies and the need of typing each price if I wanted another one. I decided to automate the process and use Python since I am familiar with it. … Other than math modeling, this course taught me valuable lessons. One was that I don’t need to be an expert on a topic to do good work on a topic; you only need dedication and perseverance. I really enjoyed working on the EPF. I even worked on it for two extra-curricular events: a one-night Hackathon and I presented it on 3 Day Startup as a business idea. It was really interesting to hear people’s suggestions, there were even some that approached me saying that I should keep working on it.” (Note from Dr. Jinx: Holy crap! I am impressed.)

That is nowhere close to all of them, although it is some of the best of them.

Look at all the deep learning expressed here. I got to help with that. I love my job!

I wrote earlier about my plan for the final presentations. I handed small pieces of scratch paper out to my students, and I tasked them with writing down the things the presenter did well, and any questions they had. I was already pleased with the results.

How could I not be pleased when they had questions to ask at the end of presentations? They had plenty of nice things to say to the presenters. It was easy to get the conversation started.

This is what one student wrote in his a final portfolio letter to me about what he learned in the class:

My favorite moment from the semester came after my Final Project presentation. … After my presentation, I was really down on myself. I got very nervous while presenting, missed points that I wanted to make, failed to answer questions that I knew the answer to, and on top of this I had gotten very little sleep the night before. When I got back to my seat, the little slips of paper were sitting there. Reading them absolutely turned my day around. While I cannot pinpoint an exact lesson I learned here, I can tell you that I really appreciate all of the effort you took to make this class a positive and enjoyable environment for everyone. I learned that a professor that really cares about creating a welcoming environment can make all the difference.

Am I ever glad I ran that experiment.

The beginning of finals week is always a period of great unhappiness and stress.

Students look at their grades, seemingly for the first time, and ask instructors to magically save them from the consequences of prior inaction.

Instructors are trying to juggle getting exams prepared with answering last minute questions from students.

Instructors pay for every little delay they’ve made in preparing their grade book.

Departmental administration and college-level administration have to deal with the onslaught of complaints from students about their unfair instructors who are not magically saving them from the consequences of prior inaction. Scheduling stress too, as projections for the fall entering class come in. Sometimes that stress trickles down in, say, my direction.

Not that I should complain too much. I am relatively well-off this end-of-the-semester. I don’t give a final. My students hand in a final portfolio, so yes, I will have some writing to grade, but the portfolio description has been prepared since the beginning of the semester; I didn’t have to write that this week. It isn’t like my students need a lot of help in preparing a final portfolio. I only had four visitors today, and I answered questions on our discussion board.

Mostly for the past two days, I’ve been working on things for our REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) program which starts on June 1, and catching up with some students and colleagues that I haven’t had time for in a while.

Tomorrow during my “final exam” I will finish out the class’s project presentations. We will have pizza, since the exam period is from 12:30 to 2:30 pm, which will be paid by the bursary I earned by doing the first-year seminar class in the fall. Some presentations will be good. Some presentations will be slightly less awesome. The pizza should be delicious.

I hope a few instructor-friends will show up for some pizza and to watch a few presentations. I am looking forward to the end of this semester. My classes were good; my careful attention on keeping it positive made a difference. Aside from that, it was a very difficult semester.