I am in the last weekend of my Spring Break, although the weather reports for Monday make the possibility of significant snow possible, perhaps even likely. While I would not mind an extended vacation since we have 4 unused snow days at school, there are only 8 weeks until the AP Statistics test, and my class is nowhere near prepared for it yet. So more days off are a double-edged sword at this point.

I only have a few more hours of schoolwork left to do, so these last two mornings of vacation I plan to do some fiction writing, probably start drafting a story in my “future mall” series. I do not want to revise the novelette I drafted last summer, since that will take a concentrated period of time to do right, which can only be during a long vacation, such as the summer. But first-drafting a story can be done in smaller doses, so I am going to try working on that. I’m a bit excited about this, since writing fiction is something I rarely, if ever, do during the school year.

I am also reading a wonderful book this past few days, called The Etched City, by K.J. Bishop. It is the type of wondrous, absorbing book that I only find every few years (the last one was China Mieville’s great Perdito Street Station). As soon as I finish reading it this weekend, I plan to post a review of it on my other blog.

My former student and friend Sneha is a college student who take a paperback novel with her everywhere she goes. When she has down time between classes, she reads. When she is hanging out with her friends doing nothing in particular, she reads. When a professor’s lecture drags into terminal boredom, she reads (presumably in the back of a lecture hall where she cannot be seen ☺). When she is sitting at a red light, out comes the book!

I mention this because Sneha reminds me a lot of myself. My entire life I have rarely been without a book. Whenever I am the passenger in a car, I read. When I am waiting for a meeting to begin, I read. I read at sporting events and waiting for a movie or a high school graduation to begin. I attended dozens of high school sporting events when Andy and Mark participated, and I was never without a book (although, admittedly, I spent as much time grading tests at those events as I did reading).

I attended science fiction worldcons regularly in the 1970s, and although I tried talking with the other attendees, I was a total failure at socializing with strangers, even when they shared the same love of science fiction that I did. So when my frustration level threatened to boil over in despair, I retreated into my books.

My reading differs from Sneha’s only in particulars. She prefers historical romance; I prefer science fiction. But we both have the same passion for characters in exotic settings, worlds which differ from our own, and a joy at flying away at least temporarily from the world in which we live. I cannot imagine living without books, and it is good to have a few close friends who feel the same way I do.

Nor is it surprising Sneha and I became friends, considering how our passion for books is only one of several similarities we share. Now if we can just get our heads out of those darned books once in awhile we would actually have a chance to chat a bit. (j/k).

Today is the start of a nine-day Winter Break, which I sorely need! School has been both busy and stressful lately, so being able to get enough sleep and work at my own pace is very desirable indeed.

My chores for the break include a combination of school work and personal work: grade three tests; do the first AP review test I assigned my AP Stat class; prepare the next Statistics chapter; prepare my taxes; finish writing and editing Halycon Days; collate VoP; cook tomato gravy and granola; begin writing an outline for Fei Fei’s Tibet book;

I also hope to do some reading, primarily SF: Best of 2004, and Nehru’s Discovering India. I have decided that the two Indian classics I want to read are The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. Interestingly, I was looking for a detailed history of India last night at Barnes & Noble, but there were a lot fewer Indian books there than Chinese books, which was surprising. But I’m in no rush, having an entire lifetime to study both countries.

This is course-selection week at school, so all the students are selecting courses for next year and getting signatures of recommendation from their teachers. Students who disagree with their teachers’ recommendation must “waive” into a course, which requires a conference between the teacher and the student’s parent, as well as a conference between the parent and the lead teacher (which, in the case of mathematics, is me).

My honors students are very motivated, so many of them are signing up for more than one math or science course. I have drawn the line at recommending anybody for more than three combined honors/AP math/science courses, because the workload in those courses is so intense that, combined with their honors/AP English, history, and language as well, almost guarantees a year of struggles for the student. Occasionally I make an exception, of course, but it is the rare student who is able to handle 7 honors/AP courses, including 4 math/science, at a time. I would rather they take 3 math/science and something less intense in addition.

As soon as the students’ selections are handed in to guidance, they will determine how many sections of each subject will run next year, and I can begin to consider what I wish to teach. I definitely overburdened myself this year teaching 5 different preparations, including a new advanced placement course, and I hope to cut back at least to 4 next year, hopefully 3. Wouldn’t that be almost heavenly?

Sorry, but I have been too busy this past week to have time to blog. I was late getting home Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights, and what little time I had available was spent grading tests and working on statistics. Fortunately, I only have one more week of school before Winter Break, which I hope to spend working on personal writing a lot!

For book lovers: Although I mostly read fiction, I do enjoy some nonfiction, primarily history and travel. So when I received a flyer to join the Discovery Channel Book Club a few weeks ago, I went to their website and checked out their offerings. They had a lot of history and travel books, so I decided to join, and this past week I received four exciting books in the mail:

Pompeii, historical fiction by Robert Harris about you-know-where during the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

In Search of Robinson Crusoe, by Tim Severin, a renowned explorer who follows the voyages of famous historical characters. While this would not have been my first choice of his books, it is the only one offered by DCBC, so I thought it worth trying.

Frontiers of Heaven and In The Empire of Genghis Khan, two award-winning travel books by Stanley Stewart, both of which explore portions of Central Asia and China.

Since I am still reading Nehru’s Discovering India, these books will have to wait awhile before I enter their worlds though.

For music lovers: I have recently bought albums by three of my very favorite rock artists ever: Chris de Burgh’s The Road to Freedom, Steve Forbert’s Just Like There’s Nothin’ To It, and the Strawbs’ Deja Fou. Good stuff all

some random thoughts:

Last night was an Asian-American Club dance. It was sparsely-attended because of a competing dance a few towns away, but since i spent the entire night chatting with Sneha, and getting to know Akanksha better, I had a very enjoyable evening.

Tonight Jean and I are going with two of my brothers to see Seton Hall play undefeated Boston College in basketball. That is probably the extent of my sports watching this weekend, since I have no intention of wasting endless hours watching the Super-Bowl complete with commercials and halftime show. Let Paul McCartney play naked, for all I care!

I’m currently reading Nehru’s book The Discovery of India. I go through phases when I want to learn about different aspects of world history and culture. Most of the latter 90s I studied China, highlighted by the Nanking Conference and book I co-edited with Fei Fei. The past few years I have read about Italy. Recently, as I have gotten closer to my Indian students, I have developed an urge to learn more about their background, so I have started reading this book, which was a gift from Sudarshan several years ago. I am considering following it up by reading a classic Indian novel, similar to how I read the three classic Chinese novels Journey to the West, Outlaws of the Marsh, and Dream of the Red Chamber. I will have to start researching that. Any suggestions would be welcome.

I enjoy learning new things, both through “passive” learning and “active” learning. For me, passive learning is much easier, since it generally consists of reading books about some topic. In the past decade I have learned a lot about China, both history and culture, and lesser amounts about world history in general. My active learning has consisted of learning to play guitar, learning to speak Chinese on about a one-year old level, and a bit of drawing.

But I have not really learned any new mathematics in the decades since I earned my Masters’ Degree in math. So last Spring when my supervisor asked me if I would teach Advanced Placement Statistics this year, one of the incentives to doing it was a chance to learn some new area of math in which I had absolutely no experience and no prior knowledge. All my collegiate math courses were “pure” mathematics, as opposed to “applied” math, which includes Statistics.

I must confess here that I have a lot of pride concerning my ability to learn. When I was in college, it was easy for me to pick up new topics and ideas rather easily. All the years that I have been teaching math, I have had that vast storehouse of mathematical knowledge at my disposal, knowledge which, on a high school level, made me feel almost invincible in my classroom. What student could ask me an Algebra question, or even a Calculus question, without my being able to answer it immediately? Stump me while teaching? Highly unlikely. Oh, sure, I made mistakes occasionally; who wouldn’t when you are on show 5 periods per day, 44 minutes each period, 180 days per year? None of those inevitable mistakes ever affected my confidence in the classroom one bit.

So guess what happened in A.P. Statistics this year? I studied the course material over the summer, and assumed I would remember it all this entire year. Did not happen. I went into the classroom assuming I understood every topic, every definition, every example thoroughly, and could teach them without the last bit of difficulty. Did not happen. I made more mistakes than I ever made in my career. I fumbled at times. I could not answer questions at times. I discovered that items I assumed I had understood when I prepared them were actually more difficult than I had realized.

Today I reached the nadir as I was explaining homework, and three of my brightest–and most polite students, thank heavens–engaged in a discussion with me on one of the topics we were learning, and I did not know which of us was correct in our explanation! I think my confidence in myself as a math teacher sunk to an all-time low!

But I was not ready to throw in the towel just yet. I came home tonight and, as I have been doing most nights, spent an hour doing Statistics. But this time I did not just prepare the next lesson, or do homework problems that I had assigned to the class. Instead I went through the entire recent chapter anew, taking the time to think about all the items in it, making sure I understood not just the “what” of them, but the “why” also. And about halfway through the chapter, I had a revelation. A topic which had made no intuitive sense to me previously suddenly was crystal clear to me. I understood why it was done, and I even agreed with the theory behind it.

So perhaps I am not quite over the hill yet. Perhaps I just need to work a little harder at learning Statistics, being less the “passive” learner reading the book and trusting the author, and more the “active” learner that I encourage my students to be. And maybe, just maybe, I can stop making mistakes and actually regain some of my students’ respect which I have lost in AP Statistics his year.