Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Score one for edtech

Today was finals day. Two classes had their finals due this afternoon. These were done remotely and submitted online. To celebrate we, of course, went for a bike ride. It was a fast 20-miler, and then I got right back to it. I started the day knowing I had 144 papers to read, and knowing that 48 of those were going to come in today.

And for that hour, just a bit more than an hour, my empty mind drifted over to the questions I’d asked on the two finals. One class had four simple questions. Two hypotheticals I was asking the students to work through, and then two questions that were a tiny bit subjective. In the other class I had the students watch a program and answer a bunch of questions about it. You can run through all of those questions quite a few times while you’re not thinking about anything else.

I hope I caught all of my typos. I hope the students did well. I hope it was all clever enough to let them show what they’ve learned, how they’re thinking, what they’ve possibly gained from their time in my class.

Not too long after we got in, Canvas, the platform the university uses for online classwork, crashed and died.

One class had finished their allotted final window. The other was mid-final. About four people hadn’t submitted their final yet. Well.

Also, my online students have their submissions due on Monday. Who knows how long Canvas will be down? And some of those students manage very regimented schedules. Well.

There was nothing more from the university than that. During finals. Well.

(Update: It came back overnight, in fact, not too long after I shared my contingency plans with all of those students with work still outstanding. Problem solved. Can kicked down the road. Everything is now due next Tuesday.)

But I can start grading that one final right now. (Mini-update: They’re doing well.)

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?

That is the view at Ballymastocker Strand.

Ireland / memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
06
May 26

Choosing is a matter of impulse

I found a new road while I was racing the last little bit of sunlight this evening. It was somewhere just after I pedaled my way past this field. I turned right on a road I’ve been on maybe three times, but it didn’t look familiar. Knowing it was already after 7 p.m., it didn’t seem like the right time to get lost. I’d left my headlight on the kitchen counter after all.

So I turned around, got back to where the two roads diverged, and instead of going right, which was correct, I went left, which was new to me. Also, it was a bit shorter, which probably worked out well. This is how much light I had two miles from home.

That’s fine, but there’s a little you have to go down, and immediately come back up the side, all of which is under a thick canopy. And the road is usually dodgy with gravel and grit. This you don’t want to ride in almost dark. It may as well be a guess. Today it was that guess, I guess, that narrowly avoided longer route, but for that turnaround, that kept me out of the dark.

The road less traveled was less interesting than the one I wanted, but it got me where I needed to go, and a few minutes and miles faster.

So that worked out.

This tidy, secluded, little spot is Malainn Bhig.

Ireland / memories / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
05
May 26

Counting up

Soon.

Or later. When it warms up and everything is working as it should.

This is Sliabh Liag, one of those places you’d go back to again and again.

cycling / Ireland / memories / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
04
May 26

Out here playing games

As a child, I got a bunch of these peg board games from my grandparents. They came as a set, but I guess they didn’t come with a way to store them, because I’ve always kept them in a cardboard King Edwards Imperial Tobacco box that my grandfather gave me. (Fitting them all into one box became a game itself.)

They’ve been sitting in a filing cabinet for a while, and I dug them out this weekend while looking for some class paperwork. (My filing system is a game of another sort.)

It seemed like a good time to not stare at a screen, so I pulled the games out and tried to figure out how they all worked. Most of them were a mystery to me, as a kid. Not that they’re overly complex, but I guess they were just beyond my patience at the time. There’s one game I knew well, because I’d been to a Cracker Barrel. I played a few rounds of that, trying to remember the pattern I devised to win. (I’d devised a pattern, which is a thing I would do, of course, but it’s been decades.)

All of which is to say, I’m telling myself it takes real talent to do this.

The good news is the other games now make sense. I need to play around with them a bit more to see which is the most entertaining.

Anyway, 144 more papers to read and grade. Two finals are due on Thursday. The rest come in next Monday. Suddenly peg board games seem like fun, don’t they?

In September of 2024 I devised a 25-mile time trial. It is a big circle with nine turns. Critically, eight of them are right turns. It involves going down the hill and back up past the haunted house, into town, by the park, through the sheep pastures, and then taking that left turn. Then you go a mile, turn onto a busy state highway, go 2.3 more miles and turn right, to get back into the countryside. Then you eventually get to the downhill that is always in the headwind, which makes the downhill feel like an uphill. You go by the crazy house and then into the woods, until the road ends. You turn right again onto another highway, one which you can absolutely fly on for four miles, before turning into another small town.

You go through three towns on this route. You pass many more warehouses. And I need to rename this. It’s not really a time trial if you’re just getting slower on the thing.

I am getting slower on the thing. Twice I’ve done it so far this year, and these are the slowest times in the series.

Much of that is about me, of course. But I can blame the weather, too. Today I had headwinds from three different directions!

If you’d like to go there, ask around for directions to Tulan Strand.

adventures / Friday / photo / Rowan / scholarship / things to read — Comments Off
01
May 26

Rounding spring’s corner

We went back to campus today. The student athletes were doing a fund raiser. They were taking shifts, sitting in chairs, wearing plastic ponchos. Pretty soon they were wearing whipped cream pies.

That’s an All-American. She’s been in both of our classes. She’s a lovely human being and, somehow, that meant she got more pies to the face than any of her peers did during her half-hour shift. I don’t know how much money you raise doing a bit like that, but it was a lovely spring day and they’d set this up in a quiet little corner of campus and people came by in dribs and drabs for an hour or so. The overhead seemed to be a few ponchos, a couple of cans of whipped cream and some paper plates.

Nearby, there’s this piece of public art.

It’s titled Knowledge is Power.

Knowledge is Power is inspired by a quote by Francis Bacon. In creating a visual representation of the verbal statement, Artist Zenos Frudakis thought a book would make an appropriate metaphor, as it has been the traditional form of preserving and transmitting knowledge through the ages.

Always interested in philosophy and the love of wisdom, Mr. Frudakis wanted this sculpture to embody those who are good examples of having powerful ideas. As a compositional element, he has faces and quotes organized around two central figures he considers two giants of thought. On the left page is Charles Darwin, and those around him are of an earlier period. On the right page is Albert Einstein, surrounded by more contemporary figures.

There’s a lot of art around campus, it turns out. I need to see more of it. Maybe something will rub off.

We had lunch at Chick-fil-A. For the first time in a good while, it seemed, we had lunch together and didn’t have to rush off somewhere. It was pleasant, it felt a bit like unwinding.

Something I wrote:

I’ve been developing and teaching a class we call Criticism in Sports Media for the last two semesters. Students are learning to consume and interpret media critically, place it within broader contexts, and examine the structure and meaning of the material. This, I say, gives one an appreciation of sport media’s role in contemporary life, because sports reflect the values of a culture.

It’s a good course, and helpful. Students know there’s a lot going on, and they’re trying to understand the media landscape that surrounds and inundates us all. They are coming to understand that there are some things they don’t understand, and they’d like to try to make some sense of it.

The class spends a lot of time on the printed word and on documentaries, and we discuss social media and, lately, AI content.

Now, at the end of the term, I wanted to leave them with a lasting impression about recognizing and addressing AI.

I’ve got a few more things I want to write soon. But, first, back to the grading. Just 144 papers and exams to go!

That video is from Mullaghmore Head, where we both fell down, separately and hilariously. You’ll just have to read about it.