Update with windy beaches, potential housing, and math

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville. This was the week before fall break, and I resubmitted a paper as well as giving and then grading an exam, so my brain is kind of full of math. I have been head-down, plowing forward, mostly ignoring everything else.

Fortunately, everything else has not been ignoring me, so I've gotten a couple of nice updates from others. One set of these came from Inkling, who took a knitting trip to the beach.

Inkling:  "This is not good beach weather (but the wind is very exciting)"

This is the kind of knitting trip where you gather for a reunion with friends who went to Ireland together years before, and where one of the women who comes along just happens to make hats for everybody there. It was that kind of trip, and Inkling had a wonderful time. She also had a spare key at my house, which used to get back into her own house when she returned safely at the end of that trip.

Seven heads are better than one, 
especially when you're a knitter at a windy beach.

In spite of all of Inkling's jollifications, Nelson wins this week's award for the cheeriest set of updates, and Sizzling naturally earns the Assist.  He tells me he's getting close to identifying the group home where he'll get to live, probably with 2-3 other guys with his kind of disabilities.  It'll be 30-60 days before he gets that housing, and along with that, he will also get a long-term social worker.  That's housing:  in the transportation arena, he's had successful adventures in riding the bus and making transfers for the first time.  And even more exciting . . . he and Sizzling might possibly have found a way to contact his birth mom.  He's super, super jazzed about that, as well he should be.  I'm crossing fingers that will work out.

Gosling is in town, visiting and she's met up with my guy, and she's coming over for waffles tomorrow.  I'm quite excited about seeing her again and hearing about life in general.  Ofsnough is doing his usual bopping from here to his protests and volunteer gigs, and this weekend he added a 50th high school reunion into the mix, for good measure.

As for me, I said I resubmitted a paper this week, and that was fun.  A good half-of-day went into creating this figure, which kind of delights me.

I have also been trying hard not to spend too much time on this diagram below, related to a completely different project, because every time I start playing with it I get absorbed and then all of a sudden the sun has set and the shopkeepers are rolling the awnings down and I still have a pile of memos begging to be written.

This is a non-concurrent force-to-funicular correlation,
in case you were wondering.  I suspect there are errors
in the diagram because the cross-ratio is off.

And then, also, this week was our first calculus midterm.  I've spent much of the semester so far sharing stories about resilience: telling stories of mathematicians I know who nearly dropped out and then who went on to do amazing things.  But then I gave the midterm and had something like 10% of my class just fail it, and in some back corner of my brain I'm kind of thinking that maybe my students ought to go be resilient in some other person's class, perhaps?  On the one hand, I really am trying to teach the students I have -- not the students I want; on the other hand, when we sit down in office hours, some of them laboriously compute 3*21, and eventually get 53; we try adding 1/2 + 1, and they can't understand why I turn the "1" into a "2/2".  It's hard to get from there to the place where they can multiply by the conjugate or take derivatives of complicated functions.  Sigh.

Having said that, I gave the exam.  I graded it.  I wrote to the students who did poorly with a heads-up email ("you didn't do as well as either you or I would like"), and I've set up appointment slots for them to come see me after fall break.  Some of the students will undoubtedly rally and figure out how to rise like a phoenix, and other students will undoubtedly decide that calculus is a hill they'll climb some other semester.  

And me, I'm going to write memos, and also get on a plane to go talk about math somewhere else, and then I'll come back and teach (most of) my students the product and quotient rules for derivatives.  And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.