School's out for summer (for two weeks)

Blogging’s been light lately because of the push to finish spring semester courses. I did so today, turning in my last batch of semester grades. So maybe now I can get back into a regular swing of posting. 

My main role this summer will be that of the stay-at-home dad. Our two girls normally attend preschool and daycare during the week, our 4-year old full-time and our 2-year old part time. This summer, the 4-year old will be going just three days a week and the 2-year old just one day a week. I will have one day a week to myself (see below), but the other four weekdays will be spent either one-on-one with my 2-year old or two-on-one with both of them. It’s a role that I am greatly looking forward to playing. 

I will be “Mr. Mom” during the day, and then I will be teaching not one but two classes in the evenings. I signed up to teach our 8-week summer calculus course on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays from 5:30-7:30; and I am directing an independent study for one of our seniors, the meetings for which will be on Wednesdays 5:30-6:30. (We’ll be working through selections from Edward Bender’s Mathematical Methods in Artificial Intelligence.) 

The girls will remain in their current preschool/daycare schedule until the start of summer classes, so I do get a couple of weeks for my own “vacation” in the interim… which will be spent writing up a paper for the ICTCM proceedings and finishing up a book review for the MAA which I should have submitted back in March. I will also need to work on adapting my 14-week calculus course to an 8-week format, which is harder than it sounds. 

Between potty-training by day and derivative-training by night, I don’t expect to have tons of free time to spend on projects like I did last summer, when the girls went full-time five days a week to daycare while I whiled my days away as a gentleman of leisure read and studied for the Reconnect 2007 workshop. Actually, it was about three weeks into that summer break that I decided I would much rather have the girls at home with me than sit around surfing the internet and pretending to learn about machine learning. The bulk of the “projects” that I have for summer involve reading, and you’ll hear more about what I am working through as it happens. (Don’t want to be too ambitious at this point and lay out a reading list.)  

For the moment, though, it’s nice not to have the pressure of prepping for the next day’s classes and keeping up with the grading stream.