Friday, March 13, 2009
Random Musings
It’s Friday. It’s sunny. I’m happy. Also I got a haircut. I don’t look like a shaggy mess anymore, well less like one. I need to trim my beard some to actually look respectable.
The term is almost over. I’m done with exams and just a couple projects to wrap up. So I have time now to actually do some research, which I’m looking forward too. Even if it is sunny and all my work involves coding and being on a compuer. Maybe I’ll strap a chair to my bike and take my laptop somewhere in the park with the dogs for much of next week and work there. With the glossy screen I can actually see it outdoors, and with a haircut, I’ll be able to keep it out of my eyes in the wind.
In other news, I have this odd and annoying bug with the Land Cruiser carputer (Telcy as in T-L-C as in Toyota Land Cruiser). I can switch to RouteBuddy from my FrontEnd, but I can’t switch back. It’s particularly annoying because I can’t reproduce it on my laptop. I haven’t installed the developer tools onto Telcy so I don’t have a debugger I can use to find out why this error is happening. It’s quite frustrating though. It means I can control the music as long as I don’t look at the GPS, otherwise I’m stuck in GPS mode until I can stop the car and quit the GPS program. Ah well, a project for the weekend.
Whitney’s suitemates are coming to town for Spring Break (in two weeks), and we are trying to have people over for dinner next Friday. Social contact, it should be great! (Also read, I need to get a life outside of my office and my house). I’ve made a couple overtures in that regard. I’m hoping I get do some work with Aaron of Revolution Robotics. I want to know more before I commit, but from what I do know, I think I could be helpful and I would enjoy it. We’ll see.
In a surprise turn of events, I heard from Morjana recently. She and I went to high school together, and I never thought she would choose to contact me. It’s good to hear from her, I hope we can stay in touch for a while. I’ve always wondered what direction her life went. Online connections can often be fleeting, time will tell, as it always does.
Well, I have a seminar in an hour, and not much that needs to get done pressingly, so I’m going to wander around for a little bit. Meet some people that need meeting, cover the little details of various things and just kill time.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
My 1st Lecture
Hurst, the professor I am the TA for, was out of town this yesterday so he asked me to fill in and lecture for him. I’ve been teaching an optional homework help session since I got to OSU, but this was the first lecture I’ve had to give. It went surprisingly well. I thought so anyway. I’m going to try to ask my recitation students how they thought it went when I see them next week. I couldn’t tell what my speed was like. Whitney said I probably didn’t have quite enough material to cover the time. When I got there I felt like I was rushing it though and still didn’t quite get through everything I wanted to.
I’m the TA for sophomore level dynamics. These are students who are intending to go into one of the engineering programs, but have not yet declared and been accepted to their respective departments. This course has covered basic physics material, forces on bodies as they are in motion, as well as the concepts of energy and momentum. My lecture introduced them to rotational kinetic energy. I went back through a derivation of translation kinetic energy from the equation for work and then on the other half of the same board showed how the derivation of rotational kinetic energy is pretty much the same. I then talked a bit about the parallel concepts of mass and mass moment of inertia in translation and rotational reference frames respectively. I showed how the final velocities for a block sliding down a slope will be different from that of a disk rolling down a slope, as well as that of a hoop rolling down a slope. I then started a more practical example, got it setup on the board, but didn’t have time to actually go through and solve it. Far enough along that they should have been able to solve it themselves though.
My lecture was not very interactive. Partly by choice, I prefer that style of lecture myself. Partly because I don’t really know how to involve and actively engage the students. I did ask students to help me determine what the initial and final energy states of the each of those three systems would be, but for the most part I just talked (and wrote on the board). There were a few questions from them, which were on a level that seemed to indicate some comprehension of the material. There was one question that stumped me for a minute. Unfortunately, I do not think aloud well at all, so there was a long pause as I puzzled it out, gave an answer that was only half correct, and then saw my error and fixed it. An hour later a much better answer to that question came to me of course.
I didn’t hate it, I’m not sure I liked it and would want to spend my life in front of a classroom. It was certainly more enjoyable than grading though. And less frustrating. I walked away feeling that they may have learned something. They will see this material in a latter class but it is actually from a chapter not even in their version of the book. I choose not to announce that this wouldn’t be on the exam until about the middle of the period after I had explained the concept and had begun to go through my examples.
I take a much different philosophy on teaching than all of the modern theories that I’ve had pushed on me in various teaching seminars and what not. I won’t speak to the high school and prior levels, but at the college level, it is my expectation that the students are here to learn. I am there (as a TA with office hours and as a lecturer) to provide my take on certain material, insight that might facilitate understanding above and beyond just reading the textbook. I do not feel it is my job to provide motivation. I do not feel it is my job to find a way to relate to the students current position. I speak from my experience as to where, why, and how information will be useful to them in the future. It is there job to generate the interest to actively understand. In a lecture setting (30+) people, I have no expectation of classroom participation. The professors I found most valuable at Mudd, were not those that asked the class what the next step in their on-board derivation might be. They were those who brought insight to the derivation, related it to something previously taught, or some other piece of knowledge such that from that insight, I was able to further my own intuition of the material. It was a rare textbook that could provide that sort of insightful commentary. As to whether students will find my take on this useful… I’m not sure the sophomore level (at this school) is the place to find that out. They are only just beginning to realize that engineering is hard, and there is still much weeding through their ranks that must be done. At Mudd we learned this within the first two weeks, and those that didn’t get it by then, realized it by our first test less than a month in. But this is OSU not Mudd.
Monday, March 2, 2009
The Land Cruiser has returned
My Toyota Land Cruiser (1994 FZJ80) has been living in Seattle since I moved down to Corvallis. This weekend, Whitney and I drove up to bring it down. I also had to replace the battery. I had long thought that the yellow and blue top Optimas were good batteries to have, especially for deep cycle and winch use. However much reading this Friday on IH8Mud convinced me that I should instead look at the Odyssey batteries. These are significantly more expensive, but Sears sells a rebadged Odyssey for significantly less. I wanted the largest battery I could fit in there, and there were conflicting reports of whether the group 31M would fit or not. Enough people said it would that I was willing to risk buying it and trying it out. It fit just, close, but it slid right in and the wires reached well. I do need to figure out what to do about strapping it down. The j-hooks already in the engine are not long enough to hold it down.
Once I got it down, and emptied all the junk that had been living inside it, I pulled the interior. It being the northwest in winter, there had been some moisture and it looks like one of the rain hoses leaks a little as one seatbelt was wet and a little moldy. So I pulled out all the seatbelts, the seats, the carpet, and the center console. We cleaned everything, and after the carpets dry, I should be able to reassemble the inside. I’m going to be taking prospective grad students to the coast this weekend and I’d like me vehicle not to look like the construction site mud pit it was. I thought about adding sound/heat proof material to the vehicle while I have the interior stripped, but the only great reports I’ve had about it are some stuff on McMaster Carr, and I don’t want to wait for that to come.
Next up… Solving the EGR problem. I’ve been getting a code 71 check engine light for a while now. It is indicative of build-up or failure somewhere in the exhaust gas recovery equipment. It’s intermittent and the vehicle passes emissions when it is off, so I’ve not been terribly concerned about it, but I want to get that light to go away permanently. Unfortunately, it’s a problem a lot of people have ended up through quite a bit of money at before resorting to the electrical tape over the light trick to deal with it. It sounds like most of those with successful resolution of this issue have just cleaned all the valves and hoses in the EGR system and replaced any cracked vacuum hoses. So that will be my first step, once I reassemble the vehicle.