Two new courses and getting into the swing with spring
Teaching at CUNY comes with a January intercession. Every year I appreciate the time to decompress from the Fall semester and gear up the Spring. This round I found myself decompressing by playing through Zelda: Breath of the wild on Nintendo switch. I’m a few years late to the platform. It’s a great game. Very distracting.
Now I must undistract myself. I have two new preps coming up for Spring, and it’s time make some different recipes (my favorite part of Zelda BOTW is making recipes with ingredients you pick up ❤️). I’ve previously blogged a bit about courses I’m teaching, and have found the process useful for materializing stories in my head about what I imagine I’m trying to accomplish in the course. I spend a good deal of time imagining course structures, but writing it all down helps to firm up the directions. So, this is one is for me.
I have two new and very different courses, and I could do a post for each. But, I’ll try them together. Both are undergraduate courses. The first course is called “The people of New York City”, and the second course is called…Ha. This process is already working out. I can never remember formal course names. My go too strategy is to load up my lab webpage and click on the courses tab. In general, for each course I make websites and share out my course materials, and this also makes it easy to find course details quickly. But, I see that I was not as far along as I thought. I have made course websites for both course, but I have not linked to them on my lab webpage. I should go do that, and then come back here to continue the narrative form to-do list.
BRB.
OOf, the scary part. I upgraded R and R studio a few weeks ago. I use these and quarto to generate websites, including my lab website. So, will it compile? And, if not, how long will it take. Let’s find out…Thankfully I only had to update one library. Not too bad. Let’s try this again.
But, one more tangent. I’m currently writing this post in notion.so. I think I really like notion. It’s fast, fun and functional. I can basically write fast in markdown with bells and whistles. My blog is on my website, and written using quarto. If I want this to be there, then I need copy this into a .qmd document, and set up a new blog post. I was hoping to write mostly in notion and then copy over to quarto later. But, as I was about to start adding external links, I wasn’t totally sure how notion markdown and quarto markdown will play together. Let’s find out.
The link to my lab website that now has my course list is crumplab.com/courses. I’m still writing in notion, and wrote that link as plain text. It is not clickable. But! it is clickable when I copy/pasted it into the visual editor in R studio. Nice.
Well. I didn’t get a start on verbalizing course structure thoughts, and now I have a meeting. Will be back here tomorrow.