I've *almost* got one paper ready to submit - I've been working on that a bit this week. It started when I went to Colombia last year and on the way, sat in on a statistical modelling class at Universidad Adolfo Ibañez in Chile. The class was taught in Spanish and what I noticed was that I could understand what was going on when the Prof was doing a structured part of the class, but I had trouble when they went into a bit of freestyle Q&A among the class. This got me thinking about how my own non-English speaking background students cope in my classes - especially given that I am a pretty informal person (lots of messing around, colloquial language etc). The paper is about that experience and realisations that it provided me and ideas for coping with classes of different backgrounds in better ways (eg making sure you constantly tag your notes/chalkwork with references to the text or your prewritten notes etc so students can follow).
It has been rejected from 2 journals already, but I think that is mostly because I didn't think about where I was sending it. That's an important lesson in itself that hasn't really effected me previously.
I did a bit of work on a paper that Masoum (my PhD student) is working on. It's about effects of chemokines like interferon-gamma in the chlamydial infection process. It's PDE based and we worked a little on refining the model itself, as well as putting some thought into the type of literature that we wanted to refer to in our intro. Going well I think.
I've also been continuing my literature search to back up a paper I'm working on related to a nifty little assessment strategy that Tim Moroney uses in comp maths. It's basically the 'design by contract' concept from IT applied to computational mathematics. It's difficult to find any literature out there, so that's definitely good from the perspective of this being something novel at least in the mathematical context.
Off the research topic for a moment, I am actually more finished teaching now since I completed my marking and grade uploads yesterday - that feels good. Especially since there was a lot that I didn't do!!! :D
Also, on Wednesday I was one of two after-lunch speakers at the University's promotion luncheon (where all the new profs and a/profs get dined by the VC and chancellor and co). That went extremely well. For about the first time since grade 12 English assignments, I actually prepared my talk - so I was nervous as hell! I very rarely get nervous at all if I just talk. I talked about my upbringing and how I got to where I am and so on, and then about what promotion means to me. But it went really really well. People actually clapped and seemed to mean it (instead of just out of habit) and lots of people came up to me and talked about my story etc.
Today I'm home with the boy while Charisse is doing her annual report for her Masters degree at UNSW. Tonight the honours students are coming over to drink away the pain of their talks this afternoon! :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment