It's been 10 days from my last post. Not really a big break for me historically but certainly a big one given how much I've been posting this year. Been under the weather for the past couple of weeks dealing with COVID-19. Haven't had super bad symptoms and as symptoms have been getting fewer and less severe I'm hoping I'm close to a full recovery. In any event, I'm feeling good enough for a quick post.

USPS is in financial trouble. That's been pretty well documented recently. Most reasonable people will recognize that the USPS is both an important service and while it receives no taxpayer support would be profitable were it not for the GOP imposing unfair and unrealistic pension funding requirements in 2006. Although I'm an ardent supporter of the post office and feel that privatization of such an important intuition would be criminal today I want to talk about some small repercussions of so many things going to email rather than snail mail.

When we first went remote I jumped on Zoom. I already new the technology and it most simulated a live class. Basically, it was the best combination if quick, easy, and effective and we were under the gun to get something going and give our students some sense of normalcy and continuity. As we settled in though, it made sense to try some different things. One was the "lab packet.

We lost Mathematician John Conway to COVID-19 over the weekend. To us non mathematicians Conway was most well known for his Game of Life - a particularly interesting cellular automaton. If you poke around the web you can find all sorts of neat things relating to the Game of Life including a Turing Machine. Some times, I'd have classes explore the Game of Life and variants as a whole unit though more often, I use it as a stepping stone to using Cellular Automata to solve problems.

Stuart Halloway is a name in the Clojure community. I was rewatching one of his talks this morning and I thought some of you would enjoy it. Lots of gems on approaching programming and development. Nothing radical or new here but lots of good stuff very well presented. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OUZZKtypink" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I was reading Mary Clair Wright's new blog the other day. It's always great to see another teacher sharing publicly online. One line caught my eye in her latest post - <blockquote> Remote instruction is weird, I can’t see them. I have to trust that they will message me with questions. </blockquote> This is a real problem. It's hard enough in a regular class where we can pick up an all sorts of cues and use all sorts formal and informal assessments but when the students are on the other end of a teleconference or even more challenging an email or chat it's even harder.

Yesterday was the start of Passover and like many others we weren't able to physically gather with friends and family to celebrate. Since the Talmud, unlike the NYC Dept of Education, doesn't seem to ban Zoom, like many others, we used Zoom to connect with family. Tonight we'll do it again. In the meantime, I thought I'd share this small bit of research Natan did a couple of years ago on a traditional part of the seder: A Historically Informed Echad Mi Yodea

Zoom has been on a wild ride. As teachers scrambled to try to deliver instruction from there homes to student homes Zoom quickly became a favorite. It was easy, performed well, and had features that other services seemed to lack. Features like being able to mute students and for me a big one - breakout rooms. Now, these features weren't flawless as I mentioned in my last post but that's okay.

While tools like Zoom, Slack and others are a tremendous boon as we're forced to do all our teaching remotely the limitations become apparent as we settle in and try to go beyond the basics of an offsite meeting. Today was code review day in my CS1 class. It's a lesson that I enjoy teaching and I think my students get a lot out of it. Today we had to do it remote.

I spent part of today cleaning up my Emacs workflow. Specifically, how I capture emails and links into org-mode I already wrote about how I used org-capture (here and here). It's pretty clean and easy but there was one thing that always nagged at me. When I capture from mu4e within Emacs by hitting C-c m it's set up to automatically populate the capture template with a link to the email labelled with the email's subject.