Still Anxious

Another promised update missed, and a nebulous amount of work done, I find myself a week away from starting a semester of the heaviest teaching I will have done since teaching high school, more than a decade ago.

Since then, I have had the opportunity to teach programming (and sometimes math) to top-notch students, as well as have my first taste of restricted teaching, before being tapped for similar duty overseas. This will be my first chance to explore lecture preparation in quite a while, and it has been exhilarating and worrisome. I am trying a new (to me) schema, and have been fully immersing myself (as it was) in the state-of-the-art. Will it succeed? Only time and effort will tell. I still haven't finalized it, and I only really have the first half detailed, but teaching has always been a fluid process, on-the-fly even as you are in front of the students. 

Here's to the new and the brave. 

Otherwise

Today, Friday, being a holiday, celebrating the end of Ramadan, I am still a week off from the end of my contract at NTU - however, I had already yesterday surrendered my staff accreditations and their accompanying cards, and am currently unemployed.  This situation, however, should be rectified by next Tuesday, whereupon another update will be given.

It was an interesting day, updating supervisors current and past, clearing my space once again, and shuffling off to parts closer to home than the far-flung West of the country.  The somewhat extended weekend finds me mildly melancholy, and somewhat anxious.

Of the previous checklist, I will admit to doing the second badly, to which I will likely post an edited version here or on LinkedIn, and will follow up with some more posts on things I had been proselytizing on in the previous decade or so - when these will actually be done, I am uncertain.  I had done a bit of the other three, but the last point is what tides me over from here to there, which is still in the next week.

Still many details to be worked out, but, luckily, some time is on my side.  To use it wisely (more focussed than the last two months have gone, at least) is the best course going forward, for another month or so.

Isabelita O'Dell

Twenty-four years (and some amount of days) ago, I started my freshman year in Philippine Science, in the Diliman campus.  Ma'am O'Dell was my Math I teacher, and would be my Math II (Geometry) teacher the following year.  I remember that the impression that my classmates had early on was that she was a strict teacher (in fact, a friend had left the school for failing Math II), and even with her short stature (I think I was coming up to eye-level with her at that point), she could hold a stern gaze.  Her heavily-accented English was carefully enunciated, but we would still get tripped up on some words (I remember we had a hard time with "cotton"), and I had, by the middle of that year, gotten the hang of hazarding an imitation of her voice, usually when demonstrating how she called my classmates by name, and me by "you" - to be fair, that was definitely no longer the case in sophomore year.

In both years, on days I had her class, it would be the last class of the day.  I remember that in freshman year, we originally had three-hour breaks on Thursday and Friday, but she had allowed us to take the classes earlier so that the externs could get home sooner.  I remember very fondly a day we had the proof of a single theorem in Geom class that ended up with one particularly bored individual throwing wads of paper all almost everyone else - and we had paid that person back in spades, despite the fact that Ma'am O'Dell had served as an inadvertent shield.  In the aftermath, I personally felt ashamed to approach her, but classmates who did said that she had shrugged it all off and laughed.

Ma'am O'Dell had a keen, wry sense of humor, which we students occasionally got to see, and she had a warmth just below the professional surface.  I had only, with the news of her passing, come to realize that her bearing and her attitude have been what I have been practicing - been trying to emulate - since I started teaching, at Pisay, and have served me well for all my teaching stops since.  (This is counterpointed by the excited, almost manic, air I share with another sophomore year Math teacher of mine, Doc Banjo Bautista.)

The last time I remember seeing her was a year after I started teaching at Pisay.  I knew that she had retired the year I came in, so we never had professionally overlapped there.  She still had the humor and warmth I remembered from nearly a decade before - only that her grayish hair had already turned mostly white.  I'm sure we were both smiling.

Of my mentors who have passed on: Sir Alex Alix, only years after I left for UP, with my maturity insufficient to sustain me at Pisay; Doc Jose Marasigan, who I was with during my grad assistant time at Ateneo, just a few years ago; and, Ma'am O'Dell; remembering her takes me back the farthest, to my most hopeful, to my most exuberant, exultant years, when possibility was still waiting for opportunity.  I heard that she may have been characterized in the Aureas Solito film, but I have not watched it yet - if that is true, I will likely want to find a copy soon, again.

It is hard to say how I feel about her passing, when it boils down to it.  That she is no longer in the world, for me to reconnect with at a future time, I cannot deny - there is sadness, but my memories of her feel like mint, like a breath of fresh air from a time past.  I don't want to take a deep breath, to hold it in, but I know that I will feel it again when I do remember her, time and again.

EDIT:  Adding a video from FB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTtgqghLNaQ

Downtime

First post of the year is at a downtime period: one which I actually expected at the start, and then again during the previous semester, which was surprisingly heavier than the first semester, but also surprisingly more fulfilling and harmonious.  Either way, I have two months of downtime, which actually had a lead of half-a-month prior.

The plan for the interim, which I'm writing here as much to remind myself, is

1. Read up on homotopy type theory and univalent foundations, which comes from reading this article with a somewhat wag-the-doggish headline.  It's at the intersection of mathematics, formal logic and computer science, and I actually feel advantaged to not have formal knowledge on the main mathematics.
2. Submit something for the Asian Scientist Writing Prize, due at the end of the month.  I was planning to have a first draft by now, but have nothing yet.  This will likely be on one of my curriculum advocacies, familiar to those I've talked to at Pisay over the last decade or so.
3. Brush up on C++ bits that I haven't picked up yet, such as multithreading and socket programming, since I haven't done so.  I also have some Udemy courses on Python and Ruby I picked up on sale from StackSocial and Slashdot Deals, which in turn tempt me with some Android and Arduino courses, which I may pick up on deep sales.  These also remind me to learn more HTML5, CSS, etc., since neither the Flash programming I learned for my Master's presentation nor the Dash programming I abruptly started and stalled on have panned out.
4. Cast larger nets more frequently in job-hunting.  'Tis the fate of all non-tenure doctorates to be forever searching for jobs - or at least until tenure or otherwise job security, which any of the above points are helpful for.

That's not to say that I can lean back and just learn on my own pace - a number of other things are vying for my attention, but these will be my priorities through July.