Quick Check In

By -
Haven't blogged here in quite a while! I haven't been blogging anywhere, but I do have a tumblr for Geography things and spend a lot of time on Twitter. Maybe I'll get something up here in the near future. Otherwise catch me on the platforms above.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Important Advice for College Students Regarding Grades

By -
The semester has just ended and I have received emails from several students inquiring about their grades.  Most of these emails have asked me to reconsider the grades that I reported to the university registrar and are now released to students.  These emails have become increasingly more common and also more brazen in their requests/demands.  I would like students to think long and hard before sending these end-of-semester emails and consider a few questions: Did you attend this class? If you answer "yes", but you missed more than 10% of class meetings (in my classes this would amount to missing more than three out of our 27 class meetings), how many classes did you miss?  Did you miss them for a family emergency? Due to illness? Or because you overslept or had more important things to do? Most of us have policies that allow flexibility for illness and family emergencies.  It is also good to learn what university offices can assist you with these matters. At...
Read more

Summer Plans

By -
We've reached the halfway point of the summer here at Miami (we start classes on August 24th), so it seems like a good time to take stock of what I've accomplished and what I still plan to do this summer. Progress Most of my work this summer has focused on REU and with the help of my student, we have made some good progress on a project. After some debate, I decided to stick with using some methodology that we've already used in this research, but apply it to different data. Most of the work done so far on this project (and the pilot study before the grant) focused on using fall imagery to detect Amur honeysuckle in forested areas. This shrub expands its leaves earlier in spring and retains them later in fall than the overstory tree species, and thus far, we have used fall imagery in our analysis (we felt that too many other plants were also green in spring). Recently, I started to reconsider this approach and tested some spring images for a conference presentation this spr...
Read more

Getting back into the groove

By -
My job can be really funny in some ways. I go from having ultimate flexibility in the summer to the structure and schedule of the semester. There is no transition. One day, I just get up and classes are back in session. I am teaching mornings this semester, so I have gotten back into a schedule of getting up early and coming into campus to teach. My afternoons are more open for labs, meetings, research, class planning, etc. and by 10pm, I am pretty wiped out. The first week back is always a shock to the system- I slept for 10 hours last Friday night! Once I get back into a routine, things are fine. I feel pretty good about how my classes are going so far. In my intro physical geography class, I am trying online quizzes for the first time. Every Monday morning, a new quiz is up for the students to take and they have until Friday night at 10pm to finish them. They are graded automatically, since I have the correct answers built into the quiz. There were a few technical glitches for the f...
Read more