In Week Notes 26, I proposed the idea of doing a retrospective on the semester. Well, this is the last week of the summer semester! So, I suppose that I ought to a retrospective right now. It turns out that a semester is a big chunk of time. For me, this was a huge summer. Everything was off the charts amazing: family, career, and hobbies.
| Week | Highlights |
|---|---|
| 12 | Fields, LSAVS, One Spoon |
| 13 | Porch garden, community plot, Rachmaninoff, loop braiding, integration in finite terms |
| 14 | TBG, Esperanto-Sumoo |
| 15 | gather and dump, incremental progress |
| 16 | EMF, Faulhaber polynomials |
| 17 | Reading French, Chishango string figures |
| 18 | CMESG, B41 course prep |
| 19 | Easing expectations, CMESG |
| 20 | Camping at Presqu’Ile |
| 21 | NASK, Fundamental Theorem First, La Nudelmanĝanto |
| 22 | Kobo, Euler’s Identity |
| 23 | Community Camp |
| 24 | My Niece, Blaugust |
| 25 | East Coast |
| 26 | Robots, Braiding, Multi-Timer, webpage jam |
We did a lot of trips as a family: Community Camp at NeeKauNis, Presqu’ile, The East Coast. That’s close to a month of time together on the road. It was cool to spend so much time with the kids. I got a chance to really watch them grow as individuals.
Going in to the summer, I was intimidated about Mira being out of school for two months. Would it be too much time? Would she forget everything? How would we, as parents, possibly survive? It turned out to be totally fine. She’s a reasonable kid and we get along great. She did a number of week long summer camps, which gave Megan and I some time alone as adults. Mira didn’t seem to forget much from school. She did, occassionally, do self-directed school~ish things like trace letters in books or add up numbers. Next year, I’ll have no worries about having a kid for a whole summer.
Work-wise: I attended four conferences: One Dish One Spoon, EMF, NASK, and CMESG. Thinking back on it, there are important work things that didn’t even make it to the Week Notes. For example, the Tri-Campus Math Ed Meet-Up. It was nice to be back at conferences. I hadn’t gone to any in-person conferences since before the Pandemic. It had been a long time! Going to CMESG was especially meaningful because I got to see my colleagues in mathematics education.
I did some writing that I am proud of:
Looking at the list, I see that all of these went to newsletters or magazines. Less formal venues, certainly. The last piece, on Writing Ritual, was cool because I analyzed my writing process for a published scholarly piece Public Space Office Hours from 2020. It was a good reminder of my process.
I was really surpised by the feeling of writing the Faulhaber piece. The topic totally came out of left field, and I felt like I was discovering something new (to me) by myself. A wild ride.
As for hobbies: A continuous joy throughout the summer was that Megan got very excited about gardening. Usually, I get in to hobbies alone. Megan doesn’t “come along” for many of them. This pattern is lonely. And so, I am overjoyed that she adopted gardening as a hobby.
I did a deep dive in to speaking French, a language that I haven’t used since highschool. It was mind boggling to really immerse myself in it. I hadn’t had that sort of language learning experience since ~2008 when I first started attending events in Esperanto. The French deep-dive was neat because it wount up mixing hobbies and professional life. At EMF, a francophone conference, I gave a talk in French. At CMESG, an aspirationally bilingual conference, I was encouraged to participate in French.
As for Esperanto: Attending NASK was sweet. I took a writing course with Jorge Rafael Nogueras. It was all about micro-fiction and got me writing fiction. I never write fiction! During the workshop, I got good feedback on the stuff that I was writing. Now, I feel empowered to write and publish short fiction in Esperanto.
Another thing that doesn’t make it to the Week Notes much is my practice of retirement. This is a time where I stretch, read, pray, and journal. As I journal about it, the practice is pretty much “self-documenting”, so I don’t write about it here. A big win this summer was that I got much more regular with this practice. I was able to do it almost every day that the childcare situation permitted.
Overall, as I said, an off-the-charts amazing time. I want to end this note with a few things that didn’t go so well. One of these was learning to drive. It wasn’t a definite goal of mine for the summer, but was on the back of my mind. The reality is that learning to drive with two little kids around and a desire to go to work is hard. My wife and I could never manage to coordinate time for driving lessons. I suppose that I shouldn’t insist on her teaching me and rather do like everyone else does: get private lessons. Another thing that could have gone better: it was really hard to bounce back from vacation. The kids got extremely disregulated by the trip out East. We spent about ten days recovering from our two week long vacation.
Published: Aug 30, 2025 @ 17:00.
Last Modified: Aug 31, 2025 @ 17:22.
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