Mike Oren.com

I've spoken previously about struggling to find balance simply in terms of time, commitments, academic pursuits, etc. However, now that my class started (so far there have been two meetings of the class) and the REU students are here, I've begun to find new struggles for balance. With the class, I'm struggling to keep things interesting (for me and the class), teaching to where I see the 'high bar' at, while at the same time trying to make sure everybody has the requisite knowledge to do well on the projects. I feel like I've been failing this struggle so far, not a complete failure but I don't feel like I've been doing at well at it as I'd like. I am really enjoying the involvement of the off-campus students with the class, although finding the best way to keep them involved without distracting me (or the on-campus students) is still a work-in-progress.

With the REU students the struggle is slightly different, I see my top priority with the REU student as making sure they feel like they can speak openly and honestly around me. That way, if they have issues with their graduate student mentors, a faculty member, or have any feedback about the program I can try to help them resolve it. To do that, I feel like I need to establish more of a relaxed rapport around them--especially since I think a big part of the REU program should be about treating the students as essentially equal to an entering graduate student (as adults capable of doing independent resarch as part of a team). At the same time, I am responsible for teaching certain classes and going over more administrative things with them that puts a power distance that I see as somewhat conflicting. With the classes I teach them, the struggle for finding the right balance between getting certain content across while keeping things interesting (for me and the students) is somewhat of a struggle as well--although with this first one part of that was I threw things together last minute (which is always a bad idea--but in this case I didn't have many alternatives since I wasn't sure how much of what I wanted to talk about would be discussed during the morning session by the guest speakers).

So I'll have to work on that this summer. In other 'news', I saw Pixar's Up today--it was a really enjoyable movie and had one of the best montage sequences I've seen in a long time (make fun of montages all you want, but the one in Up was very touching). I'm looking forward to spending a week in California in July when I go down for the HCI International conference and get to meet up with my friend Mariya.