Category: Personal

I’ve moved to a new position at work recently, going from a Curriculum Developer to a Curriculum Project Manager. My main role is no longer creating products that will directly go off to students (although I’ll still be doing a bit of that). Instead, my job is to create the processes and structures for my fellow curriculum developers to make sure they have clear goals in a project, and a set of tasks that allows them to effectively get their work done. The entire goal is to remove the planning and scheduling cruft that our team was doing (poorly) on our own, since we could each only give a little bit of time to thinking about it.

It’s an interesting change in personal focus. I still love creating things directly for students, and I love sharing my passion for math. That will never change, and I’ll still pull to do that a bit at work, as well as on my own. Yet it’s exciting to get this adjustment to my perspective. It provides me with a chance to handle larger responsibility, and lets me build whatever I would like as a curriculum developer to help make projects run more smoothly. I’m still finding my bearings and determining the boundaries of this position, but it’s an exciting time. I hope it gives me more bandwidth to do some of the more creative work in my free time as well.

Even though I’ve been vaguely aware of a certain dynamic when home in Minnesota for breaks, it has somehow become more acute this year. My break is not really a break due to how difficult my routine is to track, and how many people are vying for some time together. Of course I am happy to see my friends and family during the holidays, but there is something about being back home, as if it were high school, now that I am much more independent and live on my own. It is difficult to not have my own space anymore, and to have very little time to myself. In fact, I have to work today and that sounds like it’ll be the largest mental break available to me.

What strategies are there to help fix this dynamic and reclaim my own time and space even while at home? I’m not quite sure yet. But I’m actively working on it, and making use of the bits of time available to me. However, there has not been nearly enough to investigate the Space Force as I mentioned last week, so that will have to wait a little longer until I have more time.

Once again it’s supposed to winter, and yet it is not. In fact, we finally achieved “sweater weather” status in San Diego the other week with an uncharacteristic amount of rain and high 50’s temperatures. It’s still odd trying to adjust, and I feel a lot of dissonance between the weather and what 23 years of experience tells me should be happening.

I don’t expect I’ll ever fully adjust, and I think that’s okay. Proper winter will always have a special place in my heart. And at least I can bake cookies.

I was informed by a friend that someone I went to high school with made national news after getting kicked out of a Trump rally in Minneapolis. It made me consider the hundreds of people I no longer know much about since I left high school, and how many different paths they’ve gone on. The news of this particular classmate of mine was hilarious, and largely in character based on what I knew of them. However, seeing them in the context of the real world and not just talking to them adds a different, more intriguing element to it.

We live in an interesting time where it is largely possible to keep up with a massive number of people to some extent (at least the parts of them they are willing to share on the internet, for better or worse). You come across people you know in unexpected places, and see more snapshots of a life than has been possible until the most recent ten years or so. With regards to this specific part of social media, I don’t have particularly strong feelings. I personally enjoy seeing the whereabouts and major events of the well-adjusted people I was friendly with in school, but wouldn’t necessarily keep in direct contact with afterward. It provides me with a positive feeling for them. I can silently root for them, and assume that a few moments of thoughts are similarly directed at me from time to time.

I also know I had the privilege to go to an excellent high school with some absolutely amazing peers. I have no doubt I’ll continue to see others show up in the news every so often. It’s exciting to see what interests were developed or maintained, to get a glimpse of how people have grown since I last saw them. And, if I’m lucky, I may get one degree closer to Kevin Bacon. Or if I’m really lucky, Erdos.

This is probably more literal than you may expect. I went to the beach this weekend, and for the first time just happened to arrive during high tide on a windy day. It was incredibly interesting seeing the beach I’m familiar with have an entirely different landscape, as waves swept in well over 50 ft further than I was used to.

This is something that I’m not used to think about. Between my infrequent trips to the beach, my background of just going to lakes, and not doing much in terms of shoreline water sports when I am at the beach, the tides never seemed to affect me. But now I’m curious as to how it changes the view and experience of other beaches. It’s something I’m interested in exploring.

In general, there are many forces of nature that often affect us without much thought on our part. I’m curious about what other common, reoccurring events change my daily life without much thought from me. For now though, the tides have piqued my interest. I’ll see what I can find out.

I don’t have much time to write anything substantial this week; I had visitors all weekend, and have other visitors coming soon to prepare for. So, this is a sorry excuse for a post just for the sake of keeping my weekly streak alive.

To that end, on the side menu of the site I’ve finally added a feedback email address. I’ve had the email available for use for quite a while now, but only just figured out how to easily set-up my email clients to allow it to actually be usable by me. So, if you happen to read this blog and have ever wanted to voice strong opinions to me, emailing feedback@markrichard.org is the way to go. I believe there’s also a comment system (that has been used about once in total), but that seems much less likely to be utilized.