Student Feedback

Since I tried a few silly things with my class this semester, I wrote a couple of extra questions on the end-of-the-semester evaluations to get student feedback on them. In particular, I set up homework so that students were to choose which problems to do on an individual basis, and I orchestrated a class project to write our own textbook. Overall, student feedback was not as negative as I had anticipated, which was nice. Of course, only 19 of 39 students completed the evaluation...

Homework feedback was the least negative of the two. Of the 19 responses, 11 said they liked it. Others seemed to think it was ok, but didn't provide enough structure (not unexpectedly). A handful thought it would have been better if they were given some direction of things to focus on (I still don't see, for our class, how there was that much to choose from). One student apparently initially thought they would like the setup, but ended up not. A few flat-out didn't like it. Alas. I still like the basic idea.

The project was a source of frustration for all involved, which is too bad.

I'll begin with some of their feedback. A few students noted that they liked the idea of the project (and the project itself), working together to make something other students might use. And a few said they learned some things (mostly whichever mini project they were on), even if it wasn't related to the course content as listed on the syllabus. Some students found it tedious, and busy work, and would have rathered just do more homework problems (this confuses me, because assigning problems seems like busy work to me). A couple think in-class time to work with groups would have been good, which I can definitely see. And one student's comment, about wanting to see all the work at the end, makes me think another part could be added to the assignment, in which students would present their mini project work at the end of the semester - I think this would be valuable (even if the work is all accessible on the wiki anyway).

And now, my perspective. First off, there was no point in letting this project exist for half of the semester, as almost all of the work seemed to get done on due dates, right up to the minute. Apparently about two weeks probably could have produced the same result.

One of the parts I thought would be best was the "write questions" and then "write answers to classmates questions" parts. This seemed straight-forward enough to me, and the mostly clearly useful for our course content. Questions were due in two blocks, on a couple of Friday evenings. I'd then spend the evening (my life is that exciting!) formatting things so it all looked somewhat uniform, and randomly assigning problems to students. Due dates were such that after a block of questions were written, the answers were due two weeks later. I wanted to have a quick turn-around time from problems being written to problems being assigned, so students could have more time working on well-written answers, as well as working out issues with the questions (poor wording, ambiguity, problems in the wrong sections, etc). Of course, by my previous comment, I really could have spared more time before assigning answers. And I should have, using the time to edit the questions for clarity and content, since apparently students writing answers mostly didn't feel the need to do so (despite it being written as part of the assignment). I'm also concerned that I should have tried harder to see if questions (and, later, answers) were copied from the textbook, early on in the process. And for some reason I expected all of my students to follow the guidelines about how many of which questions (difficulty/content) to write (and write them on time), so that I when I redistributed them, everybody would end up writing the same number of answers. Silly me.

Clearly that part of the project would need to be tweaked (completely dismantled and reassembled) for future use.

The other useful part of the project was the MiniProjects, which students were put into groups for, based on initial project proposals they submitted. This part of the project was intended to involve group meetings about 2-3 weeks before the semester ended so students could show me rough drafts (ideally just little issues remaining). It became clear, the week of these meetings, that only very few of the groups had done anything at all (those that had done things had done well), which was hugely frustrating. Several students came to the meetings hoping I'd tell them what do to do get started, with no ideas of their own. This was weeks after their project proposals and group assignments. Perhaps a few more meetings would have been a good idea.

Anyway, eventually a whole-book pdf was compiled by one of the groups, of all of the sections and pages of questions and answers, and lots of appendices containing the further research found as part of many of the MiniProjects. It comes out to 126 pages, of which I wrote about 35-40. I'd share the book with you, but students at UVA own the intellectual property to their work, and I clearly can't force them to give me their work so I can just post it online for free for anybody, nor would I try. However, I did tell them I'd release all of my base effort under a CC license, and told students that if they wanted to contribute their work similarly, I'd be happy to compile it. I've got signatures from 18 students that I can gather their work up into a bundle, which I fully intend to do in the coming weeks. I'm sure you'll hear more about it, if you're still reading this far into this post.

Textbook Poll Results

Here are results from the first 77 responses to the textbook poll I mentioned recently. Charts are via Google's api, and numbers for the pie charts are percentages. I don't really know who ended up taking this, unfortunately, but my guess is that it is predominantly undergraduates at the University of Virginia.

1. How likely would you be to purchase an optional textbook for a math course, if it were a reasonable price?
   
   
   One of the fill-ins was: "Only if I perceived to be beneficial to my grade."
   
2. Would you be comfortable using a student compiled textbook for a math course if your professor used it as the main textbook for the course?
   
   
3. If you were taking a mathematics course and your professor provided you access to a free, online textbook in addition to your regular textbook, how likely would you be to reference the additional book for extra help and problems?
   
   
   
   With a write-in "Depends on how well I understand the respective material."
   
4. If a free digital copy of a textbook were legally available online, how likely would you be to buy a paper version?
   
   
5. To what extent do you use your textbook in a math course? (multiple answers allowed, counts are number of respondents). The available answers were: "I real all relevant sections", "I skim example problems", "To do extra unassigned problems", "I focus on highlighted formulas", and "Only to do assigned problems".
   
   
   Also a few fill-ins:
   
   • Whenever I find I don't understand a topic I find the book explains it in a very simple understandable way.
   • To try and find lost-related Equations
   • Reference tables and equations in the back of book
   • never
   • Paperweight
   • I do not own a textbook
6. What changes/improvements would you like to see in how textbooks are structured?
   
   Here's a sampling of answers:
   
   • A couple comments about digital versions:
     
     • "Putting textbooks online is hard for a lot of people (including myself!) to read from"
     • "would prefer more kindle/e-reader-friendly books".
   • Some about textbook usage in relation to class:
     
     • "Perhaps if the textbook order followed the order are curriculum is taught."
     • "Force students to use the textbook by alternating between online homework and maybe do quizzes based out of the book."
     • "More similarity between the material taught in class and the material in the textbook and more sample problems."
   • Some miscellaneous comments:
     
   • "Less space on corny math jokes. More space on actual math."
   • "More colorful; Black and white only is hard to look at and discourages you from using the book"
   • Most of the responses were about examples and solutions:
   • More examples
   • More and more-detailed examples of problems; detailed answers in the back of the book
   • More concrete examples and better solutions to the problems
   • To have more examples problems where the problem is worked out step by step and explained
   • clearer example problem presentation, clearer explanation of concepts
   • In the example section of a chapter, I would like to see questions that are actually challenging, something that will actually be on the test. The textbook companies always provide the most basic examples, which most of the time, are not helpful for actual application later.
   • When working out sample problems in each section split the problem into two sides. The left side would have the actual mathematical processes with each individual step shown. The right side would have the processes explained in words, not just symbols, which would make each step more understandable.
   • more steps to the answers
   • i would like to see example problems with full explanations of EACH step as well as a break down of definitions into simpler terms.
   • Solutions that show the work
   • More examples of how to solve hard problems, instead of just the basics.  If the point is to learn the material, why just assign really difficult applications of the principles as problems when you could just as easily show us how to solve them in the body of the text?
   • Many of the problems in the textbook seem rather easy compared to the problems on WebWork or questions asked on the test. It would be nice to have more problems in the textbook that would be comparable in difficulty to the UVA level of calculus.
   • Answers to every problem not just odds.
   • I think they are good but textbooks ought to have answers for all the problems - our textbook has answers for just the odd problems.
   • More examples would be nice, because for many people that is the best way to learn - by examining problems and understanding why they are done a particular way.  Also, better explanations of each step in given examples.
   • Make more sense with it. Show answers for EVERY PROBLEM and show how the answer is SOLVED. Don't just use one example and then hope that the people can figure out how to do the rest of the assigned problems. Show all the steps involved to do each problem. Make an ""answer"" textbook instead of putting the answers in the back, so that way people can have the assigned problems AND the answer textbook open so they can understand the steps required to solve the problems. It may sound like people are just going to copy the work, and maybe they will, but the answers will show a thorough way of how to solve the problems, which will help people do much better on quizzes and tests overall.
7. Do you have any additional comments or feedback?
   
   A sampling:
   
   • "The text book we have no has not helped me at all - my teacher explains everything we need to know, so the only use it has is practice problems. In the future I would suggest saving students thousands of dollars and not making a textbook mandatory"
   • "Try not to use all the example problems from the text book, it takes away a student's resource if the lectures are not helping."
   • "I haven't opened my textbook at all this year."
   • There were also two comments about how textbooks are too expensive.
   
   There was also a fairly lengthy response expounding on the virtues of e-books and the ePub format in particular. It mentioned how videos right in the textbook "could be a cool new way of learning mathematics." And apparently this student loves his or her iPad:
   

   iPad and tablets will run rampant in education/academia in the next 5 years. My iPad has transformed the way I take notes, do my reading for class, organize my life, and access my material. I have never been so prepared for class in my life, I don't necessarily do anything beyond what is assigned, I just now have the time to do it on-the-go, interactively, and efficiently. It's one of those cases where I am working smarter, not harder. And I owe it all to the iPad streamlining my academic life. Textbooks are going paperless and nearly half of mine are (all on my iPad).

Perhaps the thing that struck me the most about these results were all of the comments about examples. Many students seem to want answers to all of the problems in the book, not just the odds, and also want more detailed solutions. I can certainly see the appeal of this to students, and how it might seem helpful. However, I'm not sure that it actually would be helpful. Unfortunate as it may be, struggling through problems yourself seems to me to be a better way to really learn the content, instead of relying on textbook solutions. It's too easy to get stuck, look in the back, see what was done, and then think you understand what is going on. It's the same problem one of my students mentioned this semester: students may think they understand what's going on when they are listening to me talk about examples, but then feel stumped when they get to doing problems by themselves. Certainly I'm happy to hear that things make sense when I talk about them. But if students think they understand what's going because they can follow lectures and examples in the book, they may be fooling themselves. The only test is to struggle through problems without a guide (until you really need it).

NCR Trail Marathon

This past Saturday I ran the NCR Trail Marathon. I'd definitely recommend it for anybody looking for a marathon in the Baltimore area in November. It's a primarily flat course (besides the first and last mileish) on some sort of paved path (but probably more forgiving than roads), and pretty, with lots of trees and water and farms. It'd probably be even nicer when there are leaves on the trees, but still. It's basically an out-and-back, for whatever that's worth. Before I get to talking about my run (sorry), I want to thank all of the volunteers, staff, supporters, etc. You all were fantastic, and deserve medals for standing out there in the cold all that time. The aid station volunteers were great about calling out where water was, versus gatorade. And all of the cheering was wonderful; I definitely got a good boost every time. Thanks, all.

My goal going in was to qualify for Boston, requiring a 3:10:59 clock time. I wasn't really sure I could do it, though I was pretty confident I could get a 3:20. I tried not to get my hopes up too much, but couldn't really help it. I've been feeling like I've been running pretty well recently, even if I've only averaged 33 mile weeks for the past 9, topping out with one 41 mile week. My longest training run was a 2:34 21.2 miles, 3 weeks ago.

I got up in the 5 o'clock hour, dawdled for about an hour, slowly getting ready, and stressing myself out. My sister, like a champ, got up early to head out to the course with me, and we got to the Sparks Elementary School, where the start/finish are, by about 8. It's a 9am start time, which is sorta nice and late. Of course, that meant another hour of sitting around, stressing myself out. And checking out all the other runners. Oh man, that guy looks serious. Are there supposed to be holes in that guy's shirt in those places? And look at all those ultra shirts. And Boston apparel. Etc.

I started off a few rows back, worried that the trail might not be too wide, and I'd get cut off (no worries there, it's a car's width throughout). Put in a sub-6:50 first mile, and joked with the guy next to me... "just a few more of those, huh?" It was sort of fun looking at the runners around me... that guy surely is gonna blow up... I wonder if I can keep up with that guy for a few minutes. Etc.

At the first water stop I threw water at my face. Some of it made it to my mouth. The rest reminded me that it was probably not yet 40 degrees, and windy. Somehow the wind honestly managed to be against us in both directions. I'm not the only one who says so, so it must be true.

By mile 2 or 3, the pack had thinned out pretty well, and I was basically running with another guy (who I recognized from the shuttle, also trying to qualify for Boston), putting in just-faster-than-7s. Before too long he got a little lead, and I was worried about blowing up, myself, so I let him go. About the same time another guy caught up to me, and we also ran together for several miles, still putting in 7s pretty consistently. At every mile marker we'd both check our watches. I'd do a quick calculation in my head to make sure we were still on track, and he'd check a pace chart on his arm. After the first one or two, I said something about "nice pace, huh?" and he didn't respond. Headphones. Alright, fine. We must have run about 7 or 8 miles together in silence, putting in basically 7 minute miles throughout. Occasionally I'd think he was getting ahead, and I'd think, "ok, just let him go, you gotta do your own thing." And then I'd think, "see what he's got, maybe you two can push each other the whole time". And, "should he be breathing that hard if he's hoping to keep this pace for 2 more hours? Am I breathing that hard?" Somewhere along the line he dropped off behind me. So I ran on alone.

Since the course is basically an out-and-back, you see lots of mile markers, in addition to the ones that are just part of the NCR trail. I definitely got in to looking for the backs of the second-half signs, then the yellow NCR signs, and then the first-half signs (and the other order after the turn around). At some point there's a "fitness walk" along the side of the trail. 10ish stations set up with "do so-and-so exercise here". I was a little amused.

Hit the half in the 1:31 minute, a pace just over 7:00s. Then the turn around. And over the second half, somehow managed to basically keep my pace, and pass several runners. According to the results, 8 of the 10 guys who came in just after me overall were ahead of me at the half. So that was sorta nice. I'd keep seeing people ahead and think, ok, you'll just tail this guy in. And then I'd catch up. And nobody passed me. It was kinda crazy.

Somewhere around mile 18 I started hurting. I was hoping that'd hold off until 20, but there it was. Just kept telling myself I only had so much time left. And wondering if I'd hit my 3:10. I knew I was doing ok with all of the 7s I'd put in, so thought about trying to drop off to 7:15s or 7:30s consistently. But I couldn't convince myself I knew what that pace felt like, so I just kept pushing. I couldn't tell what I was running, so it was always a pleasant surprise when another mile would drop off at somewhere in the 7s.

At mile 22 I was ahead of my 21 mile training run time, feeling pretty rough, but basically optimistic. With every mile I kept saying, "ok, you could run 9s and still make 3:10", and then it was 10s... Of course, each mile the calculations got more difficult, with my mind not really sure why we were still doing this. What time was I at at the last mile? What mile am I at? Am I still running 7s, or am I at 12s? (I know that my 23rd mile was still sub-7, which still surprises me) Why is that girl running toward me smiling? (It was my sister, who had headed out for a run of her own) Is it a bad sign that my hands hurt like that?

With about a mile to go I scooped up one more runner. And saw two ahead of me. I figured they'd keep their lead, but it kept getting shorter. Coming up the final hill, a little before the final turn, the three of us were together. I feel sorta bad passing people at the end like that, but I gave it a kick to see if I had anything left (gotta do my run, not anybody else's, after all), and if they'd answer. I sorta did, and they sorta didn't. Came in at 3:04:55 clock time, 20th overall, and 5th in my age division (2 ahead of me were in the top 5 overall, so I could have picked up my 3rd place award for my group). Pretty proud of myself, if the length of this post didn't give that away. Sorry.

The folks at the end grabbed my tear-off bib number, grabbed my chip, and gave me a metal blanket and medal. I took a few more steps and plopped down in a chair. Other runners walked on by, "good run". I rarely had energy to answer. It was still cold and windy out, so I walked a little bit further down the hill, trying to make it back in to the school, but had to sit down again. My legs hurt, and with the blanket, I could just about avoid the wind. At some point while I was sitting there, my sister made it back from her run, and sat with me. She must have been cold, but she stayed with me anyway. A few more small walks and stops, and I eventually made it back into the school (cursing the whole way). Stopped right inside the doorway huddled up against a wall. One lady walked by and saw me shivering and gave me her metal blanket. I kept shivering. My sister kept chuckling. People kept walking by telling me about the hot soup just inside. Eventually I made it back onto my feet, and to the soup table. I must have looked pretty ragged; the lady seemed a bit concerned. I was shaking quite a bit, so she gave me some coffee to warm me up, and some soup. Made it to a seat at a table, and didn't get up for probably half an hour. Sat there with my sister, talking about our runs, shivering. Feeling like the other runners didn't look nearly as rough as I felt. The soup really was quite good. And my sister was awesome.

I think it was probably about 45 minutes after I stopped running that I finally stopped shivering. Sorta makes me think probably I gave just about all I could to the run, which is a good feeling. I definitely don't think I could have done any better. And now I guess I start looking forward to Boston :) Of course, there's an ultra in March I've got my eyes on...

A Textbook Poll

In association with my class project of making our own book, one of my students has made a quick poll about textbooks. If you are a student, or wouldn't mind sharing this with any you know, we'll be happy to have your feedback. So, if you've got a minute,

Take The Poll!

Well, In My Defense...

I gave my Ph.D. thesis defense the other day. It's sort of an odd thing to call it a defense, for a math paper. You argue in the humanities (I think, I haven't spent much time there). In math, you're just presenting facts, it's (sorta) the nice thing about math. Well, that's the ideal, I guess. There were certainly some weak joints in my work, but, as expected, people didn't have enough time to really stress about them. Which is nice.

When the thesis committee told me they were allowed to torture me with questions after everybody left, I told them, "knock yourselves out." Got a little chuckle. One professor asked what the hardest part was. I had wondered if somebody would. The hardest part was convincing myself it was worth doing --- was more worth doing than the other things I wanted to be doing. Luckily, he extended his question a little before I got to it (besides a grin), and I ended up just telling him about what math took the longest to piece together. The same professor asked if I was going to do anything with this later, that it would require some re-writing. I told him I had no intent of doing much with it, but that it would be freely available online, and he could do with it as he liked. He also said they could send me some changes that I should make. I guess when I said "whatever flips your switch", he realized I didn't care much to do them, and he, appropriately, didn't care enough to send the suggested changes to me. I didn't make any comments about how they were still allowed to make me jump through hoops, which is a little too bad.

The talk itself was fun. I do enjoy giving math talks, especially when I understand what I'm talking about. Threw in a couple jokes, got a few chuckles, put at least one professor to sleep. All in a day. I've got some notes about the presentation itself on my other blog. Or you can poke around the thesis material at my homepage.

So that means I'm nearly done. Still some administrative nonsense to do. And still a few weeks of "teaching". But nearly there.

A Homework Experiment

At the beginning of the semester I decided to try something new with homework. Basically, students were supposed to do as many problems as they thought necessary to get the understanding of the material that they desired. If a student notices that there are essentially one or two types of problems in a section (as is frequently the case with our textbook), they probably don't need to do many problems. Other students might require more practice to feel comfortable with material. I gave them the responsibility of deciding for themselves how much to do.

Each week, students turned in a sheet saying which problems they did, how they would grade their own understanding, what major and minor issues they had, any questions they had, and a "well-written" solution to one problem. Grading has been pretty easy, and I've basically just graded on completion. It's been nice to get questions on homework (and respond with individual answers), and to see students evaluating their own mistakes. Quality of "well-written" solutions varied a bit, but I did see many good ones.

Our first exam really didn't go so great, even though I hadn't seen many students rate their own understanding on homeworks much below a B. I think this was partially due to this relaxed structure of homework. After the exam I asked the students to tell me (anonymous feedback was fine) if they wanted to see anything change to make the class better for them, and I never heard anything. Our second exam, last week, went a bit better, and I like to think perhaps study habits had improved.

Anyway, part of what I wanted to see, doing homework this way, was if there was a relationship between number of problems done for homework and exam scores. I've been keeping track of how many problems each student did each week (probably miscounting slightly occasionally), and so after this last exam I broke out gnumeric. In the name of privacy (thanks to those in my twitter/facebook network for their thoughts here), I varied each point by some random small perturbation, and have removed axes labels and scales, with the following result:

The x-axis is number of problems done, and the y-axis is the sum of the two exam grades divided by the sum of the two best possible exam grades. It's nice to see that the linear fit has a positive slope, at least. The correlation coefficient for the actual scores was about 0.23, so not so great. What I find slightly interesting is that it just about looks like (and does in the actual scores too) there are 3 clusters... a large collection on the left, another 8 there in the middle, and 3 more at the end who did lots of problems.

I know it wasn't particularly scientific, or rigorous, but that's what I've got. I never told the students I was collecting this data (I'll show this to them in class tomorrow), in hopes that they wouldn't be just making up how much they did, but it's still a possibility. I almost wish I'd kept track of the scores students gave themselves, but it's too late now.

Speaking of class tomorrow, I better go sort out what we're doing...

Class Project

We're making a textbook. Or at least we're going to try.

On Friday I told my class I wanted to do a class project, where we all work together making a textbook. I told them I thought it would be fun and interesting and worthwhile. I told them that in addition to writing problems and solutions, like a textbook should have, they would also get to do something fun, of their own choosing, to make it a good project. I told them they had the weekend to think about it, and that we'd talk about it in class today. Attendance was unexpectedly low today, but the impression I got was that the majority of those in attendance were for the project. So we're going to try it.

The course I'm teaching is "Financial Math", and the textbook that has been used for this class in previous semesters, as decided by somebody else in the department some time in the past, is The Mathematics of Interest Rates and Finance, by Guthrie and Lemon (covering, approximately, chapters 1-6). I'm not a huge fan of this book, and I don't really hide that from my students. Rumor was that the department was considering finding a different book for this semester. I don't know how hard they looked, but we're using this book again. I'm pretty sure it's not because this is the best book we could be using. But what do I know. Anyway, the point is, this book is the basis for the course, and so will be the inspiration, if you will, for the book my class puts together.

I've been typing up my notes as I go, so I've got an outline and first draft of content for the first few chapters, so far. I told my students I'd write the first draft of the remaining content as well. There will be 3 parts of the project, from the perspective of it being a graded assignment. First, students will be put into groups and required to edit a few sections. I'm not much of a writer (in case you hadn't noticed), and I've done basically no editing of what I've written, so that'll be an important task. Next up, they will have to write some problems, and then I'll have them also write solutions for somebody else's problems. Finally, the fun part. They're to come up with a "mini project" that they want to do to make the book better. I've suggested things like:

• making diagrams, charts, graphics to accompany the text
• writing sections on using calculators, or spreadsheets
• writing historical or real-world content
• convert everything to other digital formats

But I'm hoping they come up with more. Things they actually want to do. I'm curious to see what they come up with. I told them to dream big, and don't worry if it was too big (we can trim it to something manageable for the purposes of grading). It'll be good to have ideas bouncing around.

The overall organization of this is still coming together. There's a bit of work that seems to need to happen on my end to get things off the ground. Next week we've got a midterm, and then we've got a little fall break, so hopefully by the time we return, in just over 2 weeks, things will be all organized for the class.

I've been LaTeXing my notes, but it seems like using the wiki feature of our course management system thanger will make it the most easy to access and keep together for everybody. So I dropped all of my current sections into the wiki. I cleaned up the first one a little, so it's now wiki-formatted, instead of LaTeX, and was working on the second section when I realized that I could just make this part of the editing they're supposed to do anyway :) Give them some experience using wikis. I may do a quick tutorial in class at some point, if we've got time. I'll aim to get first drafts of the remaining sections written quickly, so that students can start editing and writing problems and things when we get back from break.

I decided that since there are 5-6 chapters, depending on how I organize things, for the problem/solution writing portion of the project, they can just write one problem/solution per chapter. I'll have to decide how to organize who does solutions for which problems, but I figure I've got a little time in that regard.

For the mini projects, I decided to make them write a (brief, informal) proposal for what they want to do. I made it due next week, which gives me a week to look at them during break (while I'm grading exams, writing the remaining sections, oh, and that thesis thing...). I'm guessing there will be some overlap among projects, so they might end up getting grouped. And it will hopefully give me a chance to make sure everybody is doing "enough", or at least comparable amounts. I told them if they had "big" ideas, and people to work with, their mini project could be in groups. There might be some students who don't want to come up with anything - I told them they'd be assigned a project (possibly just writing more problems/solutions).

When I get carried away, I dream that this project could all come together to something beautiful and useful by the end of the semester (I think some students may be thinking like this too!). That maybe the department would start using it. That maybe folks outside of the department could get something out of it. In the discussions in class, I've told them how I think it would be great to release it as a fairly open project, like under a permissive creative commons license. In class today, I told them to assume they're working on a project that will be released fairly openly, and that if they were opposed to this they should email me or send anonymous feedback. They can still work on things and get their grade, I just wouldn't include their work in a release version (kinda tricky for "editing"... I'm hoping this doesn't come up). I also told them that I wasn't sure what the University would think about such a project, or about such a project being released however we want. Maybe they'll claim it, or restrict how we can distribute it. I'm probably going to go for a "beg forgiveness" approach, instead of "ask permission". I took a quick look online, but didn't find anything about university policies that seemed applicable. Presumably I'm being irresponsible... it's not the first time.

So, anyway. Could be fun. Could be disappointing. Will almost certainly be more work than I've considered. Hopefully we make something useful...

If you've got comments, feedback, or suggestions, I'd love to hear it. I'm sorta making this all up as I go. If you'd like to pre-order your copy today... :) I jest. Mostly. (drop a comment, you might inspire my class)