Stutzfamily blog thingie

We had our subject area awards ceremony this week, and I presented the math department awards. While the entire event started off with a very somber intonation in praise of the importance of academics, I just couldn’t keep everything in that serious a mode.

My speech was well received, getting some good chuckles and even a round of applause from the parents. I’ve had a few students, parents, and even the superintendent ask for a copy of the speech. Math dork that I am, I have transcribed it into a poem. Not a perfect rhymer, but close enough to the spirit for the last full Friday of the school year:

Good afternoon. To more fully explain the thoughts going into the choice of students, I’ll have to rely on using some difficult mathematical terms, if you all can bear with me.

While math award choices were tougher than pi
The teachers’ opinions had no great divide.

With no subtraction at all from achievements of others,
the absolute value of the winners discovered:

• Constants in class – high above the mean grade
• Factors in positive growth every day
• Multiplied the learning of large fractions of others
• And square rooted in math fundamentals we covered.

Many variables were considered, but the greatest common factor
of the recognized students is really quite rational:
the integral role that hard work has played
in beating the curve, and getting good grades.

(and if interested, the actual speech given is here.)

Our girls (and boys, but as I was coaching the girls I paid more attention to them) did a fantastic job this past weekend. We had split our squad into two even teams, so it was really fun for us to watch them go after each other on Saturday morning.

Overall they did very well, taking second and third as well as the sportsmanship trophy. We had super support from the student body as well, with loads of people showing up to cheer on the Eagles. I was extremely proud of the way they conducted themselves both on and off the court, and will miss their spirit next year!

I grabbed a few pictures from the school photographer, and you can see me hovering around in the background of them. It was kind of fun afterwards, when the coaches got in a game against the referees. I’m not going to win any awards, but at least I didn’t embarrass myself playing!

There haven’t been too many posts this week due to a new distraction in my life. For better or for worse, however, there is a long backstory that you’ll have to wade through to get to the good stuff!

Electronics in India are a hot or miss affair. Some things are very reasonably priced and of good quality, others are horrendously expensive and/or are shady knock offs. When I’ve wanted to get something expensive, I’ve usually tried to get it from the US - still showing my regional bias, I suppose.

Susan wanted to find some specific pictures from when we were in Belgrade, and the fuss and hoopla that took place in trying to find them in our stack of picture dvds was out of control. As I surveyed the wreck that our living room had become in the quest to find a few silly images, I decided that I needed a new external hard drive on which to store all our media!

One of our colleagues was planning to go to the US for a conference, so I cleared it with her and ordered a one terabyte drive from Amazon to be delivered to another colleague’s apartment (where she would be staying). That is a thousand gigs! Crazy - how am I ever going to use that all (of course, I remember saying the same thing when we bought our first computer with an enormous one-gigabyte hard drive!)?!

As I sat in front of the computer ordering, I figured ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ and ordered a portable mp3/video player as well. Well, I must’ve missed the email that said it was being sent under separate cover - because when our friend got back, she only had the hard drive, but did say that “a really small and light box from Amazon was at the apartment as well.” Guess I’ll have to figure out a way to get it this summer!

But the hard drive is here, and so I’ve spent much of the past week transferring music and pictures over to it. There are still some doubles to weed out and some ‘floaters’ lost on individual disks around the house to put on, but all in all it feels good to have everything in one place. Of course, I spent an hour last night looking through old scans and pictures I haven’t seen in years, and got nothing done on the Egypt pages…

And that’s why there haven’t been any blog entries this week. But I promise, there is a good one tomorrow!