catching my breath

I'm still getting used to not having constant email from students to deal with. Last week because of traveling and grading I trained less than 5 hours, instead of my usual 10-12 hours. I think the break was good for me--this morning I did a fairly hilly almost 28 mile ride (a variation of this without the second loop) in just under two hours. It is a ride I do fairly often and my average time for that route is about 2 hours and 20 minutes. I hope that is a good sign for the Greenville triathlon next weekend, but the cool weather today isn't likely to last.

online teaching

Grades were due yesterday at 9 am for the online course I was teaching. I fell behind because of the trip to Massachusetts, so Wednesday and Thursday I had an awful lot of grading to do.

The grades in the course turned out to be higher than usual when I teach that course in the classroom. I had fewer freshmen, and I dropped several students who weren't handing in assignments. I also had more assignments where students got full credit if they did the assignment, which helps their average (and was necessary to keep the grading burden halfway sane--I had 30 students in a 5 week summer course). When I teach that class in the classroom I do in-class tests, and for the online course the tests were obviously takehome and didn't have a time limit. But when I graded those tests it seemed to me that more students got the essential idea I wanted them to get about the relationship between technology and society better than usual in that course. My guess is that the online students approached the tests more seriously than the regular students do, feeling that that was all there was. I used a new third book that presented the ideas particularly clearly, but overall I can't imagine that students got as much as they would in the classroom. So it is interesting that they did better.

burial of the ashes

memorial party

The memorial party for my father went well--everyone kept saying how much he would have loved it. A strange event to me.

A lot of people told memories of him, particularly nephews and other men of my sisters' ages for whom he had been an important influence.

I'm mostly just tired.

Cape Cod

We got to Chatham about 5:30 Friday night, will leave to fly home Monday morning. Tonight at 5 there is a memorial cocktail party for my father, probably about 150 people. This is what he wanted. Last night about 25 of my mother's family gathered (her generation and my generation only, not kids). Tomorrow after the internment of the ashes there will be an even larger gathering of my father's family to celebrate his sister's 80th birthday. Too many people, too much social stuff for my taste. The house is full (9 adults and 8 kids in the big house) and lots more people coming in and out. Pictures coming later.

Views

We hiked up to Long Rock after dinner:

In this hot weather the Blue Ridge more than deserves its name:

June totals:
swim 16:35
bike 330 miles in 27:01
run 54 miles in 12:07

another Kanuga bike route

I've Google pedometered this one, as it was hard to follow the maps I was using. I finally figured out how to come out from Hendersonville on the less trafficky Old Kanuga Road. I knew I was going up a mountain at the beginning of my route--any road around here named xx mountain road is a pretty sure bet. I hoped Googe pedometer would do cumulative vertical gain, but it only does a profile, which shows a climb of 670 feet in about 3 miles. A couple of short steep sections, but the climb wasn't too nonstop.