Idara won’t go to sleep when I want her to, but I don’t know that yet. Right now she’s getting ready: standing at attention while I lean over her head and brush her mouthful of tiny sparkling teeth. Every night I tell her, “If you take care of your teeth they will take care of you.”

A few days ago I picked up Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams by Mitchel Resnick. The book covers the educational potential of programming cellular automata like Conway’s Game of Life using a programming language called StarLogo. I’ve long been interested in Conway’s Game of Life, and the book inspired me to implement it myself.

In June I started classes at Lewis & Clark’s Graduate School of Education, where I’m working toward a Master’s of Arts in Teaching. Now, after completing six courses in two months, I finally feel like I have a moment to come up for air and write a little bit about my experiences.

The last time I took a formal statistics course was when I was an undergrad at Lewis & Clark. I think I got a C. This was a few years before I got serious about math and doing well in school. Needless to say, I wanted this time around to be different.

One of three courses I took this term was called Modern Geometry, which covered Euclidean geometry, taxicab geometry, hyperbolic geometry, and spherical geometry.

One of three courses I took this term was on Ring Theory, the sequel to Group Theory, which I took last term. Besides the subject matter, there were a few minor differences between the two courses which I’ll highlight below. Most everything else, like the text and the instructor, remained the same.

As I write this, I’m drinking Lipton out of an orange mug emblazoned with the words “Lewis & Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling.” Technically it belongs to Rachael, who earned her master’s degree there (in counseling) about seven years ago. Now it’s my turn.

Today marks the first day of the final phase of our three-year Oregon adventure. It’s the first day of classes in the Master’s of Arts in Teaching program, which will continue for thirteen months and finish next summer. I’ll be taking classes at Lewis & Clark and student-teaching at a high school up the road. More on that soon. In the meantime I wanted to share the essay I wrote about why I’m here. I hope you enjoy it.

Gardening, sleeping in a bed, and making friends. This is Idara at two and three quarters.

My first upper division math course! Here's how it went.

In my last post about Idara, I wrote about how she wanted everything explained to her, how she was singing more and more, and how her thank you’s sounded more like an expletive than an expression of gratitude.

Some things are harder, like bedtime. But most things are easier, and more fun, and more interesting.