investing in the future...

Now that I have no outside-of-school projects, I had a little time to focus on my classes this week. The result... two new Keynote presentations... one on The Interstellar Medium and one on Room Acoustics. (How's that for diversity!) It may seem like a small accomplishment, but putting each one together involved learning something new, and each one saves a whole day of class prep time in the future. Every new one I put together brings me closer to my eventual goal of having a slide presentation for every conceivable topic in physics and astronomy I might ever have reason to teach. The latest count... 105 such presentations.

(One problem with the current state of my Keynotes is... some of them overlap, and some of them contain redundant material. One of my goals for the summer is to edit and recombine a number of presentations to eliminate redundancies. How's that for a pointless-but-satisfying project? My favorite kind!!)

I think I've decided... no "new" courses for a while. I'm doing a new philosophy of science class in the Fall, and that's it. I need a few semesters of complacency to get the courses I have down... really DOWN. I was thinking of running a new lab class called "Great Experiments in Science" in spring of 2007, but I'm thinking I should push that back a year. Yeah, it would be nice for the program, but shit... I need a break from thinking.