Here you can find my Plan from February 2003. You can find out more about plans from the plans home page. In essence, plans is a combination Blog/Chat that focuses on the Grinnell community.

Current Warning: In an attempt to avoid grading or doing other useful work, I've created {"http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~rebelsky/plans.html";"a web page that summarizes my past plans."} I've quoted some of you in it. Please let me know if you object. I will not quote you by name about alcohol or other controversial issues! I will try not to quote you if you insult me (e.g., "Rebelsky is such a bozo"). Current discussion question: Is there too much drinking on campus? Current bribe: My [CS151 Students] get a point of extra credit for going to the [GTones] concert and either cheering or harrassing {$leachale}. (If other students have activities they'd like me to bribe people to attend, let me know. I'll cap this form of extra credit at three points or so for the semester.) Current clueless question: Is there any easy way to spell-check your plan? 4:15 p.m. [Thomason] and Others: Note that I didn't ask why people drink. I asked whether there is too much student drinking on campus. I'll accept that "experimentation" is a reasonable reason for some people to drink to excess once in a while. It's still not a reason to drink to excess regularly. If "Peer Pressure" is a big reason that people regularly drink to excess, then I think we do need to do something about it as a campus community. If "Stress" or "To Escape" are big reasons that people regularly drink to excess, then I also think we need to do something about it as a campus community. 2 p.m. Well, it does seem like my question about drinking is generating some discussion. (I certainly had an interesting discussion about it at lunch.) If it's true that few students regularly drink too much, that's great, I'm encouraged to hear that. Have I made some stupid comments about drinking (including my classes)? Certainly. Does that mean that regular excessive drinking is a good idea? Certainly not. Will I try to stop making such suggestions? I'll try. 9 a.m. I've read over some of your responses to my alcohol question. I must admit that I find them lame, to put it mildly. Here are some of the key ones. Grinnell students are stressed and need to drink to relieve stress. Sorry, drinking to relieve stress is not sensible behavior. Yoga, more vigorous athletics, games, mock sword battles, singing, etc. are reasonable. I believe that drinking to relieve stress is one of the key roads to dependence on alcohol. (I assume student affairs is monitoring this, so they'll probably correct or support me.) College students everywhere drink to much. To quote the mythical mother, "If all your friends decided to jump off a cliff, would you jump, too?" More seriously, there are many activities that college students in general practice that Grinnell students do not practice. For example, you don't form fraternities and sororities and haze your colleagues. As a campus, we try to avoid charging for events so that money is not a prerequisite for social activities. What else is there to do in the middle of Iowa? I'll admit that I went to what is perhaps the geekiest school in the country (the University of Chicago), but we entertained ourselves by arguing, playing cards, reading, going to movies, and much more. Did Chicago students drink and take drugs? Certainly. Was it our primary entertainment option? Certainly not. Do I believe that there are reasonable reasons to drink? Certainly. Social drinking is both acceptable and reasonable behavior. Even the occasional over-indulgance is okay. What's not okay is regular drinking for little reason other than to get drunk. I'll note that I raised the issue, in part, because so many of my students listed "the drinking issue" as what they liked least about Grinnell. It's not just me saying this, it's your peers (who aren't always comfortable speaking publicly). Anyone want to try again?

[GumBen]: Many film theorists, socialogists, and media theorists study animation from many different perspectives. For example, one might look at perspectives on American society represented in cartoons over time, consider narrative forms in cartoons, or even reflect on what morals are presented in cartoons. There are, therefore, scholarly books on the subject of animated cartoons. I have some of them (from my time as a film geek). {$burtone} has an interest in comic art, and so might also have some interesting books.

{$inspiration} As much fun as I think I would have watching and talking about cartoons with students, it might be quite a challenge to create a cohesive course on them. What did you mean by: "{$burtone} and I can probably provide actual reference material"? Do you have the cartoons themselves or other stuff that relates to them?

Everyone: Here's a new semi-controversial topic: Is there too much drinking at Grinnell? When I started at Dartmouth, the most terrifying thing about the job was the following approximate common response to my "What do you like least about Dartmouth?" question: "What happened to me or a friend in the frats". In response to the "What do you like least about Grinnell?", I'm not getting a stunningly large number of responses that look like "The emphasis on drinking as the primary social activity." The bottles in MathLAN seem like another aspect of that problem. What's going on, and what can we do about it? ("We" can be "the campus community", "the faculty", "the strange people who read plans", or even "the folks in Math/CS".) [Venugopa]: Happy belated birthday! [GumBen]: Go for animation. Get a budget to buy every cartoon currently available on DVD. (Perhaps for the GC library.) {$burtone} and I can probably provide actual reference material.

{$inspiration} Professor Gum's long reflection on what tutorial topic to teach.

[Burtone]: Thanks for the kudos. You can borrow more Asterix books (what is the plural of Asterix?) when you return the first three.

{$inspiration} [rebelsky] is ad libing a lecture on big-O notation, since [bishopd] didn't actually cover it for a third of the class. w00t. I love sam. He's the best advisor you could ask for, he cares about students, and he teaches well, IMO. Oh, and he lends me asterix (are you done with those, [wilson]?). Nonetheless, I'm falling asleep. I want to go back to my room and shoot nazis.

[Kuper] and [CSC195]: Bishop's failure to cover big O notation in CSC152 is mostly the fault of the regular faculty for not clarifying what we expected to have covered in the course. I think we've solved that problem.

{$inspiration} Yesterday in [rebelsky]'s class:
Sam: And what are the running times of these algorithms?
starts to write some stuff on the board in big O notation
Sam: Don't all shout at once.
class is quiet.
I raise my hand.
Me: Um, I can't speak for everyone, but some of us haven't had big O analysis before, and it would be really great if you could go over it.
pause.
Sam: Who hasn't had big O analysis?
Everyone who had Bishop the wrong semester raises their hand.
Sam: Who has had it and wants to go over it again?
everyone else raises their hand.
Sam: Oh, okay.
proceeds to pull an entire lecture out of thin air.
45 minutes later, I'm once again dumbstruck over ACTUALLY HAVING LEARNED STUFF in a CS class!

[GumBen]: Um ... you have more confidence on the relevance of my theme to CS than I do. I'm teaching a tutorial on "Owning Bits: Intellectual Property in the Information Age". Is that really CS?

{$inspiration} I would like to pick one of the three that has enough interesting directions to fill a semester, attracts a diverse portion of incoming first-years (though possibly a reasonable concentration of people with interests in CS -- well I guess I am not so conerned about this since [rebelsky] will be teaching a tutorial with a CS theme), and does not exceed the scope of my knowledge/interest by too much.

[Plowman] You are permitted to write "I am smitting my incredibly difficult CS exam that you better start now or you'll never finish in time exam one problem at a time." Sorry it took so long to reply. By the way, what is "smitting"? I know what "smiting" (long i, one t) is, but not "smitting".

{$inspiration} Is it appropriate if I comment on my plan that I am, "Smitting my CS Exam one problem at a time. {insert satisfied smirk}"?

[Venugopa] Haven't heard from you in months. What's up?

[MathLAN-ers] Please don't drink alcohol in the MathLAN. And please, please, please (no, I'm not James Brown) don't leave your empties behind. {$kuper}: Thanks for updating your comment about me. How about removing the profanity from your comment about Gries. (Isn't a pain having profs on plans?) {$plowman}: I'm not giving Lindsey extra credit. Why should I give you extra credit?

Agh! I haven't updated my plan in a year. Oh well, it's probably for the best. My current plan is to survive the semester while teaching three courses, two of which are new. [HeckR]: I'd love to look at your work. However, your videos seem to use a weird format for which the CODEC is only in alpha release. (And I'm to lazy to install the CODEC on this linux system.)

For those of you who know more about these plans thingys than I do: What distinguishes plans from blogs? (Other than a lack of history?)