Summer at Last

Dave says: The last two months have been some of the busiest of my life. The last time I wrote on the blog, I was in Chicago for a management conference. After that, things started ramping up at the end of the semester with research projects, final papers, and exams. However, after the semester ended, the excitement kept right on going.

I finished writing a final paper on a Saturday night and started teaching my first college-level class the next Monday morning. The U of A has 3 summer sessions (aka: more $) and the first, pre-session, goes for 3 weeks with 3 hour classes every day. The good news is that you speed through an entire class in less than a month. The bad news is that it is hard work to prep 3 hours of material every day. However, I really like teaching and the class turned out to be a lot of fun.

The course was "Integrating Business Fundamentals with Ethics and Law" and covers a number of topics that I enjoy related to ethics, law, and business. One of my main goals was to incorporate a variety of teaching methods in addition to lecturing to make the class more engaging for students. Ultimately, the format worked well with PowerPoints, video clips (including some funny ones from The Daily Show, The Office, etc.), student presentations, case studies, and in class activities. I had about 40 students in the class and they were great about getting involved in discussions and making comments. Now that I have the materials, the class will be much easier in the future.

Additionally, I was fortunate to win a fellowship award through the department. I'm certainly not winning any cycling awards right now so I guess academic awards will have to do instead. However, I've still been out on the bike as much as possible. Although the weather has finally heated up here in Tucson, it was absolutely unbelievable for the first 5 months of the year. I still drive to school every morning with the windows down. However, I need to re-train myself to wake up at 5 am so that I can enjoy the best part of the day.

I was also recently asked to work with the young men's group at church. I did this in SLC and it is fun to get to do it again. We have only a few youth in the ward but this means that we get to know them pretty well individually.

Finally, my parents were in town over Memorial Day weekend. The reason - they have decided to move back to Arizona. They are headed to the Phoenix area where the jobs, as well as Christine (and the grandkids) are located. This all happened pretty fast and will make for a busy summer for them. We all knew that they would come back to Arizona but I think that everyone assumed that they would come back to Tucson in another 5 or 10 years.