Meet Max, a Teaching Assistant who loves climbing mountains, swing dancing, and Artificial Intelligence.

“I’ve never been bored in my life,” says Maksym Morawski (call him Max), a Computer Science graduate student who spends most of his free time scaling mountains.

Originally from Silver Spring, Max moved to Baltimore in 2006 to study Computer Science as an undergraduate. In the 4th grade, while others kids were busy building volcanoes for their science projects, Max and his computer scientist dad were putting together a computer that compared different algorithms for computing prime numbers. So choosing his major in college, explains Max, was a no-brainer.

Now a second year graduate student pursuing a Master’s in Computer Science, Max is working on a thesis that looks at predicting connections in social networks, like Facebook. A computer scientist with a sociological streak, Max’s project uses computers to understand how people interact with one another based on e-mail data sets taken from corporations.

Max’s foray into teaching began in 2010 when he became a Teaching Assistant for CMSC 202. He says his favorite part about being a TA are the discussions—where he actually gets to get up and teach and get his students excited about Computer Science. His dose of teacherly advice is as follows: “Program for fun.” If you don’t practice and enjoy programming, he explains, you will never be as good as someone who lives and breathes it.

Throughout his years at UMBC, Max’s on-campus involvement has extended past teaching. An avid dancer (he frequents Mobtown Ballroom in Baltimore City), he founded UMBC’s Swing Dancing club. He also helped conceive Project X, the club that sponsored a campus-wide scavenger hunt in 2008 and 2009 that included tasks like jumping into the Inner Harbor and high-fiving Freeman Hrabowski (which prompted a not-so-enthusiastic e-mail from the UMBC president). The prize for the hunt was an amalgamation of candy that was procured from the “Spot” using late-night meals over a series of weeks, explains Max.

But, Max’s favorite thing to do is the hobby he took up in high school: exploring mountains. A frequenter of Earth Treks—a climbing center in Columbia–Max had plans to climb frozen waterfalls in New York State this winter. His dream job, he says half-jokingly, is to be a mountaineering guide. Though, he may also consider a job in academia: “I would love to be a teacher,” he says.

1 Corinthians 2:1-5

¹ And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. ² For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. ³ I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. ⁴ My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, ⁵ so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.

Reflection:Paul declared that his message and preaching did not come from any of the best of what he could humanly conjure up. He said he was weak and he struggled with fear. His basically said that there was not enough power in him to testify about God and do ministry effectively. But he had a resource that far outweighed his weakness and fear – he had the power of God. Let us not trust in our human strength and wisdom, but instead let’s trust in the Spirit’s power alone to minister.

Response: Our strengths and weaknesses pale in comparison to the power of God and how He works in and through us as we try to minister to others. Let’s pray and ask God to help us realize our true weakness but also to not lose sight of the greatness of the power of God that has been given to us through the Holy Spirit. Let’s also ask God to fill us with His Spirit to effectively care for one another and minister to others, and to really rest our lives on His power.

“It’s the height of cold and flu season, with people coughing and sneezing and blowing their noses (not to mention their germs) every which way,” reports MSNBC’s “Body Odd” blog.

But not all those coughs and throat clears stem from illness, says Robert Provine, professor of psychology, who points out that we often cough when we hear others cough.

“We don’t know at this time [what’s behind it],” he says. “For example, is it because we have a brain mechanism that when it detects that sound, replicates it, as we seem to have for laughing and yawning? Or are we simply more likely to monitor our throat, to think, ‘Oh, there’s a tickle in my throat. I have to cough.’ The apparent contagiousness of coughing may be due to enhanced self-monitoring and not to a contagious response in the way we find in contagious laughs and yawns.”

The full post, “I cough, you cough: Why it’s contagious” appeared on the blog on February 29.

The “Children’s Lives at Colonial London Town” project, which was developed by UMBC’s Center for History Education’s “Making American History Master Teachers in Anne Arundel County” program, is the recipient of the 2012 Social Studies Program of Excellence Award from the Middle States Regional Council for the Social Studies, an affiliate of the National Council for the Social Studies. The award will be given on March 8, 2012 in Baltimore.

Marjoleine Kars, chair of history, has worked with a group of 4th and 5th grade teachers from Anne Arundel County Public Schools for the past four years. She and Mary Davis, her AACPS teacher specialist, developed the London Town project as a way to engage the teachers in doing authentic historical research that would supplement and enrich the school curriculum. The teachers determined that their students would be interested in learning about the lives of children who lived at London Town during the colonial period.

Kars, Davis and curators and education specialists at Historic London Town and Gardens, near Annapolis, MD, assisted the teachers as they worked with primary materials on site and in various collections to craft a storybook based on the lives of three families. In Fall 2011, the teachers began piloting the materials with their students. At the same time, UMBC initiated the next phase of the project: The creation of an interactive, digital resource called “Children’s Lives at Colonial London Town.” The project’s website is being designed by the UMBC New Media Studio and will feature rich historical materials, maps, timelines, as well an interactive storybook.

The website is due to launch in Summer 2012 and will be used in a program of teacher professional development during the 2012-2013 school year.