understanding

As previously mentioned, I’ve been trying to decide what to do next year. Now I’ve made up my mind: I’m leaving the school I’ve been with for the past two years and going to a large (and functional) district school. This was a difficult choice in many ways, and I’ve now got a whole matrix of decision-making factors and weights to justify what I’m doing. But really, this was an emotional decision. The school I’ve been at just felt so bad, so awful, and this new school felt fresh and good when I first walked on campus to interview. I’m sure there are downsides and drawbacks, and that I’ll be complaining about those soon enough. But for now, I’m happy with my choice.

I’ll be teaching computer science (non-AP) instead of math, and teaching in the city instead of the outlying wastelands, so I will be living in a completely different world from the one I’ve written about for the past two years. It feels right to me that these 200 some-odd posts and the comments that go with them are their own entity, so this will be the end of this blog. I may start a new one, but it probably won’t be anonymous. If I’m teaching students about computers, I want to be sure we’re doing stuff as a class that involves reading and writing online. That will probably take up all my blogging time, and I’ll want to do it using my real name. Anyone interested in keeping in touch, leave a comment and I’ll point you over at whatever happens next. It’s been a good ride, and I’ve both learned and grown from interacting with people through this blog. Thank you all for being here for me and for each other. Keep fighting the good fight.

The completely non-sexy acronym AMS DMR somehow seems like a perfect fit for this site where you can download a huge amount of math journals in the public domain. I have barely scratched the surface here, but hopefully with more eyes looking at this stuff we can unearth some interesting goods.

For my question of the day today, I asked:

Do you think it’s fair for someone to take a picture of you in public and post it on the internet?

This of course was prompted by the recent street view controversy, but most students weren’t aware of that. They talked about how they generally don’t want unflattering pictures of themselves on their friends’ MySpace pages, but there were also dissenting voices basically saying, “Get over it.” When I brought up the issue of documenting police brutality, they almost all said that was a totally different thing. I usually let their voices and opinions guide the conversation, so I’m not sure how well they understood the problem of balance between an open society with press freedoms and the implications for personal privacy.

But when I explained what’s going on now with street view, they were remarkably pragmatic about the whole thing. More than one student (in various classes) came up with a practical solution: Just auto-detect faces and blur them out. They seemed to not be too worried about it in general.

When I took calculus in high school, my teacher was a master at creating alternate realities. Through the sheer force of his personality (and probably 20 years of practice) he drew in the class and we came out the other end knowing not only his procedures and policies but also a fictional personal mythology of math that included Charlton Heston, The Math Gods, aliens, Mickey Mouse, and a whole cast of other characters, inside jokes, and special terminology. We felt like we were part of a secret club. And, in a sense, we were — the mathematical elite of that high school.

So, I aspire. I’ve given quirky problems and projects about my spring break road trip in college, where to sit in the movie theater with your girlfriend (which some of the girls from the class verified with my girlfriend at the time in the ladies’ room during last year’s prom — and of course, she knew the answer), and some terrible puns lifted directly from my own high school experience (unLIMITed enjoyment, etc). This year, I gave my calculus students these little buttons that said “Calculus All-Stars” with a derivative on them after we finished that unit test. It quickly became the class identity. I didn’t set out to do that, but it’s almost as if every class wants to create an identity to set themselves apart and have a way to honor each other for their dedication and hard work. Anyway, this is just an observation that this effect can be used to great advantage and that masters of the game probably know this on several levels.