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Risk

When I was young I was pretty good at improvisation; fortunately when I stopped being good at it I had some small failures and enough time to change course. Through most of my adult life I have been a planner.

Sometimes folk who plan are presented as being comically inflexible as a cliche, but that is actually a sign of poor planning when you don't give yourself margins for dealing with the unexpected (which happens fairly predictably).

I plan my courses well, with goals that I share with others combined with goals that make more sense to me individually. I adapt to the students in the class as best I can and adjust what the course does as best I can to meet their needs.

I am teaching a course this term for the first time that is upper level and refers to theory underlying something that is used in an awful lot of technology. I had one plan for how to demonstrate that flavor of technology after covering the theory as I planned the course.

Mid-semester I attended the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics. For my interests the technology changes slowly and I try to attend every four years or so. This time I saw a demonstration of technology that I had tried using earlier and decided was not ready for prime time, at least by me in a classroom.  The technology if I was able to be on top of it was now ready for prime time and was better than what I had originally planned for the course.

So I'm taking a risk and changing a large part of my course midstream, something I can't remember doing before. It's a risk and a lot of work but if I can't take risks for the right reasons then I should retire and get out of the way. I'm not quite ready to do that yet.

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