Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Accountability

Mathematics as a discipline teaches accountability. Every claim, whether it be a computation result or a statement (theorem) about how things work is accountable. We teach this accountability developmentally, with lower expectations at the beginning, and sometimes folk who study mathematics casually don't understand this. In my multivariable calculus classes, which I teach most frequently, I usually phrase my expectations as "give me a reason to believe your answer", citing my time working at an investment bank where my recommendations had financial repercussions and my supervisor never took my word for anything. In higher-level mathematics classes such as Abstract Algebra or Analysis I can be more explicit: these are the things we all agree to assume, these are the proof techniques which we understand; can you make an argument that convinces the community who have accepted those axioms and rules of inference that what you claim is true? We work hard to remove the ego fro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Contents of Most Recent Email to NC Senators

 Sent to Senators Tillis and Budd of NC this morning: My uncle was a police detective in Philadelphia before he retired. He showed his face and his badge to all he talked to on the job; he gave his name and business card to the public he served. This is what law enforcement officials have done in this country as policy until now; what if anything has changed?   The violent thugs serving in ICE are not law enforcement. They do not protect and serve; they attack and refuse to identify themselves. They are a paramilitary force responsible only to President Trump and his minions, who reflexively desecrate the memory of their victims. All dishonor themselves daily, all lack integrity. Immigration is a serious issue. Using brutal thugs to deal with it is like using a chainsaw to remove an appendix. The appendix may need to come out but using a chainsaw is a silly solution that kills people. It is painful to think of all the children incarcerated by ICE. It is unthinkable to all...
Post a Comment
Read more