Applied Abstractions

 Lots of personal and professional things swirling in my world, and I thought I'd reflect on a few of them here.  I am taking an accounting class through my institution. It is online and I just finished my first quiz with a 98%. Being a student I am noticing a few things; I really appreciate the well-defined nature of the course. Reading the textbook, completing a few assignments, struggling through some ideas, and taking a quiz every two weeks. It feels very doable and I don't feel overwhelmed. I wonder about this in my own courses, where I have quite a few components and parts, and wonder if their utility in helping students understand math is discounted by student confusion about what to do and when.  Being an educator it feels that I am trading my cognitive, social, and mathematical knowledge for money. That's the job, right? In accounting though it seems clear that you are trading a specific skill you have developed, like a craftsperson or an artisan. for money I know

 I am hosting a professional learning community for my state-level organization (SBCTC) and am sharing some thoughts on how I am planning my next term, using the Building Thinking Classrooms ( BTC ) framework. Below is the post I made on December 20th 2023 to our internal discussion forum. If you have thoughts, questions, or ideas about the BTC framework, post it below! ------------------------------  I am teaching MATH 104 Finite Mathematics with Support next term, and want to weave thinking questions throughout the course . This corequisite support course allows students can enter the course with below college level placement, and earn college credit in one term instead of two. These students are majoring in business, accounting, or other programs, eventually need to take MATH&148 Business Calculus. The course covers linear equations, systems of linear equations, linear programming, the Simplex method, functions (polynomial, rational, exponential, logarithmic), financial math, a

Emails suck. As a faculty member I have to spend large parts of my day responding to emails, to serve what Cal Newport calls "the hyperactive hivemind" where decisions are made by this constant back and forth of emails. Faculty can't eliminate emails completely, but I have found a few things to help me manage my email load, which could help others. Two precautions:  1. Each of our email systems are different, yet most will have a version of what I am suggesting. I use Outlook for my work email, and I am confident that these ideas could work for you in Gmail, Mail on Mac, etc.  2. Just as our email systems are different, you may use a different learning management system (LMS) than what my institution uses, Canvas. This is not a big deal as most (Moodle, Blackboard, etc.) have settings similar to what I use.  Now that I've gotten that out of the way, here are four tips to reduce how much time, effort, and energy you spend on emails as a faculty member. 

Along with everyone else freaking out about Chat GPT ( John Dickerson did a nice segment on CBS ) I thought I might test it out with a few basic questions from classes I teach. This year my focus is on introduction to statistics, so I thought I would start by asking it a few open-ended and computational questions. 

As an educator for a few years (uh...16?) I'm seeing a kind of 'blank spot' in the education landscape; individuals who take education research, and write articles and produce other media promoting the teaching practices from this research.  Contrast that with science writers who make up a whole industry of reading current science research, and writing for publications like Popular Science, National Geographic, and other national magazines. Sure, we might have organizations or institutions ( PERTS , the Rand Corporation , Dana Center , etc.) that create initiatives to support the implementation of one set of best practices or another, but we don't have individuals writing about the most recent advances in education research. Granted, there are breakthrough topics every so often that get printed, seemingly everywhere, like the growth mindset based on Dr. Carol Dweck's work. At the same time education topics are not a regular part of most American's media diet.  A

 I wrote a comment responding to my colleague Joe Pitkin's blog post The School Down the Hill From the Ivory Tower . In it he talks about the democratization of information through the internet, and the role community colleges play in higher education. Here is my comment, mainly so I can have it in an accessible spot for me to reference later.  Thank you for sharing your thoughts Joe! I’m having similar ‘big’ thoughts about community colleges and higher education in general. You’re right, our commitment to providing a high-quality, personalized education to anyone who walks in our doors is our value proposition, and we need support from the state, administrators, and colleagues to do that. Too often I see people from other departments operate under a scarcity model of resources, that to get ‘mine’ I must take from ‘yours’. That isn’t going to get us anywhere. Where I see the biggest opportunities for growth in higher education is the mismatch between the new role of educators and t