JaMMin' in 2012

Aside from a brief post on my presentation on writing research, I've not yet had a chance to say anything about this year's Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM), from which I returned a little over a week ago. It was a fruitful affair, marking my first ever JMM where I spent more time in meetings than I did at talks. (Avoiding administration: ur doin it wrong.)

My first full day at JMM began with a two-hour meeting of the MAA's Committee on Undergraduate Programs in Mathematics (CUPM). I was recently appointed to this body, a group charged (as you might expect from its name) with making recommendations regarding the form and content of undergraduate mathematics programs across the country. Of course, this is a very loosely-defined directive, and mission-creep inevitably sneaks in. We spent a good deal of time talking not only about the undergraduate programs themselves but also their interface with K-12 education.

What struck me most about this meeting was my sense by its end that even the most well-informed of college mathematics educators are at a loss when it comes to solving some of the biggest problems facing math education today. Why is this? It's not like the problems are new ones: for decades we've dealt with student recruitment and retention, students' transition to higher mathematics, and imperfect transfer of skills from AP coursework to college coursework. It's not that we don't have proven pedagogies and time-tested methods of math education at our disposal...and it's not that we have a shortage of talented teachers to put those pedagogies and methods into practice. Maybe it's simply that the student body we're dealing with is diverse enough to foil any attempt at applying one-size-fits-all panaceas: more than ever before we serve a population whose members differ from one another ethnically, economically, socially, spiritually, intellectually, and in every other way we can think of...to extremes heretofore unimaginable.

The next meeting I had to make was a one-on-one with one of my colleagues in the AMS. After receiving a note I'd sent a few months ago to the Project NExT list regarding my forthcoming book, Flora had expressed interest in meeting with me at the Joint Meetings to talk about it in a bit more detail. It seems that earlier in her career she'd gone down a path much like the one I've followed recently, leading WAC and WID efforts at her home campus (DePauw University) before heading over to the AMS full-time. Flora and I shared an hour or so together talking about the importance of writing (and other modes of communication) in the teaching and learning of mathematics, and before long she invited me to take part in a morning meeting of the AMS's counterpart to the CUPM a couple of days later. Though she couldn't guarantee me the floor, she mentioned that one of the members of the committee had brought up writing as a potential topic for further elaboration by the AMS's Committee on Education (CoE). Topics selected for such elaboration become the focus of discussions and workshops at the CoE's fall meetings.

So I made it to that Friday morning meeting (still bleary-eyed after a night of revelry with several of my Vanderbilt friends). Less focused than the CUPM meeting had been, this one consisted of a loosely-knit (and often heated) conversation on several topics related to undergraduate math education. We spent about twenty minutes each topic: potential certification (by the MAA, AMS, or both jointly) of undergraduate mathematics programs, facilitating students' success in calculus courses, and the necessity for upper-level "elective" coursework like point-set topology.

The first of these was the most controversial issue, on which there was much disagreement. For my part, I brought up a concern that's faced the members of the Curriculum Review Task Force this past year: those major programs which face accreditation by a professional body are among the most rigid and time-consuming, placing heavy demands on both students and faculty. In this way they are unsustainable and resource-intensive. One of the other folks present at the AMS meeting countered that the "accredited" majors at her school are the ones that receive the most attention and resources from administration, and that this alone is reason enough to pursue the adoption some sort of certification procedure.

As you might suspect, I disagree. From the point of view of a math department member, this move might make sense: why not try to carve out a bigger chunk of the pie by forcing your school to support your attainment of accreditation benchmarks? But from the point of an administrator, the move appears more questionable: the pie's only so big, and with the economy the way it is, it's likely to get any bigger. If every department's trying to carve out bigger and bigger pieces for themselves, there's not going to be much to go around. We'll starve each other out if we don't cooperate more meaningfully at higher levels than the department.

To be continued, I'm sure.

The conference wasn't just one meeting after another. I had a lovely time reconnecting with several past REU students (including Wilhelmina, from way back in 2007!), grad school friends, Project NExT buddies, and a bajillion other people I'd not seen in a long time. I spread the word everywhere I could about my book, shamelessly leaving flyers on tables all over the convention center. I made it to a dozen or so talks on graph theory and group theory...and to several posters and presentations by my students, past and present. Most outstanding was Ino's and Ned's talk on their ongoing research into nutrition, given in the MAA's session on the mathematics of sustainability. They nailed it. Several folks had great questions afterward, and they received at least three invitations for collaboration and further presentation. We'll be following up on those shortly. Well done!

Much more work to do! But it's great fun. I'm looking forward to seeing what the coming weeks and months bring. 2012's gonna be a good one.

Blowing up the interwebs

I'm not sure this won't cause a cataclysmic loop of self-reference, but here's a link to a very nice little Chronicle write-up on this past Wednesday's JMM talk on our rhetorical analysis of the REU students' writing.

Nice.

I hope the folks that make it here from that site will take the time to poke around a little bit and read a bit more about my work with math and writing. Please think about picking up a copy of my forthcoming book, Student writing in the quantitative disciplines: A guide for college faculty, available in March from Jossey-Bass.

I hope once I'm settled back in at home tonight or tomorrow to write a run-down on my whole JMM experience (minus much of the after-hours goings-on), but for now I've got a few more talks to make.

On deck

It's a new year, and we're only a few days away from a new semester (beginning Monday, January 9th). There are big, big things in the works: my book comes out in a couple of months, the work of the Curriculum Review Task Force should be coming to a head this term (with concrete recommendations to the Faculty Senate due by April), and...well...other news items about which I'll be able to say more in a few weeks' time.

What's in store, teaching-wise? I've got three preps this term, one for two (large) sections of a course I've not taught in almost six years (Calculus III), one for a single (small) section of a course I've never taught (a Masters of Liberal Arts [MLA] course on the cognitive psychology behind mathematics), and one for my section (of two) of our senior seminar.

In the seven years I've been at UNCA we've not taught two concurrent sections of that last class, so I'm not sure exactly how we're going to manage it. I've yet to talk to my colleague Timon, who'll be teaching the other section. I imagine we might hold many activities together, splitting when it comes time for the students to present. There's simply no way we'll get through 26 student presentations in the five or six weeks we can offer them to speak. We'd have to have an unprecedented four talks per period to make it work, and that's simply unworkable. Thus splitting into separate sections for that part of the course, though not ideal, is about the best we'll be able to do.

Meanwhile, I've got plans for the other courses. Calc III, which I've not taught since Summer 2006 (the last summer I wasn't running the REU), I'll be running with a modified Moore method: one day each week will be devoted to discussion of new definitions and discoveries, a second day to small group work on the current problem set, and the third to problem presentations. Both sections of this class are big enough (roughly 30 students apiece) that I'll probably ask students to "present" simultaneously (two to four at a time) whenever feasible. This'll ensure that we make it through problem sets in a somewhat timely fashion, and that each individual student gets more opportunities to present. I've already worked with about half of the students in both sections, which familiarity will help me ease into the new term.

I can't say the same for my MLA course. It's been nearly a decade since I taught a graduate-level course (a special topics course on Coxeter groups and related groups which I led at UIUC back in Spring 2004), and this course differs dramatically from that one. We'll be exploring the learning and cognition of mathematics, and I plan to inject a good deal of philosophy and sociology into the mix as well, drawing on a number of sources to paint a picture of mathematics most people never see. We'll begin with Stanislas Dehaene's marvelous book Number sense: How the mind creates mathematics, about which I've blogged a bit before (see the "Dehaene" tag at the right), surveying the psychology of mathematical discovery, before moving onto Imre Lakatos's Proof and refutation, a philosophical treatise designed to lay bare the workings of what might be called the "mathematical method."

I'm not sure what to expect from this course. I suspect there'll be a week or two of me feeling out the students (currently there are seven students enrolled) to see where their interests and aptitudes lie. Likely none of them are straight-up mathematicians; I'll be curious to learn what they're hoping to get from the class, and I'm certain they'll help me give it more direction.

Ah, well...one week to go. Before then I'm off to Boston for this year's JMM, at which several UNCA students (and a few past REU students) are presenting. I'm particularly excited to see how far Ned's and Ino's work on nutritional data has come since their presentation at Kennesaw State in November. (They're presenting in a special session on mathematics and sustainability.)

Further bulletins as events warrant, likely soon.

Beaming...

...with pride! My undergraduate researchers Ned and Ino are making substantial progress on their nutritional analysis project. Fresh out of a meeting with leaders of the Housing Authority of the City of Asheville (HACA), they have a better-than-ever vision of the scope of their project. They'll be working with HACA to develop affordable, nutritious, and pleasant meal plans to distribute to low-income families who rely on the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (formerly called the Food Stamp program) for grocery purchases.

This project will be meaningful, rich, and offer technical mathematical challenges. I'm so excited for them, and immensely proud of the work they're doing. They're self-directed, focused, and quick. I have high hopes for this project, about which they're already scheduled to speak at two conferences, including the JMM in Boston in January.

Good stuff! Further bulletins as events warrant.

What a difference six years make

The last time I was in this hotel (The Marriott Marquis in Atlanta) was January of 2005. The Joint Meetings were in full swing. I'd crashed the party, masquerading as a registered attendee by slipping my 2002 JMM badge into a recycled badge holder and hoping no one would look too carefully at the logo on the badge's corner. No one gave me any trouble, probably because I kept a low profile and didn't try to duck into the heavily-guarded exhibit hall. After all, I'd come only for three first-round interviews (Seattle University, Carleton College, and UNCA) and a couple of dinners and lunches with Vandy friends.

The first two interviews were a bust. The third...well, you can guess how that one turned out.

Here I am again, six years later. The 2011 Conference on College Composition and Communication gets underway tomorrow. It's met since 1949, but this is my first. I'm thrilled to be here; I feel like I'm diving yet more deeply into the academic writing community, a very warm and welcoming pool of teachers and scholars.

I spent an hour or two over dinner perusing the program, planning my schedule for tomorrow. I'll never tire of the clever and insightful wordplay in which this community revels, play that goes beyond mere punnery: words like "ecopreneurship" and "hypermediacy" pepper the presentation titles, and boundaries of every variety (ethnic, national, racial, sexual, gender, etc.) are broken as presenters assert their selves unabashedly: "I write myself; this is who I am."

It makes me feel as though scholarship in my own discipline, even the scholarship of teaching and learning in math, is soft soap in comparison. A simplistic response would be to claim that considerations such as gender, ethnicity, etc., are irrelevant in the mathematics classroom. Yet this assertion is craven and evasive. Why are we (mathematicians) not so bold as to confront those issues of identity which surely affect our students' performance in our courses? Why are we afraid of letting ourselves and our students proclaim their own identity in their work? Are we afraid of losing what Scott Montgomery (in The scientific voice) calls "heroic objectivity"? Isn't hypermediacy as important in our field as it is in composition, if not more so ("hyperimmediacy")?

Anyway, I'm sure I'll head home in a few days with a boatload of new ideas to think about. For now, I'm going to head down to the hotel bar and have a drink while looking over the paper I wrote with the Charleston crew. I'm sure at some point in the next couple of days Damian and Bella and I will sit down to hash out the next stage of the project, and I want to be ready.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow!

19 hours until my first class of the Spring 2009 semester begins.

At 9:00 it's 75 minutes of Calc I.

At 12:45 MATH 280 takes over.

At 2:45, Abstract Algebra II.

And at 4:10 we'll convene the semester's first meeting of MATH 480.

One of the myriad things I somehow managed to get done in Washington was arrange for the first guest speaker of the semester in MATH 480: my new colleague from Clemson, Nikos, offered to speak on the semester's third Wednesday, two weeks hence. Much appreciated, Nikos!

What else went on at this year's JMM?

Six of our sixteen REU students from the past two years were present, and all were presenting research in some form or another. Two of them, Nestor and Norton, won prizes for their contributions to the undergraduate poster session (Nestor's poster dealt with work he completed at his second REU this past summer). Most of us got together for a lovely dinner on Tuesday night of the conference.

The Fifth Annual Semi-Official Vanderbilt Mathematics Department Reunion Dinner had five attendees this year, the smallest it's been since its inception. Timing the dinner was a pain in the patoot: there were three other mathematicians and assorted hangers-on present at the meetings, but they were unable to reconcile their schedules with everyone else's. Bummer.

I managed to make a few new contacts in the math/poetry community, including a number of other readers in the Wednesday night poetry reading (good to meet you, Kaz, if you're reading this, and thank you for all of your organizational ability, Katarina!) and a fellow faculty member who, like me, is using poetry in her classrooms in order to instill confidence in struggling students (props, Lorena!). Incidentally, if you're at all intrigued (as a poet, as a mathematician, or as both) by math poetry, you should do yourself a favor and find a copy of Strange Attractors (available from A.K. Peters Press, edited by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney), from which a number of last week's readings came.

Tip and I and Klaus, our colleague from Chemistry (hereinafte known as "The Shepherd"), made it over the river to Virginia to hold a highly productive meeting with one of the nabobs of the NSF. We got a number of practical suggestions regarding our still-in-progress vertically-integrated U/K-12 community outreach program proposal. Progress! Ah, elusive thing...

...and somehow I managed to make it to twenty-odd talks ranging from combinatorics to mathematical biology. That's "twenty-odd" with a hyphen. Although it must be admitted that some of them were odd indeed.

Finally, I should say that shout-outs go to some of my best friends whom I don't see nearly often enough, including the Vandy folks and the stalwart sterling dots who still manage to make it to most of the JMMs no matter where they're held.

So...

...tomorrow, huh?

I think I'm ready.

I'm starting MATH 280 off in the same manner I've started it off the last two times I've taught it: the first activities (both in-class and take-home) are highly intentional writing exercises designed to get students thinking about just what it means to write in mathematics, and it gets them doing peer review right away. Moreover, the exercises always prove immensely fun and popular.

Both Calc I and Abstract II get underway with review exercises. After doing a bit of brainstorming together on the first day of class, Friday will give the students a chance to strut their stuff as I'll be asking them to pair up between tomorrow and Friday and develop brief presentations on various topics from the relevant course material (Precalc and Abstract I, respectively).

And Senior Seminar? I'll figure that out when I get there. I think by 4:10 everyone (including me) is going to be so zombified that I'd be amazed if we get anything fruitful finished. I'll probably just make sure everyone's on board with the format, and maybe lead a discussion on what elements make up a good math talk. My hope is that in the first couple of weeks we can come up with a commonly-created rubric for oral presentations.

What else? Hmmmm...

...I'm going to go for now, and try to enjoy my last hours of relative boredom.

Tomorrow: class-by-class updates, as per custom.

New Year's resolutions

Happy new year, folks! As I write this it's already 2009 in 11/24 of the world, with just a few hours left in 2008 for me and mine in North Carolina.

I'm not overly eager to see 2008 go, as it's been a pretty decent year for me (economic downturn notwithstanding). I am looking forward to 2009, though, as I've got a number of irons warming in the fire that should be nice and hot before the new year is up.

What's gone on this past year? What's to come in the year that begins tomorrow?

2008 Teaching Highlights (in no particular order)

1. I'm still high from my work with this past year's crop of REU students. They were smart, quick, and immensely talented. I truly felt humbled by some of the work they put out this summer.

2. I received my third nomination by my students for a university-wide teaching award. I. Am. Honored. My thanks go out to all of the wonderful students who make this job such a pleasure to perform.

3. I'm very proud of having survived my first-ever teaching of Precalculus. It presented new challenges to me, ones that I feel I met rather well. I'm incredibly grateful to my Precalc students for their seemingly limitless patience and cooperation; they taught me innumerable tricks and techniques. I've learned much from them.

4. My first full calendar year of service on the Writing Intensive Committee has taught me boatloads about the many manifestations of academic writing. In attending my first two writing-related conferences, I've learned what a welcoming and supportive bunch the composition/rhetoric community is. I look forward to developing further ties with many of that community's members.

5. I've been intrigued and excited by the possibilities I've begun to study for interplay between math and poetry. What I've seen so far, I'm sure, is little more than the tip of the iceberg. What will the coming year bring?

2009 Coming Attractions (in no particular order)

1. Spring 2009 will be my first ever semester with four preps. However, I've taught every one of these classes before, so none of them are new preps, and I've already got the structure of two of them pretty much completely worked out. Is it going to kick my ass? We'll see.

2. In the coming semester my Super Saturday class will be on-line for the first time since I've been leading it. Now that I've got a solid curriculum and a number of good resources to back it up, I'm more confident than ever as I go into my sixth semester with the program. If things go well, I'm thinking of using the course materials as the basis for a children's book on hands-on advanced mathematics.

3. I'm excited to find out how the LaTeX module is going to work out in our Foundations course. It'll be difficult to assess the overall impact of this move right away, but I hope that by introducing the students to the software early in their careers it'll make them stronger expositors of mathematics down the road.

4. I'll be submitting several non-mathematics articles this coming year, comprising a few on the scholarship of teaching and learning in various settings. I'm eager to see how these are received.

5. The third summer of the REU is fast approaching, and with six of our past two years' alumni presenting at JMM, I'm wondering how we're going to top our past successes. I hope we can come through, though, as by June 5th I'm going to have to submit my application for continued funding from the NSF.


All that and more. But I'll leave it for tomorrow. For now, it's off to the celebration!

Write or wrong

Hey, hey, hey! It's a brand new year, folks!

So far this year I've done little related to my teaching, I've spent most of my time reading (gasp!) for pleasure. I've capped off seven books in the last two weeks...golly, it's nice to have free time. This morning, for instance, I finished Wangari Maathai's Unbowed: a memoir, a recounting of her life in Kenya and the founding of the Green Belt Movement, the organization primarily responsible for her receipt of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. Before that it was a collection of short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Georges Bernanos's The diary of a country priest, John Griffin's classic Black like me, and a pair of books by Jonathan Kozol and Kurt Vonnegut, reviewer elsewhere in this blog. It's been great to be free to read again, something I'm sadly unable to do much of during the school year.

I've also been mulling over what I'd like to accomplish through my teaching during the coming year.

Last year could be characterized by consciousness: I believe that more than anything else I learned to become fully conscious of my pedagogical efforts, and cognizant of the effect my deliberate actions would have on my students. I made conscious efforts to structure my assignments developmentally, to engage students in meaningful, conscious discovery. I believe that my conscious focus paid off, I feel as though my 280 class benefitted enormously, for instance, and the effort that went into Newton v. Leibniz was repaid tenfold by the students' growth through the project. (By the way, I heard back from Prof. Bornstein, she was delighted to hear from me, and wrote me a wonderful letter on her own ideas on teaching. She looks forward, as do I, to continued correspondence. I need to write back to her...)

So what is it that will characterize my teaching in the coming year?

Discovery, perhaps? That will certainly be a central theme of my upcoming graph theory course, in which I'll be challenging students to rebuild the discipline from scratch.

Or maybe authority? Might I focus my energy on encouraging my students to take the reins in their own studies, to ask the questions that need to be asked, to take responsibility for their own futures?

The line between these broad territories is an unclear one. I look forward to seeing how my classes take shape in the coming weeks.

At present I'm ready for Day One (now a week and a half away, on Monday, January 14th), freshly printed syllabi, worksheets, problem sets, and project outlines covering my desk. All I've got to do now is get some Skittles for the candy machine, in order to be ready for the third installment of Calc II's Confectionary Conundrum, an exercise whose execution I've now got down to an artform.

Good news came yesterday in the form of an e-mail from Texas: both my individual presentation and the panel presentation I'm putting together with a couple of my UNCA colleagues (one from the Writing Center and a second from Sociology) were accepted by the organizers for May's 9th International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference at UT-Austin! This is exciting. It'll be the first time I'll have had a chance to speak at a non-math-related conference, about a subject that's quickly becoming my second specialty (writing in the mathematics curriculum). In my individual presentation I'll be talking about the use of the "homework committees" and other structured peer-review exercises to encourage student self- and peer-assessment and self-authorship. Our panel will discuss the ways in which discipline-specific writing is taught, nurtured, and evaluated in the liberal arts setting. My portion of that program will invite non-mathematicians into the world of mathematical writing, indicating the similarities between math writing and writing in other disciplines. By highlighting the grammatical structures, syntactical rules, stylistic conventions, and assessment criteria that characterize mathematical writing and by comparing these aspects with corresponding aspects of writing elsewhere, I hope to dispel the notion that math writing must be an alien enterprise to non-mathematicians.

This is going to be an exciting conference.

Meanwhile I'm only a couple of days away from departing for San Diego, site of my fifth Joint Mathematical Meetings. A lot going on there (judging an UG poster session, presenting in the expander graphs and Ramanujan graphs special session, glad-handing every mother-lovin' person I can find to drum up support for my REU), but I'm already looking beyond it to May, bringing not only the Writing conference but also my next graph theory conference, to which I hope to drag a few students. (One of my freshpeople is making great progress on graceful labelings over this break! I told her to expect me to try to get her to go to this conference in May. More on that as events warrant...)

Nawlins

How-dee, y'all!

I'm just back from the city where creole and cajun cookery reign in the kitchen, where Zydeco music blares from nearly every storefront, where Bourbon Street flows with cheap liquor and smells like things unmentionable.

And where nearly 6,000 mathematicians assembled for the past few days to meet and greet and hash over the latest advances in mathematics and math pedagogy.

I had a chance to meet up with a HUGE number of friends, faculty, and colleagues from graduate school, and from my postdoc at UIUC (hello to all the Vandy/Illinois folks, especially Nikola up in Maine, one of my most regular readers!), and to meet a passel of new folks who share my interest in developing and implementing alternative pedagogical methods.

The session on writing and discussing mathematics in which I spoke about the writing component of our recently-completed MATH 365 was fantastic. I got a number of great ideas for group writing exercises and projects, some of which I hope to soon incorporate into my courses.

My mind is still awash, and not yet fully unpacked, so it'll be a little while before I assemble all my thoughts on these matters.

More to come soon, though, I promise...

280, Day One

I've hit upon a good (I hesitate to call it perfect) first-day activity for my 280 folks, the budding mathematicians being introduced to rigorous proofs for the first time.

We'll cogitate, construct, and verify the correctness of a theorem, a process which will involve sifting through a bit of empirical evidence, assembling from this data a hypothesis, shaping it into some meaningful mass with the help of a from-scratch definition or two, and demonstrating the validity of the resulting theorem with some careful logic and mathematically precise language. Emphasis will be placed on the "process" involved, including coming up with a hypothesis, expressing it with clear definitions, symbols, and terminology, and verifying its truth with a persuasive argument.

I don't want to give the game away completely, so I'll keep the topic under wraps for now, suffice to say it's a rather straightforward problem I'm sure everyone'll be able to handle.

In other news, I've finished my talk for the New Orleans meeting on the writing component of this past semester's 365 class. It was bloody hard to boil all that we did writing-wise in that course down into a ten-minute talk, and I hope what I've come up with does the trick.

The proverbial Morning After

Well, it's all over and done with.

I think.

There are a few minor details to wrap up with one or two folks, but nothing major. The third exams, the last journal entries, the presentations and concomitant posters are all graded and ready to hand back to those eager enough to come and retrieve them. (C'mon, y'all! Come and get 'em!)

Moreover, I've finished grading.

Ouch.

In the end, I'm really disappointed that I've got to hand out grades: how difficult is it to boil down all of the interactions, inquiries, examples, applications, projects, presentations, portfolios, and other assorted whatnots we've collaborated on in the past few months, and end up with a residuum summed up by a single letter?

I tell you what: put simply, it's a bitch.

But it's done. And ultimately many people in the class did very well. There's a pretty large number of As and A-minuses, a fair smattering of Bs and Cs of various sorts, and only a puny handful of anything lower.

Beyond the grades, there are the lessons learned. I hope that in the case of our class we've been able to transcend cliche and put some truth into that truism. I can't speak for the students in the class (I'd love it if they'd take the time to speak for themselves in the comments to this post!), but I know I've learned a lot.

1. I am never, ever going to do this with a class this size again. Ever. I'm figurin' the upper limit for this method is something in the ballpark of 15 students. At that point I could have an eminently manageable 5 teams of 3 folks each. With that small a number of teams, I could make the rounds in the classroom during group exercises and be sure of hitting everyone at least once. I could schedule team meetings more regularly to ensure frequent updates, and the teams would be small enough to allow for easier scheduling of research meetings. We started out with thirty-three students and ended with thirty, and as hair-pullingly frustrating as the size of the course sometimes made the daily proceedings, I'm quite frankly awed that more people didn't drop midway. I have nothing but admiration for the patience and dedication of those that stuck with it.

2. This method of learning is not for everyone. Those that fared best were those who were more used to courses run along these lines, and those whose learning styles are at odds with those assumed by a more "traditional" classroom. For instance, those who identified as "visual" learners were likelier to find our class useful. Others, more used to the run-of-the-mill lecture format, felt a bit out-of-place and longed for those infrequent days when I'd stand at the front of the room and yammer. As the semester wore on, I developed a balance between the applications-based guided discovery exercises I'd envisioned for the course and a more lecture-led semitraditional format, all based upon the worksheets I turned out, one or two per week.

3. This method of teaching is not for everyone. As folks who've had me for other courses can attest, my teaching style is probably best characterized by the word "enthusiastic." A number of other words have been used to describe my teaching (few of which, fortunately, are unprintable), but this is the word which predominates in my teaching evaluations at the end of every semester (runners-up include "approachable" and "accessible"). And honestly, without the charisma and energy that I put into my classes, I have NO IDEA how I would have made it through this semester. WARNING: if you plan on teaching in this manner, make sure that you've got lots of free time, and boundless energy. Even with all of the preparation I did in advance, I was still blown away by just how much I had to do to keep up with the work. A lot of this labor was on account of the size of the course, but much can be attributed to the method alone.

4. Some innovation is appreciated. Team quizzes, for example, went over enormously well. I'm keepin' those: you can be sure that every course I teach from this point forward will include some variant of that activity. This blog's been a popular feature, too. For a while there, before everyone was occupied with exams and presentations and other geegaws, I was getting at least one or two comments per post (and as many as 14 at one point), which ain't bad considering all of the other faaaaaaaaar more interesting blogs there are out there that my students could be reading. (By the way, a shout out to The Comics Curmudgeon, one of the baddest blogs on the internet.) Change of Basis, too, will live on, in modified form, as I move into the planning stages for next semester's classes. Look forward to my continued chronicling of my teaching adventures. There are several of you from Linear who are continuing on with me, either in 280 or in Number Theory...keep reading, folks, and keep posting!

I've learned more lessons than this, but those are the biggies.

I've gotta go for now, but hey, 365ers! I really would like to hear what you feel you've gotten from this class, so please feel free to leave a comment or two on this post: let me know what you've learned, what lessons you'll take with you.

This'll likely be the last post I make on 365 for quite a while, but I'll be back soon with updates regarding next semester's courses. And I'm slated to give a talk on the writing component of our class in January at the big annual Joint Meetings of the American Mathematical Society and Mathematics Association of America. I'll be sure to let you know how that goes. (And yes, Fiona, I'll let you know as soon as I hear about the Information Literacy Intensive status for the class...but I'll be seeing you in 280 in the Spring, so I know you won't be going anywhere!)

Au revoir, then. To everyone in my class: thank you. Thank you for your hard work, your time, your cooperation, your willingness to try something new, your everything. Take care, and have a wonderful Winter Break!