Hello World!!!!

Just wanna get this first post on the blog without overthinking it really. I'm at Jackalope Coffee, a favorite work spot. It's summer vacation still (for two more glorious weeks); I've got a second coffee going and yes a real desire to get this blog underway.

 Why a blog?

I've been teaching for like seventeen or eighteen years at this point. I do have definite opinions and things that I think are right and wrong. I'll talk about those at some point. But---sometimes distressingly---I feel like I'm sincerely just figuring things out for the first time. Thus spawned the name of this blog.

I just finished reading Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of Freedom. As I understand it was his last book. I have not read his other work except probably some chapters from Pedagogy of the Oppressed in grad school... or now I remember also being assigned to read a chapter before starting the tutoring job at Daley College. I'm not sure they understood the text they assigned...

Anyway I've found reading this text to be extremely generative. To me I'm not always sure what that word means (generating things I guess) but here I mean that it gives me ideas that I want to implement in my classroom, or that feel like a truth I need to incorporate into my being. Let me pick a quote from the last chapter or so...

Teaching, which is really inseparable from learning, is of its very nature a joyful experience. It is also false to consider seriousness and joy to be contradictory, as if joy were the enemy of methodological rigor. On the contrary, the more methodologically rigorous I become in my questionings and in my teaching practice, the more joyful and hopeful I become as well. [Pedagogy of Freedom, page 125]

At this very moment the chorus from SAULT's "Wildfires" comes on, as if to echo and reify Freire's sentiments. I see this also echoed in Gholdy Mohamed's work (Joy as a discipline), in Cornelius Minor's work (We Got This) which I always tried to read but didn't quite see clearly until this summer. The other stuff I'm reading this summer are Woodson's Miseducation of the Negro, a book of essays by Alfie Kohn (Feel-Bad Education), and probably something else that I can't remember at the moment. Non-education books of the moment: Karl Knaussgard's Summer, a history of Malort, and a book of poetry called We Contain Landscapes by an author first name Patricjia (I've probably butchered the spelling). I bought the poetry book at the bookstore in O'Hare, surprisingly well-stocked, I think called Barbara's. Maybe I'll go back to this paragraph and verify this info, but anyway I'm trying to get this blogpost out there without distracting myself with the internet at large.

All this reading was inspired by probably a few things. The immediate spark came from the experience of going to the Math in the Mountains teaching camp in June. It was like a math teacher vacation, just solving cool problems at all hours, interspersed with little hikes, visits to Jackson, and some great conversation as well. Most of the other attendees worked at independent schools (why not say private schools?), some of these schools obviously supporting the type of attitude that mathematics is a creative discipline. That curiosity is important to the learning of mathematics. And I came away first of all refreshed and re-inspired to do something like this with my students. And then I got kinda mad thinking about all the supposedly well-meaning adults who impose a type of mathematics that is nothing like this. That's based around skills, either filling cavernous gaps or training quick children in even more technical skills. Like, how much time did I waste talking about students' dismal ACT scores? How did that talk help me become a better teacher? So I realized that I had (always had) the power to reject, to refuse the premise of the question, in the service of my students. This feeling combined with reading the book of essays by Kohn (a felicitous find at the thrift store in downtown Jackson), leading to bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress (omitted from the list above!), and that led into the the Freire and everything else.

Some things I want to write about:

• Ideas to implement class meetings, to discuss what students want to learn, how the class is going on a regular basis, to improve the classroom community, and to lead to more democratic structures within the classroom
• How to stop giving tests (should I stop giving tests?)
• How to change the idea that grades are the "payment" that students receive for doing work in class
• Specific math teaching topics, like the teaching of geometry in general, and what is algebra for, and other good stuff

Also I'm realizing that I do have this side of me that is, I guess I can call it, an amateur mathematician. There are three different investigations that I spent time on this summer, and I'd like to write up my results. Preview:

1. Spencer's problem: An ant is on the corner of a 2x2x2 cube. It has grid lines drawn in, I imagine like a small rubix cube. The ant can only travel along those grid lines. There are many possible "shortest paths" from one corner to the opposite corner, only traveling on the outside surface of the cube. How many?
2. Jessica's problem: It started with this puzzle [I've got to come back and add the image!] and then I investigated a generalization to the puzzle.
3. My own problem: I was looking up how to construct a pentagon, and then I started looking at golden ratio arithmetic, and powers of phi. For example, phi^2+phi^{-2}. I wonder if blogger supports any type of math input.

Surely that's long enough for the first post, so.... Hello!