Taking Care of Business
First off, if you have not already heard of Erik Seligman's wonderful Math Mutations podcast, I strongly recommend you bookmark it.
Presenting interesting mathematics topics in audio only (though transcripts for each podcast are provided on the site) is certainly no small task, I would think. And Seligman does a wonderful job—each podcast is delightfully brief, intriguing, entertaining, and intelligent.
Secondly, I would like to extend a long overdue (nearly a year overdue) public thank-you to both Joanne Jacobs and the folks at NCLBlog for giving me some free advertising for a presentation I gave last year at NCTM's national conference in Atlanta. The topic was parent involvment, and I received a pretty good crowd (about 60 people) in spite of having to compete with more popular, more mathematical topics in the same time slot.
In the presentation, I attempted to combine a theoretical framework for understanding parent involvement with current research outside of that framework—all while not directly addressing either the theory or many of the nuances of the research.
It was, to say the least, a learning experience. I was disappointed, though not really surprised, to see that, despite my implicit goal of reframing the issue of parent involvement to focus on how schools could think about and reach out to parents, the teachers in the audience were much more interested in talking about ways to simply get parents to the school.
I think every edu-blogger should have the opportunity to have one or more humbling experiences similar to that.
Presenting interesting mathematics topics in audio only (though transcripts for each podcast are provided on the site) is certainly no small task, I would think. And Seligman does a wonderful job—each podcast is delightfully brief, intriguing, entertaining, and intelligent.
Secondly, I would like to extend a long overdue (nearly a year overdue) public thank-you to both Joanne Jacobs and the folks at NCLBlog for giving me some free advertising for a presentation I gave last year at NCTM's national conference in Atlanta. The topic was parent involvment, and I received a pretty good crowd (about 60 people) in spite of having to compete with more popular, more mathematical topics in the same time slot.
In the presentation, I attempted to combine a theoretical framework for understanding parent involvement with current research outside of that framework—all while not directly addressing either the theory or many of the nuances of the research.
It was, to say the least, a learning experience. I was disappointed, though not really surprised, to see that, despite my implicit goal of reframing the issue of parent involvement to focus on how schools could think about and reach out to parents, the teachers in the audience were much more interested in talking about ways to simply get parents to the school.
I think every edu-blogger should have the opportunity to have one or more humbling experiences similar to that.