I wasn't planning on starting a blog. I was just trying to get some advice.
Some background:
I'm starting a tenure track research/teaching position in mathematics in the fall. Having only taught one course in the last four years as a postdoc, I'm feeling out of practice at teaching in general, and in particular have virtually no experience in planning and organizing a course as a whole.
But I'm also excited. Really excited. I've missed teaching, and I'll get to teach my favorite courses this year -- a semester of undergraduate combinatorics, and the year-long graduate topology sequence.
Like all right-thinking people, I've long been skeptical of the lecture as a teaching method, but what exactly to replace it with? Coming up teaching calculus at Michigan in grad school, I have some practical experience in alternative methods, as well as plenty of half-baked dreams of my own. But I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I'm aware and intrigued of the buzz around flipping the classroom and peer instruction, but also a bit skeptical, unsure where to start with these methods, and not feeling ready to take on anything too radical in my first year at a new place.
So, when I stumble across Brett's blog (I vaguely knew Brett in grad school), I decide he's a good person to ask about this and send him an email.
His advice: join google+ and twitter; start a teaching blog.
It was a bit like hearing you need to get more exercise from your doctor. Of course that would help. You were just maybe hoping there was something, well, a bit easier?
Anyway, here I am. It's rather plain now, and hopefully will stay that way for a long but finite time: I have more than enough fiddly computer/design stuff going on already, and just wanted to get this up and running.
And if it all goes horribly wrong, it's Brett's fault.
