a time for some reflection
The current academic year is coming to its end; I taught my last class a week and a bit ago, and my next proper class (besides the occasional seminar) will be in the autumn. There is a vast amount to be done over the summer, not directly related to teaching but directly related to the job as a whole. One research paper is largely done, needed a bit of tidying and some attention at one point of the argument. Another paper dances before my eyes, a mirage on the horizon, as yet unformed and nascent.
There are other projects as well, problems I would like to spend some time thinking about and working through. This is a part of the job, voyaging beyond the frontiers of extant human knowledge (how grand it sounds).
And both of these aspects of the role are aspects of it that I enjoy. Working with students and expanding their mathematical horizons, and then expanding the horizons of mathematics itself, are engaging and awesome experiences.
But this time, at the end of the teaching year, is a time for reflection. The teaching year went well, I think. I picked up a new class in semester 2, and I learned a lot and I hope the students did as well. This intertwines in some way to topics I’ve covered in previous chapters in this extended scree, such as the distance between teacher and student.
So in this case, though I hadn’t taught the class before, I have a few decades of both the experience of doing math and making sense of math, but also of teaching, of making sense of new things and relating them to other aspects of math. And what’s interesting is that in the process of preparing and teaching, I came across one or two things that I might be able to use in some of my mathematical project work.
There are other sides to this reflection, beyond the day job. There is the old parable of rock and gravel and sand. And it’s again time to undertake the audit, to empty the jar as it were and to examine my current rocks, my current gravel and my current sand. It’s a tricky examination, because all come with their sunk costs. And the fallacy notwithstanding, it’s hard to grind rocks into sand or to press sand to form gravel. It’ll be an interesting summer.
multijimbo 