Math to the People

It has been 8 years since I’ve used this space. 8 years that I haven’t been writing publicly about my teaching. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t been teaching, it doesn’t meant that I haven’t been innovating. It just means that I haven’t had a need to write about it publicly.

“Why now?” you might ask. “Why is Telyn choosing this moment to relaunch eir blog?” Well, I have made a decision to go back to school for my Ph.D. in Math Education. I made the decision that I wanted to eventually do this over 5 years ago, but the time was not right until now.

As I have been reading up on Ph.D. programs and the application requirements, one of the things that has been standing out to me has been the requirement to turn in an academic writing sample. The truth is that it has been many many years since I have done any academic writing. I have not taken a course or written a paper in over five years, and I simply do not have anything to include as part of my Ph.D. application. It also seems a shame to me to start writing again, but to know that my writing will not be read by anyone other than university admissions officers.

This means that the primary purpose behind me relaunching my blog is to get practice writing again. I wish to exercise my writing muscles through this blog so that I can practice for my future studies. However, this blog is going to be more than that. Through researching various Ph.D. programs, I have realized that I am not certain where my current research interests lie. I know certain areas of education research that interested me years ago when I was taking education courses. It has been long enough since then that some of those interests have waned. Moreover, I simply am not up-to-date as to current developments in the scholarship of Math Education.

Therefore, part of this blog is going to be me commenting on reading I am doing into math education. I will use this as a way to challenge myself to perform independent study into some of the areas in which I am interested. However, I will also be using this blog as a way to talk about what is going on in my own classroom. Us Post-Secondary educators rarely get the opportunity to talk to anyone beyond our own departments about what we are doing in the classroom. I hope that, through this blog, I can help others learn from my teaching experiences just as I will be learning from the research of others.

I look forward to writing this blog, and I hope that others can get as much from reading it as I get from writing it.

Till next time,

Telyn