Blogs

Ann Hassenpflug has an interesting article on the difficulty of teaching a graduate-level education class when parents whose childcare arrangements have fallen through bring their children to class. A lively and sometimes heated discussion follows in the comments.

What’s New at UVenus: ● A couple of shout-outs for University of Venus in this month’s Teaching Carnival at ProfHacker...

Too Big to Know is a surprisingly small book (around 200 pages - you can sample an excerpt at The Atlantic) that covers a lot of ground, touching on issues of interest to anyone who wonders where knowledge is headed and what shape it is taking in this unstable era. The subtitle, written in the elevator pitch style that is so popular with publishers these days, provides a hint of what's inside: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room.

The busy life of a grad student is often spent juggling multiple responsibilities from school, work and personal life. If you’re anything like me, you’re always finding yourself overcommitted to things and something has to drop to the wayside. One of my goals has been to better manage my time and set up boundaries with my commitments. I’m not naturally a planner (big understatement!), but I’ve come to realize that if I’m not careful, things are just going to fall apart.

Academic conferences offer opportunities to test-run ideas before like-minded colleagues, to network, and to key into conversations within one’s discipline or specialization. For many academics, it’s an integral part of the job. In my University’s promotion system, considerable weight is given to presenting papers at academic conferences. Whether local, national or international, conferences provide venues for institutional promotion-- a chance to showcase research outputs from our little corner of the world.

Lately, I've had to become an expert at running projects outside of my expertise. I'm heading up a website project and a room A/V design projects, both subjects I know just enough about to be dangerous.

This Marketplace report brought me up short. It’s about Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, endorsing gay marriage in New York. The report notes that CEO’s of major banks aren’t generally known for taking positions on potentially divisive social issues.

There are many times in math that we encounter behavior that appears to repeat or cycle back on itself. For example, one often finds strings of repeating digits when trying to convert a rational number into a decimal, or one can observe cyclical behavior associated with the trigonometric functions. Such behavior came to mind recently as I realized that we are moving from winter into a spring that will eventually turn into summer, and that, as a mom, I needed to plan for such a change in seasons.