Prologue … What was this blog?

This blog is officially ‘inactive’ as far as new posts and comments are concerned.  This ‘prologue’ post is my final commentary.

Goals and intentions:
When the three major professional efforts to change developmental mathematics began in 2009 (AMATYC’s New Life Project, Carnegie Foundation’s “Quantway & Statway”, and the Dana Center’s “Math Pathways”) people in the profession of developmental mathematics were facing a unique combination of opportunities and external forces.  This blog was begun with a goal of supporting fellow faculty members in their adaptations and challenges.  The words “hope” and “engagement” were central to my thinking at that time.

• Hope:  Dev math educators were being criticized and marginalized within the higher education community.  I was struck by the general comparisons to the gay community as represented by the film “Milk”, and particularly by the statement attributed to Harvey Milk that “you have got to give them hope”.  Without hope, people do not work toward shared goals and our profession is therefore diminished.
• Engagement:  Among administrators, faculty are sometimes classified as “green light” (will go along with doing something new) or “red light” (resists efforts to make changes).  While I recognize that such distinctions have some validity, I believe that the community can not leave any groups ‘behind’.  Nelson Mandela, in the movie “Invictus”, makes a point of including former ‘enemies’ when building collaborations that resulted in a new government.  I believe that progress is only made to the extent that all groups of faculty are deeply engaged in a process of critical thinking related to the problems in our shared space.

At the time I began this blog, the focus was on developmental mathematics (as seen in the name ‘dev math revival’).  If I was starting again, I would instead focus on the broader set of problems of ‘math in the first two years’.

Results (which types of Posts were ‘read’?)
In the 8.6666… years of maintaining this blog, I have published a bit over 500 posts.  Being a mathematician with a statistician’s interests, I have obviously watched the data on which posts got read.  I would not have anticipated the patterns observed:

1. The most popular posts dealt with ‘college algebra’ or pre-calculus.   Two of the top five posts (as measured by ‘hits’) are in this category.  Although not anticipated, I find this interest reassuring given how obsolete that part of our curriculum is.
2. One post (about ‘plus four’ and statistics in math ed) is the all-time leader for hits.  My guess is that there were hundreds of desperate stat students looking for help on adjustments in statistics and their search turned up my post.
3. The second most popular type of posts dealt with co-requisite remediation.  When the blog was begun, this terminology did not yet exist; however, the apparent popularity of this type of post is consistent with the goals which were in mind for the blog.
4. “Math Lit” was a big draw for the blog in the beginning; not so much anymore.  I worry that the reason is that people are either stuck in the traditional curriculum or they’ve been mandated to to co-requisites.  Given the logical limitations to co-requisites, and the generally awful nature of the traditional curriculum, this decline of interest is discouraging.

From time to time, I have posted about mathematics directly –such as “PEMDAS” (the terrible thing that it is) or basic algebra topics.  Some posts were about the teaching of mathematics.  Neither of these groups were terribly popular, and I am not concerned about that.  [The community has lots of resources for those types of ‘posts’, many of whom are more skilled and more articulate then I.]

Farewell
My retirement means that I will no longer be making posts.  The blog will remain visible, and might even help some people in the future.  As found for writing in general, my work in writing for this blog has helped me clarify my reasoning and sharpen my conclusions.  I am grateful for my colleagues who have taken the time to read and possibly engage with some commentary (even when you & I disagree).

Thank you!