New name, different focus

The math blog that was going to be here has been moved to new locations, one on Tumblr and a mirror to it on Posterous. This is a measured response to my partial, but extremely serious displeasure with Google's actions in the recent past. I don't take kindly to censorship, least of all from a company which claims to not practice it. Yes, they eventually stopped, but something this cut and dried should never have been allowed to become a test of wills.

What Google will get, instead of a math blog on its server, will be a more practical and somewhat less interesting side blog, on which I will be discussing plans for upcoming events in the real world, some (but not all) of which will involve post Calculus Math tutoring. I will caution some of those reading this, who might be overly interested in the words "sliding scale" that I tend to offer that consideration only to students who live in neighborhoods in which one doesn't want to be seen in designer clothes - not Englewood, but not the Magnificent Mile, either. Sometimes, when we're there, the scale might even slide all of the way down to zero. "You mean ... volunteer work?" Gasp. If you want to call it that - not that I would. I call it "poor people having each other's backs".

What is, to date, a lifetime maximum salary of $6000 per year (before taxes), I would question the sanity of anybody who would deny that the label fits, in my case; we're looking at a salary closer to what one would expect to see in the Third World than in America, though expectations might be changing. As poor people, we don't have much control over the prices the rich are willing to offer for our labor, but we do have more than a little control over who it is, that we offer that labor to. So, as long as I know where my rice and beans are coming from, fairly often I'll be willing to take a fellow pauper's $2 over a rich kid's offer of $60, just to send a little of what money can buy back in a direction where it has been going unreasonably infrequently, during the last few years. If I can bring a few newfound friends along on one of these trips, all the better - and healthier, too, in some places - but understand that my trust is earned, not given, and hard earned, at that.

The tutoring of which I'll be writing will never be pre-Calculus level. I never had any trouble whatsoever understanding pre-Calculus mathematics, which might speak well of me as a past student, but not so well as a prospective instructor in those courses. Saying "this is obvious" to somebody to whom the material is not at all obvious is not helpful, but I would find myself reduced to that. I can't get inside the head of those students - most people who've been in PhD programs really can't - and so I leave that kind of tutoring to those more competent in it than I am. I can already hear some semi-faceless individual preaching to me about my supposedly not taking poor people on their own terms, to which I would respond with some well founded indignation of my own - where do these supposedly progressive people get the idea that the poor can't handle more advanced material, or shouldn't be given the chance to do so? Especially when the poor seems to have been almost the only people handling it for some years, now, in those generations that have followed the boomers?



I mentioned trust. I will sometimes be mentioning events that will often have little to do with Mathematics, and will be held in the more clearly safe parts of town, things we do just for fun. The level of trust needed for me to let you along on a trip to a book reading is a lot lower than that needed for me to invite you along to the West side. These will be the events I invite strangers along on, and on which we - if there ever is a we in the context of these events - will get to know knew people. If there never is a we ... then I guess that the readership, whoever that is, will get to read a little journaling about nerd life in Chicago.

This might be of some interest to somebody, although really - there are far better towns for such interests, so expect to feel a little frustration in these pages. But by now, you probably expected that.

A little more clarity ...

Regarding the question posed at the end of my last post: Probably the main difference will be that the main blog focuses on problems other people bring up, and mirrors my Yahoo answers content, while on this one, the problems I solve will be of my own choosing. I might also write about posts on other Blogger journals of relevance to the teaching of Mathematics.

I'm still setting up a few companion accounts which will allow me to comment on some of the more common blog hosts. I will caution some of you, though, that I have little patience with Postmodernism or self-esteem based education. I do insist on rigor, and that does mean that the proofs are going to run longer than the hand waving soundbites favored by those who live to get great student evaluations. Mathematics is hard work. Anybody who tries to tell you otherwise is lying.

Let's not overanalyze this one

I find homework problems. I solve them. You read the solutions, and those solutions help you solve similar problems, helping you earn higher grades.

That's all this blog really is. It's an offshoot of a homework and answer journal I have elsewhere. I still have to work out what that means. We'll find out.