Books and writing are great, even though I don't read or write as much as
I'd like. I have been known to refer to myself as a "closet English
major," however. Some of the books I've read recently include
Why Many College Teachers Cannot Lecture
(J. Penner),
A Night in the Lonesome October
(R. Zelazny), and
Last Child in the Woods (R. Louv).
For some reason or another, indicated
books come with some level of endorsement by me, for whatever you think
that may be worth.
Course materials and their development occupied rather more of my
time once upon a time. (Now much of my time now is spent on official
instructional
technology stuff). But I think that
writing projects
are a good thing (as a bit of self-aggrandizement, c.f. also
here). For documenting a
course and accomplishments, a
course portfolio is cool
and handy.
Instructional technology
is what I do most of the time now. I'm involved with developing
the
Gateway testing
module for
WeBWorK, and have
spent some time creating
problem
banks that we use in courses at Michigan. There are other
applications we use there on the
instructional
technology server. If you have questions about any of that, feel
free to let me know.
Project NExT is
a professional development program for new Math Ph.D.s. It's a
program of the MAA that is open to
Math Ph.D.s in their first two years of full-time college or
university teaching. You can
search
for Fellows by different criteria, and there are
Section NExTs associated with many of
the MAA Sections.
I'm coordinating and teaching
Math
216 (differential equations;
ctools) in winter 2013, and taught and/or coordinated
it in winter and fall 2012. In winter 2011, I co-coordinated
Math 115
(calculus I, which I
taught
some years ago). In fall 2010 (and
before)
I taught
Math 316,
(a differential equations course; those are CTools links (sorry); some
other information is here).
In '09-'10 I coordinated and taught
Math 215
(calculus III;
local
home page for the fall). Sometime before that I taught
Math 116
(calculus II;
section
page), which I coordinated in Fall 2006, 2007 and 2008.
Before coming to
Michigan, I taught a
wide
variety
of courses at
Nebraska Wesleyan University.
A few personal items:
I did my
undergraduate work at
Grinnell College, a small liberal
arts school in Iowa, and graduate work in
applied math at
Northwestern University. Determined to
stay at a school with the same initials, I then taught at
Nebraska Wesleyan University, in
Lincoln, where at least one
other university may be found. I've been
known to play more ultimate (in
Ann Arbor) than is entirely
sensible. Music is a large part of the background on which my life runs.
And, as you might expect, I lean towards technical
geek-dom:
my laptops run Linux (including
ran Gentoo and more recently
Fedora).