When I was away in Paris for Spring Break, people didn’t stop blogging. I spent a good number of hours catching up, while I’m sick and not in the mood to do anything really active. (When am I ever really in the mood to do active things, though?) So I logged into netvibes and buckled down… carnivals… posts… links…

There’s a lot of good stuff out there. Here’s some that I want to highlight:

1. A primer on the zeta function: you know this person knows how to break something down and present it in a clear way. It builds up, from smaller simple examples to build intuition, to a grand finish.
2. An analysis of whitespace — physical, and metaphorical: “I like to talk. I really wish I could just and listen to myself, because the information that I spew out is just awesome stuff. My students might disagree, though. If I reduce the amount of noise that I make, my students will be more likely to hear the important things I tell them. As a side note, I find that the misbehaviors in my class seem to happen when I am talking or the students are otherwise disengaged. So the less I talk and the more I work, the better! “
3. A funny (but insightful) take on parent teacher conferences, which I had to pass along to a number of my teacher friends. To whet your appetite: “I also feel I must apologize. I am sorry that I sent your child to the nurse the other day when he complained of a toothache. I don’t know where my head was. Thank you for the quick analysis of my motives via email that afternoon. Had you not pointed it out, I would have never picked up on my underlying desire to lessen the number of students in my class by sending them to the nurse for innocuous ailments. I got your message loud and clear though. Your use of 18 point font, bold print, all caps text really aids in the reading process. From now on, I will not send him to the nurse for toothaches.”
4. I struggle with homework, and it’s nice to know others do too. Good ideas for other forms of assessment are in the comments after the post. Huzzah!
5. A small, silly, cutsie way to get students engaged when dealing with coordinate points.
6. Carl Sagan on Flatland (from Science After Sunclipse)… Amazing expository. Good teaching. I was hooked and I know all this.