My math department is losing it’s department head, and two long-term members to retirement. And since the hiring season has now gotten underway, I’ve been looking at the resumes and personal statements of potential candidates. One of them had an online portfolio, with student quotations, sample tests and quizzes, videos of him teaching, and lots of other useful pieces of flotsam and jetsam.

Of course, my critical eye went first to the terrible website design.

But the idea, and the content, were good. And so, in the spirit of picking projects to focus my mind on so I don’t get depressed, I have decided to make my own portfolio.

http://www.virb.com/samjshah

It’s only in the beginning stages, but the idea behind it is go beyond creating something that will be useful when job hunting; it is going to be the place where I document my success, and show off who I am as a person and as a teacher (the two are inseparable). It’s going to archive the little things that just don’t fit or belong on a resume. (Small two day conferences I attended, quotations from students, good smartboards I’ve created, writings from grad school, etc.)

Which means that lots of flotsam and jetsam are going to be carefully placed in there. I want to put on this page all the things I would want to see/read if I were looking into hiring someone.

For this week in the faculty periodic professional development meeting, I was asked to present a problem, observation, case study (basically anything) to a set of 10 new teachers. (We switch off presenters each time we meet.) I chose to do mine on the relationship between teaching, presenting, and smartboard — and the evolution of my understanding of this relationship since I’ve started teaching.

Unlike animal and plant evolution which can take hundreds of years for permanent changes to become stable (I guess bacterial evolution can happen in a matter of hours), I’ve evolved a lot in my teaching style and I wanted to share that with others. So instead of bringing up problem and talking it to death without any resolution or actionable steps — which is the norm — I decided that my group would learn something.

And so I presented. I only had 1 hour to create the ten minute presentation, which is why it is on the bland side, but I think I inspired a few of the teachers. Especially one of the music teachers, for whom I see this to be a huge timesaver.

One of the lower school teachers who had heard about my presentation randomly stopped me and said that we should talk, because she too has been using smartboard a lot and we could trade observations and ideas.

But honestly, I’m not here to change anyone’s mind about anything. I’m here to do my stuff in the classroom. Whatever else comes out of it, great.

I don’t know why I’m posting this, because it has nothing to do with math or teaching, but I love love love this song and video!

Run to Your Grave from the mae shi on Vimeo.

I’m snug in a bug in a rug now. It’s cold. So cold, in fact, that I’ve plugged in my electric blanket and I’m tucking myself in my big fluffy down comforter. And better than that, I found out today that I came in second place in the Annual Report design contest I wrote about earlier.

I was so elated that I sent an email with the good news to my school’s “faculty folderol” course conference (basically, a place where faculty can post about anything from an apartment they are subletting to finding good restaurant recommendations)!

You can view the winners and read the judges analyses, the other entrants, and the initial competition description.

The two best things about this competition is that (1) I got a chance to reflect on the year, on the information we save and the information we discard and the information that we discarded that we wished we had saved, and on how my life has differed from January to December. (2) I learned to use a program like photoshop (but without 99% of the bells and whistles). It’s an opensource program called Seashore; you have to do your work on “layers.” A lot more work, but very easy to play around and edit in. The learning curve is steep. I made one slide a night; the first night’s work took about 3 hours, but the next three nights’ work took about 1 hour each.

So congrats to me. I’m proud.

I did get to enter dy/dan’s Annual Report contest. (It involved a lot of time management to spew these out — I did one slide a day.) I admit that there are some very easy ways to improve my images (my astute sister made some helpful suggestions), but since I have already submitted the four images, I’m going to leave them be.

The hard thing with design, I’ve learned in this short time, is that you are almost never going to be satisfied, because there is always one or two things that you realize could be made better (constantly tweaking and adjusting), or you come up with an entirely new idea that would take a huge amount of time to execute.

[Update: I am now officially on dy/dan’s page! Post here, and my contest entry here. Lookin’ good!]

This morning I gave a presentation to the 10th grade about a blog I set up for them to archive their community service week (which is two weeks from now). It went well. I left knowing I did a good (darn good) job with my presentation — I joked and got my point across.

The dean who was there said that after the presentation, he wanted to hug me (because it really got the kids to realize what the whole community service thing was about).

I had done a lot of work to set up this blog — but I did it because I believe in it, because I wanted to.

I got back to my office in the middle of the day, and on my desk was a bouquet of flowers. From the 10th grade advisers (homeroom teachers), in appreciation of all the work I’ve done on this. My heart glowed; it’s nice to have hard work is acknowledged.

Winter break has come to a close. With only a few minutes before I retire and wake up a teacher, I must confess that the lazy and carefree version of myself needed to emerge and have his way for a couple of weeks. Strangely, at the end of most breaks when I was in college, I was bored and raring to go back to classes; I definitely don’t feel ready.

Part of it, surely, is because I came up with three separate projects that I want to work on, and I’d love some free time to sit down and tear into them.

1. I want to enter this graphic design/information presentation contest, headed up by my blog hero dy/dan. So far I have ideas for 2 of the 4 pieces of information that I want to include: (1) all the restaurants I’ve eaten at in NYC and (2) how my network of friends has grown since moving here. I’m also toying with music and something dealing with my move. Unfortunately the due date for the competition is this Sunday and I am going to be too busy to work on it.

2. I want to learn how to use SmartBoard Recorder and SmartBoard Notebook to create teaching videos while I’m at my apartment (read: no smartboard projector there), and then find a good website to upload them to.

3. I want to learn quantum mechanics using lectures by Leonard Susskind from Stanford (found on iTunesU). I’ve already watched 8 hours of it, and I’m relieved that I can understand everything up to this point.

Part of my non-desire to go to school, the whiney part of me thinks, is that I don’t want to wake up at 6:30am everyday and go to bed by 10:30pm everyday.

Strangely, after such a long break, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to teach: how to lesson plan, how to engage a class, how to act. I know, I know… it’s like riding a bicycle, and all that jazz, but I won’t feel comfortable about returning to the classroom until I actually get there. The one thing I know in the back of my head, even though my immediate emotions aren’t sharing in it, is that once I enter a classroom, I get into a groove. I just have to hold out until that happens. In 9 hours.