It’s 2026, and I’m 20 years behind in starting a blog! So what am I doing with this blog and why does it exist?
It really comes down to one truth about me and one truth about the world.
I like talking about math and education and math education
I mostly have been talking about these topics in three contexts:
- Online, with my friends.
- In-person, with my friends.
- In class, with my students.
These three contexts have worked out really well: I love my friends, I love my students, and I love hanging around with both (online and in-person)! But something has been happening with the online spaces that I use to talk to both students and friends.
The world (and the Internet, especially) is easily manipulated by awful (powerful) people
These spaces have essentially always been controlled by big-tech and ed-tech companies, but recently that control has been both much more noticeable and much more hostile. Social media platforms are being tuned to algorithmically induce rage in its userbase. Generative AI tools are flooding the internet with slop. Learning Management Software is being filled with bloat.
So this blog is a small way for me to take a subset of the things I like to talk about with friends and with students and preserve them: I can host some of that here for preservation or for easy reference. It’s also a small way for me to disentangle myself and my courses from companies like Instructure, who are wont to take their product (and the courses hosted on it) in directions that I do not agree with or want to be associated with1.
I have some ideas of making this a small space where I can record some of my thoughts, talk about some teaching things that I’m thinking of at the moment, and reflect on some of the kinds of experiences that come up in the education industry, both in and out of the classroom. In that, I am hopeful that I can wrest some small portion of the internet away from the control of 5 \(\left(\stackrel{?}{\pm} 2\right)\) of the worst human beings you can imagine. But I am also hopeful that I can preserve some of my ideas and thoughts for myself to reference in the future.