summer activities

This summer I had a fair amount of travel and conference/workshop activities. I’ve also been working on several projects that need finishing, and of course I have an eight-month old daughter. So I haven’t been blogging, even though several ideas for posts have been kicking around in my head. In order to get something posted, here’s a summary of some major events of the summer.

In May I taught a four-week session of “Transition to Abstract Mathematics”, our introduction-to-proofs course. I had seven students who worked very hard throughout the session. I was pleased that we were able to reach a point where the students could present results they selected from Proofs from THE BOOK during the final exam period.

In June I attended a program on “Teichmüller dynamics, mapping class groups and applications” at the Institut Fourier in Grenoble. (If any of those topics are of interest to you, videos of all the talks are available on YouTube.) I did not give a lecture, but I had a chance to talk with several people about work I did last summer with a Pepperdine student on the topic of “homothety” or “dilation” surfaces. Got a couple of more projects started during this time, to mix into the three or four I was already working on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It was also my first time visiting that part of France, so I traveled with family around the region. A couple of touristic highlights: tasting Chartreuse at the distillery in Voiron, and exploring the Citadel in Sisteron.

In July I participated in an IBL workshop run by the Academy of Inquiry-Based Learning. Four days with 25 enthusiastic teacher-learners and six fantastic facilitators. I started a set of IBL notes to use in the course on complex variables I’m teaching next spring and garnered several new tools and ideas for increasing student activity and engagement in the classroom.

Last weekend I joined the mastery grading session at MathFest. Tons more ideas here! It’s great to be part of so many communities of people who are generating and sharing ideas big and small.

I’ve promised to write at least one more blog post in the next week, for Sam Shah’s Virtual Conference on Mathematical Flavors. So it won’t be quite so long before I post again!