@Alice, criminy. Can’t believe they posted that one. If ever I was gonna censor someone’s comment …

@Kate, I’d rather not. YouTube, as a video repository and social network, kinda bums me out. You can get an unblocked and higher-res experience with the iPod edition, though.

And YouTube doesn’t? Truly the e-rate filter gods are a fickle bunch.

This man just referenced one of my all time favorite moments in cinema. Obscure. Damn.

Don’t keep that one to yourself, lol.

As for the not learning enough as the years add up, this side note: The past few weeks I’ve been e-mailing a few math ed researchers in connection with finishing up the most improbably useful ed class I’ve taken so far. I’ve been asking questions about math specific learning disabilities, and one researcher writes back, listing some resources that look great and that I’ll check out when I can access a good library after the vacation, and then adds:

I’m sorry not to have more to offer you, but at this point you are noticing things in your students that the research world has not yet gotten around to exploring. You are very much on the cutting edge!

Now what I was asking about was nothing particularly unusual – definitely stuff my (admittedly above average geeky) math teacher colleagues would also discuss, and certainly nothing more complex than what Mr. K routinely dissects on his blog. It’s just that there is so little connection between those that are hired to know the literature and produce more of it, and those that work in classrooms.

I’m wondering if there aren’t ways of making more teacher-researcher interactions happen, in the interest of more learning across the board. And, your kind of assessment system might be particularly useful not only for helping students learn, but also for generating data of a kind that math ed researchers could use for teaching us more.

Not sure that investigations in the intersection of cognitive psychology and math ed are what would make teaching more exciting for you in the long run – but maybe it could add interest for a few years – no?

I mean, for a lawyer, say, there may be a new regulation or law that provokes a lot of new learning (I’m thinking when Sarbanes-Oxley hit and required a lot of retooling for corporate law types), or for a doctor there may be a new technique or a radically different treatment.

But otherwise, in most professions, there is a basic pile of learning (and the learning to learn it that goes along with the pile) that takes place early in your career and after that, it’s a search for new ideas, new techniques, info from other fields that can inform your teaching, etc. that informs how much you learn and change.