Great post, and I just wanted to add to the growing EdCrowd chorus here. I helped start EdCrowd (http://edcrowd.com/ — a StackOverflow implementation) with a number of my friends in order to work on a solution to just the problems you are describing. For those not yet initiated to StackOverflow’s approach, we made a demo video here: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EuTzOBuTxs) and a little humorous video here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_BJqRaNT0U) about the difficulties of finding good answers to questions about teaching with Google searches.

The transformation that I can imagine good knowledge sharing tools bringing to education is the shift from teachers prioritizing finding solutions to the four or five biggest problems in their classroom (which is as much as one individual can handle) to looking everywhere for issues that could be improved now that the solutions can be crowd-sourced.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts on the site. You can reach us at edcrowd@gmail.com

How much better would my first years have been if I could have shared what I was doing with the crowd that frequents this blog (or Sam’s or Kate’s, or…) or the twitterers who are on the mathteachers list created by @JackieB? I like the idea of modeling something after the likes of Slashdot. That sort of collegial discussion is really valuable. A repository of ideas is ok, but the discussion and the community are the real special sauces.

–p

I can only speak personally here but when I started blogged in my third year teaching, I don’t think I had much to offer apart from stories about my own excitement, my own failure, my own learning about teaching. That was the extent of my leadership and advocacy. My first three years were all about getting my own house in order. I’m fairly certain those three years would have turned into five had I not found so many effective mentors throughout the edublogosphere.

I really enjoyed your posts on the NCTM conference, since low professional development budgets and salaries made attending this year outside of my means. I have this hope that NCTM will continue and that new teachers can eventually take part, because otherwise I have to hope that we can make something work on our own, and that intimidates me.

So far, EdCrowd looks like a great resource, and I’m looking forward to getting some work done there.

— On the question of new teacher leaders: Are mathematicians trained to respect mastery? We revere our elders who have published and expanded mathematics, while many new teachers have not and may never publish. I feel that this, along with the first year of “faking it” while teaching, really set me up to look to be led rather than decide to start leading. What do the first three years of teaching look like right now to new math teachers?

Why are first-time blog comments always so long? Sigh.