The Co-Video Mathematician

Many of my experiences during the pandemic and the response are probably similar to most. Some days I can’t see the differences from how it was before unless I look closely. I go for a hike with my family or watch my son play ball or my daughter do gymnas

  • PDF / 153,380 Bytes
  • 8 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
  • 19 Downloads / 169 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT


Many of my experiences during the pandemic and the response are probably similar to most. Some days I can’t see the differences from how it was before unless I look closely. I go for a hike with my family or watch my son play ball or my daughter do gymnastics. It feels normal till I look more closely and see how spread out we are, how little conversation there is in the stands. Other times what we have lost is clear, especially on days when my kids should be in school and are instead home with me. I fight the same depression that we all face. My family is fortunate. My wife and I are both professors (she in marketing at UMass Amherst, I in mathematics at Williams), so we could shift our jobs online. For me it was particularly easy, since for the past six years I’ve been recording all my lectures and posting them on YouTube (see https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/ sjmiller/public_html/). I was teaching two sections of multivariable calculus when we moved online; it took a minute to write my students and say that 2020 is now 2018, and for the rest of the semester we’ll watch the videos from the last time I taught the class; my students even sent out a meme of me enjoying drinks on a beach in the new normal! While this “freed” up time, there was a long line of demands on it too. The three biggest were teaching, my kids, and the regional school committee where I serve as vice-chair and chair of the now very busy education sub-committee. Though there are connections between them, I’ll break into three sections.

S. J. Miller (*) Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Wonders (ed.) Math in the Time of Corona, Mathematics Online First Collections, https://doi.org/10.1007/16618_2020_16

S. J. Miller

1 Teaching As I had been online for years, it was natural to reach out and help colleagues to transition. In addition to posting my videos, I had also opened up my classes to students at other schools, and taught online classes with colleagues over the summer (Introduction to Data Science, with Ella Foster-Molina, Jingchen (Monika) Hu, Moataz Khalifa and Natalia Toporikova, with tremendous administrative support by Liz Evans). Thus I could share first hand experiences of things that worked and things that most assuredly did not! In addition to helping friends at universities, I also did a lot with elementary and secondary school teachers. I had been giving continuing education lectures for years with the Teachers as Scholars program (https://www. teachersasscholars.org/), as well as designing modules and running on-line classes with the Value of Computational Thinking across Grade Levels team (with Midge Cozzens and many, many others, supported by DIMACS and the NSF: https://www. comap.com/Free/VCTAL/index.html). I moved this year’s course online, and spent many weeks helping others do the same for theirs. There were two parts to this. Obvious