Quora is one of my favorite time-waster websites, and somehow, I signed myself up to get a semi-weekly email from them that always seems to draw me into reading all the way down the email. Yesterday, I came across this question:

Since we’ve been studying energy in my send year Matter and Interactions course, and just finished studying centripetal forces in the previous chapter, this seemed like a wonderful problem for our last class of 2017.

We quickly went to estimating the things we knew to solve this. We’ve talked about the solar constant before and we knew that at the radius of the earth, every square meter receives 1400W of light energy on average. Knowing that it takes light 8 minutes to reach the Earth from the Sun, we quickly calculated the total power of the earth to be around 10^26W, and so we knew that the sun was losing 10^26 J of mass energy every second.

We knew that this energy was coming from fusion and that the sun was losing rest energy. We found the energy using the idea

$\Delta E =\Delta m c^2$

$\Delta m = 1.1 \times 10^9 kg$

This was a pretty huge mass, but we weren’t as worried when we realized the mass of the sun is ~10^31 kg.

We then wondered how long the sun had been around, and figured a good estimate would be slightly longer than the earth, or about 4 billion years. Since we only care about the how the orbit of the earth might have changed, we wondered how much the mass of the sun changed while the earth was around. Googling 4 billion years in seconds gave us 10^17s, so the sun has lost about 10^26 kg of mass or around 100 Earths of mass.

Though this turns out to be only about 0.01% of the Sun’s mass, we still wondered if this would have a noticeable effect on the Earth’s orbit, and it was at this point that we realized computational modeling could give us an answer. We’ve already written a model of the earth-sun which includes code like this:

dt = 86400 #make time step 1 day while t < 4e9 * dt: #update forces Fg = (-Gm_sunm=_earth/r**2)*norm(r) #update momentum earth.p = earth.p+Fg*dt #update position earth.pos = earth.pos + earth.p/earth.m*dt 

And we realized that we could add a single line about the gravitational force calculation that read: m_sun = m_sun -1.1e9 *dt 

to account for the changing mass of the sun. We then thought we could write a program that plotted two earths—one feeling a force from a constant mass sun, and one feeling a force from a changing mass sun, and see how they departed.

All of this was great until we realized we’d set a timestep of a single day, and a wile loop that would need to run for 4billion years, and around this time, the class was almost over, but we thought of a few problems:

• We can’t increase the size of the time step by much because our approximation that the final momentum is equal to the average momentum is conditioned upon the idea that the net force is constant over the time interval
• Our errors from the time steps accumulate as time goes forward in in our program, so we weren’t even sure that a 1-day long time step would work for a 4 billion year long calculation

The beauty of this was we saw that this would be a nearly impossible problem to solve in closed form—integrating a force that depends on both position and changing mass seems daunting to me, but it’s totally do-able (in theory) computationally. We also all agreed that the answer is likely to be there is no discernable change in the orbit.

I’m sure there is some algorithm or method that would allow you to use a larger time step, or somehow quickly compute these trajectories, but I must admit I don’t know what it is off the top of my head, and would welcome ideas from my readers.

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This is part of a three post series on the hiring process in independent schools from multiple perspectives. This post gives my advice to teaching candidates as someone who evaluated applicants to for our physics openings last year.

To learn about how we conducted our search for physics teaching candidates last year, read my post, Some thoughts on conducting a physics teacher search.

To learn about the perspective of a candidate applying for jobs at independent and boarding schools, see Megan’s post, How to get hired in an independent school

Now that we’ve completed our job search and hired 3 teachers, I thought I would share a few pieces of advice for job applicants.

## Consider independent schools

If you’ve thought about becoming a teacher, you might think you need to complete a degree in education, be certified or hold an advanced degree in physics in order to teach high school physics. While all of these things can be helpful, none of them are necessary to teach in an independent school, and we routinely hire teachers who have none of these qualifications. Almost none of my colleagues are certified to teach, few hold education degrees, though most do hold advanced degrees (many earn them while teaching at my school).

My school hires recent graduates—we’ve often hired those who think that they might want to teach for a few years before applying to graduate school. We also hire experienced candidates who’ve worked years in an industry and who aren’t sure that they and it hires people who have worked in industry for years and are ready to make a career change. Just about the only prerequisite I would say is common to our faculty and successful candidates is a deep love of their discipline, a passion for learning and an ability to connect with students.

And of course, if you’re an experienced teacher in a public or private school, we’d love to consider you for a teaching position as well. So what’s the next step?

## Think carefully about using a placement service

There are a number of teacher placement services that specialize in placing teachers in independent schools. Nearly every independent school uses these services for the majority of their hiring. Using a placement service is pretty simple, especially for physics teachers scarce and in demand. You fill out an online application, submit a personal statement, resume and a transcript if you are a recent grad, and will usually complete a short interview with a placement associate. After that, the placement service will begin sending you referrals of schools that they’ve sent your file to, according to your school and geographic preferences. You then contact the schools that interest you (or not, if they indicate such), and begin the job interview process at each of those schools. Along the way, you might also go to a hiring fair, where hundreds of schools and thousands of candidates gather in large hotel ballrooms for a series of 30-minute interviews that can feel like speed dating gone wild.

While a placement service can do a lot of the grunt work for you, I’d encourage you to seriously consider whether or not you need to use a placement service at all. Here are some reasons you might want to consider doing a search as a free agent.

• Placement services aren’t gatekeepers: You don’t need a placement service to find out about openings—most schools post them on their website, and the NAIS Job board (which you can even subscribe to via RSS). Also, no school gets so many applications that they would pass over a well-qualified application that came unsolicited—many times, these applications stand out more because they don’t come through the placement service.
• You get to customize your application: to a large degree, applications from placement services all look the same. When I browse through the website, I see a list of brief bios that are all formatted the same, and when I pull up the full file, I get cover sheet template that is the same for every candidate I read. I actually have to dig to find the unique documents that you have control over—your personal statement and resume. But if you simply email your application to us, those documents are the very first things we see.
• You are a free agent: If a school hires you, then the school must pay 15% of your starting salary to the placement service. Though I have no evidence of this, I’ve got to think that a person making a hiring decision choosing between two equally qualified candidates would be much more inclined to take the one who doesn’t come at a 15% premium, and heck, you might even be able to negotiate a signing bonus.
• Your blog is your application: If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance that you’re already part of the MTB0S/PhTBoS. You’ve got 10, 100, or 1000 followers, and you’re actively having conversations about teaching online. Sure, you could have a placement service send out your materials schools for you, or, you could save everyone a lot of trouble and send a letter and a link to your blog to schools that interest you, and if your letter crossed my desk, you’d be fast-tracked for a phone interview. There just aren’t that many candidates out there who are thinking about math/physics teaching with the level of depth, consistency, and engagement that is common on the MTBoS.

### If you do use a placement service

Ok, so you still want to use a placement service? That’s great. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I do ask that you do one thing. Please make sure your file is complete before the service begins to send out referrals. I can’t tell you how many partial files I read this year—I’d read a great resume, a wonderful reference or two, and then I’d look for a personal statement only to find it’s not there. Incomplete files give a poor impression to reviews, and I’m sure some just pass on them and never look back. Usually, I’d set a reminder to come back in a week to see if the file is complete, and a disappointing number of times, it wasn’t.

Also, a surprising number of times, it seemed like the documents in candidates files were first faxed to a working coal mine and back before being added to a file. I’m not sure how this happens in 2017, but I’d encourage you to make sure you give the placement service pristine PDF copies of all of your materials to prevent this from happening. It’s your responsibility to make sure your file is the best reflection of you.

Remeber also that you are likely just one row in a big web table of applicants, or one file in a stack of documents, each with the same format. You should think carefully about how the documents you have control over—your resume and your personal statement stand out and reflect who you are. At the moment I’m reading your file, I’m often looking for something, anything that will make me think it’s worth half an hour to offer you an interview. Why not take me out of the confines of the placement service’s website or off the page and direct me to a website that shares some of your work. I’d love to read a comment you wrote for a student, an interesting class activity you crafted, or just about anything else that shows me you are going out of your way to share who you are.

### Don’t forget the power of networking

Just like any job search, having a contact with someone at the school can obviously be a huge help. But don’t think that means you need to have some sort of deep connection. If you’ve commented on this blog, we’ve chatted at an AAPT meeting, or you’ve just emailed me out of the blue at some point to ask a teaching question, we’re connected. The MTBoS/PhTBoS really is one big family, and we seek to help each other as much as we can, so don’t be afraid to reach out.

### Your personal statement is the key

This also applies to your resume—bring the detail. Since we aren’t dealing with hundreds of applicants, I don’t mind long resumes. If you need a 3rd or 4th page to really describe everything that’s involved with coaching your robotics team, take it.

### Prepare for every interview

If you we offer you a phone interview, that means we found something interesting about you in your application and want to learn more. Like your personal statement, we are looking for you to tell us a story through this interview—don’t be afraid to reinterpret our questions to take us to the things you most want to talk about and give us the details that we can latch on to in follow-up questions. One of the things I love most about interviewing candidates is that I usually find myself coming away with new approaches and ideas for my own teaching, but for this to happen, you have to be ready to push past surface level responses to our questions.

We are also expecting that you are going make an effort to learn something about us. The easiest place to show us that you’ve done some preparation is when we turn the last half of the interview over to you and ask you what questions you have for us. Just about the worst thing, you can say at this point, and in any interview is “I think we’ve covered them all.” This is a great chance for you to ask us the questions that will help you to determine if our school is right for you, and I can’t tell you how great it was to hear a candidate say “yes, I have a whole list here.”

### Don’t forget the invisible interview

Any good advice about interviewing will tell you that your interview begins the moment you step through the door of the building or office—how you treat the receptionist is often as important as how you treat the CEO. This is doubly or triply true at a school. At my boarding school, we arrange for most teaching candidates to fly the closest airport to us, which is about 45 minutes away. Candidates get picked up by our school driver, a wonderful man who drives members of the community to and from the airport. If you engaged the school driver in a thoughtful conversation, and he happened to run into the headmaster, who is an occasional passenger to the airport, I’m sure it would be a significant point in your favor. Likewise, if you were rude or dismissive to him, or anyone you encounter during your visit, that could easily find its way back to a member of the search team and hurt your candidacy.

Since interview visits to our school are all day affairs, we usually host candidates overnight, and it’s not uncommon to arrange some sort of informal social gathering or dinner for the candidate the evening before. When I visited 20 years ago, I remember the headmaster saying he was going to drop me off at a small gathering of a few faculty at a colleague’s house. Being the naive 21-year old I was, I remember thinking how cool it was that faculty got together for wine and cheese socials during the middle of the week and that they were willing to invite a stranger like me. But in actuality, this was an informal part of the interview process too. No, participants didn’t fill out some sort of evaluation card rating my strengths and weaknesses afterward, but I am sure that the impressions I made with attendees at that event did play into the many many factors that were considered in making the decision to hire me.

Remember, we aren’t just looking to hire a teacher to teach a few classes, we are hiring a neighbor, and if we have brought you to campus, we are all pulling for you and hoping that you will have a great visit.

My advice, use this to your advantage you’re going to meet a lot of people and get a chance to learn from perspectives about our community—use that opportunity to its fullest.

This is part of a three post series on the hiring process in independent schools from multiple perspectives. This post discusses how we ran a search for a physics teacher last year.

To read advice I’d give to candidates looking for STEM jobs in independent schools, see my post, Advice for a physics job seeker from someone who just helped to hire three.

To learn about the perspective of a candidate applying for jobs at independent and boarding schools, see Megan’s post, How to get hired in an independent school

This year we had an opening for a physics teacher, and we ended up hiring a great one. In this post, I wanted to share some of the things we learned.

It’s always a challenge to find a physics teachers—there just aren’t that many of them. It’s even more challenging to find a physics teacher at a boarding school where we need our teachers to also coach and do dorm duty. I know this is a truism even at non-boarding schools, and for other STEM subjects, like math.

## Expanding the pool

We started this search knowing we wanted to begin with a large and diverse pool of candidates. In the past, we’ve simply posted a job description on our website and initiated a search with one of the major independent school search firms. Unsurprisingly, this approach doesn’t lead to the most diverse applicant pool—there just aren’t that many physics teachers out there who are familiar with the boarding/independent school world looking for jobs. Just as an example, one placement service we worked with sent us 20 applications for our physics opening, one of whom was a candidate of color and only two of whom were women. Compare this to the 84 candidates the placement service provided for a French opening. It seems that placement services have just as many challenges as we do in finding qualified candidates for physics openings. In order to get the diverse applicant pool we wanted, we needed to be more active in our search.

We worked to expand or pool in 3 ways. First, we posted the job on the NAIS Job Board. This is a simple and obvious first step, but one we’ve neglected in the past. It’s free to post ads on this site, and the job board serves as a clearinghouse for most jobs in the independent school world, so it’s very widely read. It easily yielded as many applicants as the placement service we routinely use.

We also posted to relevant listservs, most notably the Modeling Physics Listserv hosted by modelinginstruction.org. Even if you aren’t 100% into modeling, this is a great place to put your job in front of a great group of teachers who are deeply committed to physics, professional development, and student inquiry. You do have to be a member of this group in order to post, but if you have an opening that you would like to be shared, I would be happy to post it for you on this listserv. Other listservs worth considering might be your local AAPT subsection listserv, and the PHYS-L listserv for physics teachers.

By far the best thing we did in this job search was sending emails to the department chairs of about 80 physics programs around the country. Sadly, there’s no mailing list for this, so a colleague and I spent an hour of so googling “physics department chair for X University” and filling in a large spreadsheet, which I’ve posted here to save you a bit of work should you choose to do the same. In building this list, we made an explicit effort to target women’s colleges, historically black colleges and colleges with PhysTEC programs focused on physics teacher education. Our email included short 1 page flyer that could be posted on a bulletin board (do schools even do this anymore?), along with a description of our school and opening, and a statement that we would be happy to talk to anyone interested in talking about Physics Teaching, regardless of whether they were interested in our school or not. This letter turned out to be one of our best sources of potential applicants. Though these new applicants lacked experience, many demonstrated a deep commitment to physics education through their undergraduate careers and that rivaled many of the experienced applicants we saw. Three of our five finalists who came to campus contacted us first through this outreach, and the diversity candidates that came to us through this outreach was far greater than any other application source in our search.

Three of our five finalists who came to campus contacted us first through this outreach, and the diversity candidates that came to us through this outreach was far greater than any other application source in our search.

## Managing the Workflow

We had 3 people participating on the initial screening of applicants, and we knew we needed a way to manage the workflow of reviewing and contacting candidates. It’s easy to get buried in email about a job search, so we turned to Trello, a great to-do manager that specializes in group collaboration. Using Trello, we were able to set up lists for todos, as well as lists of candidates, complete with individual checklists listing each step of the review process.

As much as possible, we wanted to make sure we were keeping candidates informed of their status as we proceeded in our search, keeping in mind that most searches can drag on for much longer than you might first imagine. One thing that helped us tremendously in this effort was to pre-draft a set of correspondence templates for each stage of the search, from when an application is received, to the point where finalists are invited for a visit to campus. We tried to make sure we followed up at each of the following stages, and whenever more than a few weeks of time passed following our last contact with a candidate if only to say that we are still considering the application and appreciate the candidate’s patience.

### Have a low bar for phone screens

Our efforts worked, and we got a strong pool of diverse applicants. Because of this, we felt we should try to phone interview as many candidates as possible, which led to us doing about 20 phone interviews for this search. Though I’m not sure this approach would scale to a search that had hundreds of applicants, it turned out to be the right decision for us, as we met some great physics teachers, had wonderful conversations about teaching physics and were able to even more clearly identify our most standout candidates. For a number of the candidates that didn’t move forward in the search, I believe we established professional connections that will last into the future.

In order to make our phone interviews fair, we also tried as much as possible to work from a uniform set of questions. We conducted our interviews using skype/google hangouts (and usually had to switch to the other when we had audio problems with our first attempt) and always made sure we had two people on each call so that we could be taking notes while the other was talking. We drafted specific questions for candidates coming directly from college or without teaching experience. Having the question document open during the interview helped tremendously to make sure we were covering roughly the same ground with each interview.

The decision to move forward after a phone interview and invite a candidate for an on-campus interview can be a bit unpredictable and drawn out at a boarding school, given all the various needs the school has in terms of coaching, residential life, housing and other considerations. This is where it became especially important to stay in touch with candidates as the search progressed. But once a candidate did make it to the on-campus interview stage, the headmaster’s office took over, scheduling the day and arranging meetings with students, and teachers and administrators from all aspects of the life of the school. It’s also customary to ask teachers to do a mock lesson, but we’ve found it better to instead ask candidates to participate as a co-teacher in one of our classes. Most often, our students are working in small groups on problems as part of a modeling cycle, and so it’s very instructive to have a second teacher in the room to circulate and push students’ thinking, and it’s very useful to us to see how the teacher actually interacts with students in a small group setting, as this represents the dominant mode of learning for most of our classes. One other thing we do is try to make sure that we provided each visiting candidate with a complete copy of his/her schedule before arriving on campus. We also wrote a clear explanation of what we are looking for when the candidate visits our classes, to make explicit that this was an evaluative part of the interview process, and we didn’t simply want them to passively observe our class. Before arriving on campus we sent them the problems/lesson we were working on, and told them we would like them to interact and observe the students in the problem-solving process, and then followed up later in the day to see what observations they had about the work they saw. Often, this turned out to be a critical differentiator in evaluating candidates. Stronger candidates made sharper and more incisive observations of the students in the class.

In the end, we had three wonderful candidates visit the school, none of whom came through one of the major search firms. We ended up hiring our first choice—a candidate who found us through the NAIS job board posting.

## Stay conscious of your unconscious bias

Unconscious bias can be a significant obstacle in an effective search. The unconscious biases we all have to implicitly favor those candidates that are most similar to us have the potential to derail even the most well-intentioned efforts to seek out a diverse pool.I  know that if I let it, it would be easy to for me to fill our applicant pool with geeky, Duke basketball loving white guys like me. I would be most comfortable in those interviews, and as a result, I’d likely make those interviewees feel more comfortable, and probably feel a stronger “gut feeling” that this white, male, candidate is going to be a great fit for our department or program. Unconscious bias is how our brain processes information and how we work as social animals, and we have to work hard at every step of the search to make sure we aren’t allowing our own biases to interfere with the integrity of the search and the needs of the program. To learn more about how to do this, I strongly encourage you to check out the great resources Google’s HR department has created in their re:Work program on Unconscious Bias at Work. You’ll find incredible materials here focused on how to unbias your workplace, with a particular emphasis on the hiring process. Google has even created a step by step workbook and presentation you can adapt to do training at your own school. The one hour video Google re:Work produced on unconscious bias is one of the most informative and practical presentations on this subject that I’ve seen.

One takeaway I’d personally like to try from this is to try to adopt more of the practice of structured interviews in our phone screens. Although we did develop a set of common questions, we weren’t as careful in thinking beforehand about what excellent, average and poor responses to our questions looked like, and I think this would have been a very helpful exercise, given the research on how ineffective unstructured interviews can be. At the same time, we have to allow for personalization of the interview process adapt to the candidate’s experiences and background.

For those of us who work in privileged boarding and independent schools, I think we should also spend a fair amount of time considering our privilege as individuals familiar with and knowledgeable about the boarding school world. We must recognize that the candidates who are most familiar with the independent and boarding school world are going to naturally appear far more fluid and capable in interviews and informal settings throughout the interview process. This initial familiarity, however, may not be an indicator that their performance or adjustment to our community expectations will be superior to other candidates who are less familiar with the boarding school milieu and may, in fact, pick up our culture and habits fairly quickly. Nearly 20 years ago, this was certainly me. Though I was fortunate to attend a private college, I attended public school all my life, was the first in my family to go to college, and spent much of my interview at the school I work at now in awe of the incredible contrasts between this school and my own educational upbringing. I’m thankful that those that interviewed me were willing to see beyond all of the ways in which I might not have registered as a “good fit” for the culture – not because I wasn’t capable but because it was so foreign to me. Those who interviewed me gave me a chance learn.

## Further ideas

The lesson I’ve learned from this is that good schools should always looking for great teachers. We need to always be reaching out make connections with other teachers. Mainly, this is good practice—staying connected with professionals in your field keeps you abreast of the latest practices in the field, and also allows your best ideas to make it into the world. But making these connections also makes it much easier to find teachers when you do have an opening.

Reaching out directly to physics departments at colleges and universities turned out to be the biggest bang for our buck in terms of bringing a pool of qualified candidates from a range of backgrounds that wouldn’t have otherwise considered our opening. It has made me think that we could do even more outreach with our neighboring colleges and universities and invite any seniors who are considering teaching to spend a day visiting our school to get a better sense of what independent school teaching is like.

Our school asks each class/discipline to develop specific honor expectations for our classes. My physics colleagues and I put together this document, and I welcome your feedback to make it even better.

Honor Expectations in Physics

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Earlier in the summer, I wrote about paradigm lab assessments as a way to improve student understanding of the arguments we made in board meetings.

Summer is over, and it’s time to get to work cranking out these assessments. I’ve written a draft of the first assessment I’d like to do with my Honors Physics class, and I would love your feedback to make this even better.

CVPM Paradigm Assessment (Google Doc—feel free to edit and comment)

Some questions from me:

• This will be the first paradigm assessment for my students—am I testing too much here?
• I don’t want this to feel like a lab report. Would it be better to break this up into a quiz or some sort of form on Canvas?

I’ll admit, I can become infatuated with edTech from time to time. I also envision that it will have a much more powerful influence on my classroom than it ever seems to have. Despite this, my classroom is still fairly un-techy; I’m inconsistent at best when it comes to using our LMS, Canvas, and on any given you’re most likely to find my students solving physics problems in small groups using pencil and paper.

Still, I do dream of an app that will be a true game changer in my classroom, and I think the app of my dreams would look something like this:

• Quickly record and tag observations about students and groups—I want to be able to walk around the room, see a cool thing a student is doing, and write a note about it and tag it to the student to refer back to later when I’m writing comments. I’d also like to have the choice to make these comments private. It’d be even better if I could add photos, short video recordings, and audio notes. Double bonus if I could tag more than just the student, for instance #insightfulquestion.
• Let students submit photos and screencasets for feedback—It’s become a very common method of getting help in my class for students to send me a quick photo of their work for feedback. I can quickly look at the photo and write a few questions to push their thinking, or offer a hint. Right now, those emails pile up in my inbox, and I don’t have a nice way of organizing them or quickly searching for them. Putting all of these photos/screencasts in an app and then being able to organize and tag them would be a godsend.
• Let students create multimedia portfolios of their work and get feedback from me—I’d love for students to be able to create portfolios of their work—they could add photos, video and audio recordings and tag their work with various tags like #goallessproblem or #explainedmistake. I’d then be able to go through the portfolio of a student and give feedback, both as text, and ideally as written annotation. Bonus if the student can respond to my feedback and we can have a bit of a dialogue.

And of course, I’d want all of this to work nicely on multiple platforms, including my iPhone, student phones of every flavor of iOS and Android and laptops (with extra bonus for instantly de-flipping photos snapped using the webcam).

As best I can tell, this app doesn’t exist as a single app, but I have found 3 contenders that each do part of this. They are:

• Class Dojo—the observation app. Class dojo makes it super easy to record feedback about individual students or groups. If I never invite my students to have their own accounts, then my notes notes would be private, but if I do set my students up with accounts, it seems like students would see any notes I write about them. Class Dojo is fast—it’s really easy to group students and quickly leave feedback. My heisitation is that Class Dogo does seem to be the the app embodiement of Skinnerism, and I don’t want to create a points economy in my class is fed by Class Dojo like I’ve read about in so many elementary school classrooms
• Seesaw—an incredible digital portfolio. Seesaw really seems to do some great stuff for allowing you and students to quickly add multimedia to a digitial portfolio, but the ability to quickly add a note about a student leaves a lot to be desired—it’s very clunky and slow. But I’ve heard from a number of high school teachers that really like this app.
• Flipgrid—the new video sharing wonder. Flipgrid seems like a great way for students to share video. Many of its features seem to overlap with Seesaw, but Flipgrid’s presentation is unique, and I’ve seen a few links on Twitter of people using it as a tool for having people leave video messages when they miss a teacher or professor for office hours which seems cool (but not something I need to do). Flipgrid seems like it could be my photo/screencast submission app, but I’m not sure it does photos, which would be a dealbreaker, I’m afraid.

There’s a crazy part of me that thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to try to use all of these apps this year. But the sane part of me knows this is a really bad idea. Here’s where I’m reaching out to you—are there things these apps can do that I’m missing? Is there a way to get to 80% of what I want to do with just one of these apps?

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More details that make Twitter Math Camp so great:

• Thank you notes: Have you ever had a conference where you were literally provided with thank you notes and encouraged to write a note thanking anyone who made the conference useful for you? Have you ever seen a beach bag full of handwritten thank you notes? Go to TMC18, and you’ll see both of these.
• Simply amazing volunteers, and not wasting their time: Lots of conferences have volunteers to help make things run smoothly, but I’ve often noticed that those volunteers end up overtaxed and really struggle to participate fully in the conference itself. Somehow, TMC has voluneteers—someone stopped by the first few minutes of every session I was at to make sure the AV was working properly, but at the same time, I noticed that the volunteers were able to participate every bit as much as the anyone else.
• Flex sessions: Have you ever had a great idea at a conference and then just wanted to be able to talk about it with 10 other people? Or have you just wanted to do some yoga in the middle of the conference? All of this is possible at TMC. Flex sessions are 1 hour long open sessions that any can offer on the 3rd day of TMC, and you can propose one as late as a few hours before these sessions start. So great.

I also truly love the idea of having 2.5-hour morning sessions that extend for 3 days. This really lets you get to know a group of people in a way that seldom happens at a 3-day conference. Our closing circle at Elizabeth’s session was truly special. Elizabeth shared a really open look into how she organizes her classroom and truly delivered on her description to provide an immersive experience and a real window into her teaching.

TMC is dedicated to welcoming others and constantly re-examining itself to make sure it is being as inclusive as possible. Really, I’ve never been part of a more self-reflective community that is so committed to sharing, connecting and welcoming new people to the joy of math and math teaching.

Perhaps the best example of this was the flex session I sat in on with Tina Cardone discussing the TMC application process. Tina is one of the leaders of the registration process, and she shared a ton of statistics with the group about the TMC attendees. The thought that Tina and the rest of the TMC board put into planning this process—they’ve thought of so much and made so many efforts to diversify TMC. A few things I learned from attending this session is that nearly 110 of the TMC slots are filled by presenters. The remaining 90 slots were filled by a lottery and wait list, and only about 94 people completed the lottery application—and ultimately everyone who completed the lottery was able to gain attendance to TMC. This surprised me—I had submitted two session proposals, both of which were rejected (rightly so, when I compare my ideas to the sessions I saw), and after my sessions were rejected, I was really worried about my odds in the lottery.

The challenges of creating a 200 person conference that continues to allow all the people who know and love this community to attend while still remaining open to newcomers is one that I think might be right up there with P vs NP. There were a number of ideas for how we might be able to increase access and awareness of TMC, but I think this is something that our community will be struggling with for some time to come. I did have one big idea about how we might reach pre-service teachers and others who just love math, and I’m going to blog about that in another post.

With this post, my time at TMC must come to an end, as I’ve got to drive back to Delaware and start getting ready for school. I’m sad to miss the last day and the big reveal for TMC18, but I’m leaving knowing that this is a vibrant organization with an amazing future ahead of it.