This Space is NOT for Lease

After abandoning my blog due to overwhelming time constraints from holding down 3 jobs, I've decided to try to pick back up where I left off. The time away has been well spent. I've been reading the blogs of some of my peers and I've come up with some good questions to explore here in the future. So to keep me motivated and you interested I'd like to give you a quick sneak preview of what I have in store for you in the coming weeks:

1. Finish my 4 point evaluation criteria of cloud computing products with the last requirement: Security.
2. A case study of how I used google's web services to run my tutoring sideline business.
3. Start exploring some pedagogical issues that I have run into in my teaching.

I'll explain #3 a little better here because it's what I've been thinking about most recently. (Pop it off the stack!) So this is the 3rd semester that I've been teaching Quantitative Literacy and I've got the lecture and testing bits down pat. But my familiarity with the material improves my student's performance only so far. After the 2nd time teaching this I've found that I can now foresee the pitfalls that a lot of my students fall into and head them off at the pass before they go plunging down a cliff (just because dramatic metaphors are fun!).

But that doesn't necessarily solve the problem of students who have been trained by a lifetime of public schools to just study for the test and avoid independent thought at all costs. Which as a math teacher and critical-thought-enthusiast frustrates the crap out of me! So my next thought is this: "Do we really want a society FULL of critical thinkers?" (After all somebody has to take out the garbage). And that leads me down a whole laundry list of questions:

• Should we be preparing EVERY student for a college degree?
• What makes a successful student?
• What makes a successful teacher?
• What makes a failing student?
• What makes a failing teacher?
• What is success?
• What is failure?
  
• Which set of students is better to teach: straight A students, C/D borderline students, F students?
• Does teaching need technology to prepare the future student? Or does technology need more pedagogy applied to it to adapt the machines to the way humans think, work and live?

If you have any answers, good. If you just have more questions to add, Better. If you're just confused and think I'm a little crazy, Perfect! Let me know in the comments.