Help Pick Summer Content

As some readers know, my day job is in education. I’ve got a career in private education that I love, but it doesn’t cover all of the topics I’d love to teach. I’ve been thinking about covering those topics elsewhere, namely here, but wanted reader feedback in deciding the exact form it would take. Details below.

My gut instinct is to run a series of “summer school” articles, one a week through July and August, with a different topic each year. This gives me time to prepare them properly to go into depth, and also time for readers to pick and choose from options that they want to learn about. My formal education covers a lot of math and physics, but I’ve also done others. (My official designations are B.Sc., M.Sc. and B.Ed.)

I teach high school level physics and math often enough to keep that itch scratched. The topics with itches I can’t easily scratch during the day are as follows:

  • Relativity
  • Quantum Mechanics
  • Linear Algebra
  • Regular Algebra
  • Real Analysis (i.e. really in depth calculus)
  • History of Film
  • Education itself, particularly with math

The mental picture I have for the series would be weekly installments (probably published Monday mornings) delivered in PDF format where the math is involved, but I don’t intend to fight through calculus and linear algebra in anything but LaTeX. If the physics topics are chosen, each lesson would start with an entirely conceptual and non-mathematical portion, and that would then be following by the supporting math, so that the lessons would be accessible regardless of the reader’s mathematical abilities.

If you would be interested in a series on any of these topics, state your preference and we’ll see what happens.

6 replies on “Help Pick Summer Content”

  1. I’m probably in the minority here, but of those topics the ones I know the least about are history of film, and education. I’d be particularly interested in those (though all of these sound like fun).

    Otherwise, quantum mechanics also gets my vote. It’d be nice to see it presented with more concepts and less Stupid Math Tricks than the usual treatment has (but I’m not bitter at all).

  2. I woke up this morning gripped with an approach to quantum mechanics that I believe will work. That will be this year’s topic. If all goes well, I’ll make this an annual thing. Watch the Bureau for the first class on Monday, July 5, 2010.

Comments are closed.