Sunday at Work

Without doing too much information about poor Milo, his tummy seems to be doing better today. Now we're on to project fatten him back up.

The kids are going to have to shift back into an earlier schedule with the resuming of school tomorrow. They've grown accustomed to sleep in until 7:30 or even 8! It has been pretty nice.

Today I am writing an article that a practitioner journal invited me to write. I agreed to do it back in September and we negotiated a January deadline. I found it strange and amusing that this particular journal invited me to write an article because it is without a doubt the journal I have had the most trouble getting my non-solicited articles accepted into. Anyway, the article is about how to promote proof at the middle school level, and it's pretty fun to write. So far.

Sometimes I worry about all of this writing I've been doing this year for teachers. This is part of the "service" part of my job, reaching out to the teaching community to translate my research into practical ideas and tips for the classroom. Ethically, I think it is the part that matters most, because my work is ultimately aimed at improving math instruction and learning. Why bother doing all of the fancy research if it never gets translated for teachers? But at the same time, it is probably kind of unhelpful or even harmful for the tenure case to be doing this. Every hour I spend doing something like this is an hour not spent creating a theoretical or empirical article about deep ideas and showing that I am an important researcher (or whatever).

Anyway, I don't know. I've been doing it because people asked me to, and because I do think it is important and it matters. But sometimes I wonder...