i got an e-mail out of the blue the other day from laurens gunnarsen, who i'd never heard of before. the subject heading was "a wild idea" and i think that i was pretty sure that it was spam and was about to delete it when i decided to read it for a laugh and was surprised to find out that it was a serious message.

apparently gunnarsen is an associate of some kind of someone named jonah sinick, who had some sort of interaction with john baez which i'm imagining had something to do with how gunnarsen came to contact me.

gunnarsen and/or sinick have some sort of ideas/plan/project involving the teaching of mathematics. so do i, of course, though unfortunately mine are pretty much all a lot closer to the idea stage than to the project stage...

the very rough idea that i've gotten so far about what they're trying to do is that they're more or less giving up on "the school system" and instead trying to find individual young students who show some sort of mathematical promise (which in practice for them might mean mainly children of rich silicon-valley-type parents; if i'm not misremembering too badly then i think that they actually even mentioned something like that somewhere) and offering them some sort of high-quality exposure to mathematical ideas and to the process of becoming a mathematician (or possibly some other type of creative user of mathematics). i think they intend that the experience should be interesting and exciting for the student, and in a way that genuinely arises from the mathematics. they mentioned drawing some kind of inspiration from the "suzuki method" of music teaching but i don't know very much about that method.

well, i probably didn't convey the idea that well. my description sounded pretty generic whereas i probably already got some more specific idea of what they intend. but not that much more specific, especially since i think that you can usually tell a lot more from watching someone actually teach than from hearing them describe their teaching philosophy.

i'm pretty eager to talk to gunnarsen, but i need to prepare first, to organize my thoughts about my own teaching ideas as well as about theirs.