i'm way behind schedule in replying to laurens gunnarsen - i hope that he hasn't already lost interest - so i should try here to organize my thoughts about how to respond.

i guess that the ultra-short summary is that although i probably have all sorts of reservations about whatever it is that gunnarsen and/or sinick are proposing, i'm desperate enough in many ways that i'm eager to explore the possibilities further.

my life goal for almost as long as i've had one has been to be a mathematics teacher of a sort, and in this goal i've been a comical and/or tragical failure so far. my ideas about what mathematics is and how to teach it seem different enough from more commonly accepted such ideas that i've almost always found it intolerable to make the practical concessions necessary to obtain a teaching job; to pretend to teach under such conditions would so lack value for me that i find it preferable to continue living in unemployment and poverty.

it hasn't been so one-sidedly discouraging as to cause me to give up hope in the past, though, and even now i still haven't completely given up hope. if i'd had just a few more lucky breaks or a few less personal failings, if i'd worked harder at it and concentrated more exclusively on it; most especially, if i'd ever found someone remotely sympathetic to my ideas and in a position to do something about it, then i might have found a job that would actually be worthwhile to me. conceivably i could still do so.

what's usually considered mathematics teaching strikes me as more like the opposite of teaching, and the opposite of mathematics.

the audience that i seek for my mathematical ideas is a mathematically disenfranchised class of students... one of my major points of uncertainty as to whether what i want to do can mesh with what gunnarsen and sinick want to do is to what extent the class of students that they aim to teach overlaps the class that i want to teach...


gunnarsen's "war stories".... chinese room... baez... who do i want to reach... ??.....
relationship between mathematics and "real life" and "real world problems" ...
...need for practice...

classroom teaching ... schools... feedback/interaction ... moore method.... socratic ...