[email to david yetter]

hi. i'd like to thank you for trying to help me get admitted to ksu, but it looks like it's not going to work out.

i hope that you understand why it makes no sense for me to accept the conditions that i've been offered: i know that teaching in a coordinated setting is a guarantee of failure for me, and i also know that under more reasonable conditions i can prove that i can be a competent and successful teacher. it's no good for me to be promised to be allowed to teach independently contingent upon first demonstrating that i can teach competently working under a coordinator, when i know that i can't teach competently working under a coordinator.

the really absurd thing for me here is this:

when i was gathering references from people as part of the application process, a number of people mentioned to me that some citation index recorded a comparatively impressive number of citations of "my" papers. i barely know what a citation index is, and i presume that the papers in question are mainly ones actually written by john baez, for which i somehow got listed as co-author. without having carefully read those papers, i imagine that they give only a distorted impression of my actual ideas. nevertheless, i believe that those papers were often cited in significant part because of their expository qualities, and that those expository qualities reflect my contribution to a significant extent. so in a way, my expository abilities have been recognized by the mathematics community- and yet i've been in effect blacklisted from teaching for the last twenty-five years, when the primary business of teaching is exposition, the explanation of ideas.

could it be that it actually makes sense to give someone who's demonstrated an unusual expository ability a chance to teach in the classroom, when that's what they really want ???

it would be funny if it weren't tragic. hell, it's funny even though it _is_ tragic.

of course i don't mean to deny baez's own contributions to the exposition in those papers; in fact he wrote those papers single-handedly, usually rejecting any explicit attempt that i made to shape the narrative. but what he wrote about was often ideas that he learned from me. often he gave people the impression that i was the inventor of those ideas and that he was the expositor, but in those cases i was often actually telling him about ideas that he'd already been exposed to without understanding them, explaining them to him in a way that he could understand, and that he could then adapt to explain to other people via his natural medium of exposition which is writing. my own natural medium of exposition, in contrast, is standing up in front of a bunch of people and talking to them, which coincidentally happens to be what classroom teaching is like.

if you have any suggestions about how to convince gpac to change their minds and to agree to a fairer compromise, then i'd be interested to hear them. i expect that it's too late for fall 2012, but i may still be available after that and i'm still interested in ksu as one of my last best hopes.

i've arranged for teaching evaluation forms to be sent to the five students from the course on galois theory and related ideas that i taught last summer. i don't know whether any of the forms will actually be turned in, or what they might say. it was the first time in about 25 years that i had anything close to a real teaching job, and i felt very stiff and out of practice from decades of involuntary unemployment. it's unrealistic for me to expect to be able to return to the classroom and immediately be as good as i was 25 years ago, but with regular practice i think that i can get back to that level.

as for teaching evaluations from earlier teaching experiences, i've asked the schools involved for copies of such evaluations if they exist, but no evidence has turned up that any such evaluations still exist.

i would be open to the possibility of enrolling at ksu without having to teach at all, if such an arrangement could be made practical. i would even be open to the possibility of teaching under a coordinator if i wouldn't be penalized for my inevitable poor performance in such a circumstance; such a possibility however would make even less sense than what's actually been offered to me.

the only reasonable and fair possibility is for me to be allowed to teach independently, perhaps after first demonstrating my teaching ability by means of a "summer tryout" as i've suggested. there's even less excuse for being unable to arrange such a tryout now that the time frame for it is shifting from summer 2012 to summer 2013.

i am not open to the possibility of teaching under a coordinator if i will be penalized for my inevitable poor performance under such a circumstance.