My first post was an introduction to the the title of the blog, Intellectual Sprawl, and its purpose. This explains the subtitle, the motto, the blog’s description. It’s based on this piece by Mike Monteiro:
As with many jobs, teaching is about incremental improvement. When I think back to my first year of teaching at SI, I want to hunt down those thirty students from that first AP Psych class, and apologize to them. When I think of that first batch of sixty freshmen in World History 1, I really want to find them and apologize!
But, as the years have passed, I’ve made fewer and fewer mistakes — not none, just fewer.
It’s my hope that by writing down the mistakes that I make, as well as the occasional success, I can accelerate the process of shedding mistakes. The thing about teaching is that every year you delay improving something, more students have to endure the less-good — the more students that are deprived of a better education.