Purpose of this Blog
I first set up this blog back in 2011 to support an EricksonEducation website that I had set up to showcase my and my students work, but I was too busy grading papers to devote any time to it and abandoned it. Why come back to it now you ask? For what it is worth, I would still like to share my ideas and opinions on how to improve STEM education, and, in particular math education, especially for talented and underrepresented students.
In the 13 years since I first considered this, the situation appears to be worse than ever. Another reason for the resurrection of this blog is that in the intervening years I have written several books which address many of the issues that concern me. The latest book can be found here
Getting back to the implicit question of "what it is worth" which anyone who writes a book or resorts to blogging has to ask, yes, I realize that this is most likely a futile effort and view it as more of a "message in a bottle" or "Hail Mary" pass into the future: I hope the words here will help underrepresented students avoid the costly mistake of listening to people who don't necessarily have their intellectual development as a top priority. From my point of view, it is my duty to point out the problems and offer some solutions, but it ain't my fault if y'all don't listen.
Maybe the key benefit of this blog is that whenever I read or hear about something that bothers me in the news, I can just write about it here. My wife cares about racism too, but she's tired of listening to me talk about the same stuff over and over again and I didn't think Linkedin, the only social media account I have, is an appropriate place to post this material.