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stoutfellowI am no longer a young man. I am not even a young professor; the number of years since I came here is nearly double the number that remain before my planned retirement. I find myself thinking about my legacy, about what impact (slight though it surely will be) my years as a professor will have had on the world.
First and foremost, there are my students. There have been so many of them.... Probably most of them will scarcely remember me - the engineering students who had to take calculus from me, the nursing students suffering through a GenEd course on statistics.... There have been some, I hope, whose lives I have touched positively. A few, at least, have told me so. I still treasure a message that one of them left in my pigeonhole after he graduated.
Second, there is the handful of papers I have written and will write. There are woefully few of them; I hope to increase their number by quite a bit before the end, but they are what they are. Another part of this is the geometry seminar that T, W, and I have put together; that might outlast my tenure here.
Third, and weighing most on my mind at the moment.... Let me go back to before the beginning. I came here in 1986, one of three hires in the math department that year. In the year or two preceding, two or three professors had retired, prompting the new hires. One of them was a math-history buff. (I don't know what his actual specialty was; it might have been math history, for all I know.) He had been responsible for an occasionally-offered course on that subject, and with his retirement it fell into abeyance, although it remained in the catalog. Some years later, I was returning from class and talking to one of my students, and she asked if that course would ever be offered again. I told her I didn't know, but I would talk to the chair about it. I volunteered to teach it, and the next summer it was on the schedule. Over the next few years, it grew in popularity, despite being offered only in summer (almost always taught by me), and not in all of those. Eventually, our math ed people made a push to divide it into two courses - one on pre-modern mathematics, appropriate for elementary and middle-school teachers, and a modern course, better for high school teachers - and to move both into the regular year and curriculum. The course on modern mathematics became my bailiwick, as the broader course had been; both courses are quite popular.
Those courses are very different from our other offerings; I have put my own stamp on the modern course, and the assignments are, mostly, of my own creation. I begin to be concerned about its fate after I am gone; who will teach it after me, and how? I am considering putting out an open appeal to my colleagues, inviting any of the younger faculty who might be interested to start working with me, preparing to take it over, and perhaps teaching it in my stead even before I retire. I would be sad to see it fall into abeyance again, or become a rote lecture course. It will be more than a decade before I retire, so perhaps it is early to be considering this, but still... I worry.
First and foremost, there are my students. There have been so many of them.... Probably most of them will scarcely remember me - the engineering students who had to take calculus from me, the nursing students suffering through a GenEd course on statistics.... There have been some, I hope, whose lives I have touched positively. A few, at least, have told me so. I still treasure a message that one of them left in my pigeonhole after he graduated.
Professor :name:,I don't really know what he meant by that last, but I cherish the note.
Over the years you certainly have changed the way I think about mathematics. More importantly, your demeanor in the classroom changed the way I think about the world.
Always grateful,
:name:
Second, there is the handful of papers I have written and will write. There are woefully few of them; I hope to increase their number by quite a bit before the end, but they are what they are. Another part of this is the geometry seminar that T, W, and I have put together; that might outlast my tenure here.
Third, and weighing most on my mind at the moment.... Let me go back to before the beginning. I came here in 1986, one of three hires in the math department that year. In the year or two preceding, two or three professors had retired, prompting the new hires. One of them was a math-history buff. (I don't know what his actual specialty was; it might have been math history, for all I know.) He had been responsible for an occasionally-offered course on that subject, and with his retirement it fell into abeyance, although it remained in the catalog. Some years later, I was returning from class and talking to one of my students, and she asked if that course would ever be offered again. I told her I didn't know, but I would talk to the chair about it. I volunteered to teach it, and the next summer it was on the schedule. Over the next few years, it grew in popularity, despite being offered only in summer (almost always taught by me), and not in all of those. Eventually, our math ed people made a push to divide it into two courses - one on pre-modern mathematics, appropriate for elementary and middle-school teachers, and a modern course, better for high school teachers - and to move both into the regular year and curriculum. The course on modern mathematics became my bailiwick, as the broader course had been; both courses are quite popular.
Those courses are very different from our other offerings; I have put my own stamp on the modern course, and the assignments are, mostly, of my own creation. I begin to be concerned about its fate after I am gone; who will teach it after me, and how? I am considering putting out an open appeal to my colleagues, inviting any of the younger faculty who might be interested to start working with me, preparing to take it over, and perhaps teaching it in my stead even before I retire. I would be sad to see it fall into abeyance again, or become a rote lecture course. It will be more than a decade before I retire, so perhaps it is early to be considering this, but still... I worry.
