ALAF

My financial plan for content creation

~ Jeff Anderson Math ~ 5 Comments

One of the principles I want to work towards as a content creator is transparency. I want to be transparent about my plans for the money I make and my long-term goals for my work as an author. Here is a short version of my longer-term goal for my content creation work:

  • I’d like to get to a place in my career where my full-time job consists of teaching in-person classes on campus two days a week in fall and winter quarters each year. Ideally, I would teach these classes on the same days of each week (in other words, I would be face-to-face with students on Mondays/Wednesdays or Tuesdays/Thursdays). I would spend the other two days each week building content. My Fridays are usually reserved for faculty projects specifically for Foothill College for which I need to attend meetings.
  • Each spring, I want a full quarter of paid work on my content creation projects. This work supports my teaching and hopefully impacts the lives of students (both mine and many others).

Below is an analysis for how much money this would cost. At the end of this post, I share my goals for the coming years and decades of my life.

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ALAF Update: Types of Math Models (v20230321)

~ Jeff Anderson Math ~ Leave a comment

In this post, I share my current work on a new section that will be part of my ALAF textbook project. This section is titled “Types of Math Models.” The goal of this work is to give a detailed overview of how math models are used in the world so that students can start to understand the larger contexts for the math they study in school. In this work I highlight five different categories of mathematical models including:

  • Models to understand our physical world
  • Models to conduct unethical or impractical experiments
  • Models to inform public policy
  • Models to make money
  • Models to save money

Under each category of model, I provide some real-world historical examples so that students can ground their intuition in concrete examples that show up in their world. I’m still early in the drafting process but I’m excited to share this work. I can’t wait to have students discover the frequency with which linear algebra shows up in so many of the models I highlight in this section.

anderson_applied_linear_algebra_types_of_mathematical_models_v20230321Download