OK then. This is the start of my blog. Not the most exciting start. I guess I should introduce myself…
Hi. I’m Shaun, a maths teacher from Australia, rural Victoria to be more precise. I’ve been teaching for four and not-quite-a-half years, at a small P-12 school (combined primary and secondary), though all of my classes are senior secondary (well, this year anyway). I also teach IT and sometimes pretend I know something about Physics.
OK, I’ve actually taught a bit of Physics over the last few years. It’s just, who really wants to teach Physics when they could be teaching Maths? 😉
I’m planning to use this blog to share teaching ideas, and maybe just ramble about anything else that catches my interest (typically fairly nerdy stuff). That said, who knows how that will actually turn out?
I’ve been following a number of mathsy type blogs for a while now, so I thought it was about time I jumped in on the action. This is also the first year I’ve introduced a new ICT class ‘Web Development’ as a year 9 & 10 elective, so I thought building a website was a good way to update my own skills.
For that reason, I chose to build this site myself, rather than going with a service like blogger or wordpress.com. I’m using ghost as the backend, but I wrote the theme myself; if you really feel the need to look at my code, please ignore the fact that it’s a complete mess at the moment. I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of commented lines that I haven’t gotten around to deleting yet. I really am an amateur at this stuff.
So about the name. I realise already that it wasn’t the best choice of a domain name, as the US (and a fair chunk of the rest of the world) doesn’t spell ‘factorise’ the same way we do here. So that doesn’t make it all that easy to find.
And to be honest, I don’t really know myself what it means. Number Theory was my favourite course at uni, so I guess that’s what I chose a reference to? But who knows what ‘The Prime Factorisation of Me’ is supposed to be about. Is it possible to factorise a person? Maybe it’s saying that by breaking the different aspects of me and my teaching practice down into my simple prime parts, I can build them up together to become a more awesome, composite, teacher? Or maybe it’s the first available domain I found and now I’m just sticking to it.
(For the record, just as the default theme for Ghost is called ‘Casper’, I’m currently calling the theme of this blog ‘Composite Human’. I thought it was appropriate.)
Also, it’s less than ideal, but I don’t have comments yet, because Ghost doesn’t support them. I’m still figuring out how to do that one. Maybe Disqus? If you have any suggestions, maybe you could leave them in the … oh, right.
So that’s the awkward first post out of the way. Maybe next time I’ll actually have something interesting to say.
EDIT: So to address the whole no comments thing, I’m now on twitter: @theshauncarter.
EDIT 2: As you may have noticed, I’ve decided to give Disqus a trial run. Was really quick to set up, but it seems to act a little weird. In theory I’ve allowed guest comments, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
EDIT 3: My bad, guest comments are working fine.