Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska, Ph.D., (Full) Professor of Mathematics and ICT in Education, Univ. St. Clement of Ohrid, Bitola, FYR Macedonia
Socrates: Academics suffer from many delusions caused by their deep isolations in the ivory towers of academia.
My priority is creating useful, understandable, consistent math pages for our pupils/students and for people like myself who are educators in the field.
Because these goals are NOT the goals of en.wikipedia as evidenced on the wikiproject portal, I try (not always successfully :)) to only work on the Translate Wikipedia project, focusing on articles in Macedonian (where I have lived and worked for over 35 years) and whose goals are to actually provide a useful OER.
I am totally not interested in form over content. That said, I want my pages to be very readable and helpful so I spend a lot of time on spacing, images, etc.
- If you need a reference for a math concept - feel free to contact me. I have now collected about 60 books including encyclopedias, online resources, textbooks, etc. on 5th-12th grade and on 1st and 2nd year university mathematics (all STEM).
- If you need an image (or something changed on any of my images) - feel free to contact me. I certainly will try to help :)
Be aware that I am ONLY interested
- in people who think mathematics is a living, breathing subject that interacts with everyone's life throughout his life. I am TOTALLY NOT interested in showing off how difficult mathematics is and how wonderful and smart we academics are that we can understand it. The main purpose of the website planetmath.org is to provide an encyclopedia based on the mathematics subject classification system now imported into the Wikiproject under the Mathematics Portal. This site now has the same purpose, structure, working principles, etc. of planetmath.org and wherever possible its content has been imported verbatim here into Wikipedia (why we need two such encyclopedias is beyond my understanding) and a citation here of planetmath.org is above the word of God. This relegates anything under 3rd year theoretical mathematics to trivial, and our educators and all of the children on this planet to nothing, which is in direct contradiction to the idea of Wikipedia.
- in people who actually work/teach in the field with live human beings, year after year after year. I am interested in every experience and helpful idea here. I am TOTALLY NOT interested in studies performed on sample sets of students by non-teachers (and while I particularly abhor their total disdain of teachers in the field - given the above group of people, I certainly understand where they are coming from).
- how mathematics is taught in different countries. (I had THE most interesting learning experiences this year working (a) on the slope page - my engineering kids loved working on the grade of the roads and (b) on the congruence (geometry) page where the two very different, but of course completely intertwined definitions of an angle were discussed.)
- in good, useful OER resources. I love MathForum's Dr. Math (Drexel), MathOpenRef, PurpleMath, Cut-the-Knot, MathisFun and everything Paul Dawkins (Lamar) writes. These are people who are providing real resources on a day-to-day, year-in and year-out basis. They have only my total admiration.
Finally, I will say that I was (hopefully was) once young and brash and self-important and a know-it-all (and the only woman in my class and so incredibly defensive)... I had the most wonderful Ph.D. mentor, who told me "You don't owe me anything. Whatever you think you owe me, you really owe it to someone in the next generation." I try to keep THAT in mind here.
Lfahlberg (talk) 19:04, 20 January 2014 (UTC)