Students.
People asking that question want a subject, and I usually don't give one, because the subject changes and the students don't. Over 26 years it has been developmental algebra, calculus, statistics, physics, personal finance, motorcycle safety, and whatever else the room needed. The constant is a person in front of me who thinks they can't do the thing.
If you want the subject list anyway, it's on the Courses Taught page.
I taught to learning styles for years. I believed it, I defended it, and when a colleague pushed back I went to the research to prove her wrong. She wasn't wrong.
That reversal is the reason for the writing here. A method can sound good, feel right in the room, be endorsed by people I respect, and still be false. So I test the ideas everyone already agrees with, including my own, and I show the work either way. The method is the part you can use on something I never wrote about.
They are the same job.
The thing I actually work on is the numbers people act on: money, risk, measurement, and grades. A student deciding whether to take a loan, a rider deciding whether they can make that turn, and a person reading a percentage on a slide with no raw figure attached are all doing the same thing, which is acting on a quantity they haven't checked.
Twelve personal finance certifications and twenty years of teaching motorcycle safety are where that work happens outside a math classroom.
I build and give presentations about NASA missions, past, current, and planned, for schools, libraries, retirement communities, and civic groups. 107 of them since 2018.
I pick the topic with whoever asked for the talk, and then everything in the presentation has to come from NASA's own published material. That's the program's rule, not mine, and it's a constraint I've come to appreciate. One approved source removes the option of reaching for a better story from somewhere I haven't checked.
If you want to request a talk, reach you on my SSA Contact page. I am located in south-central Pennsylvania and will travel to nearby areas. (There are multiple SSAs throughout the world, so check the SSA Directory if I am not near you.) There is no cost for volunteers to present to your organization.
Yes, and I say so when I do.
I've used it to build tools, most usefully a converter that turns a publisher's broken test bank export into a package that will actually load into our learning management system. I found the problem. The AI wrote most of the code. That distinction matters enough that it is written that way on my CV.
What I don't do is let it decide what's true. Everything it hands me gets the same treatment as anything else that sounds right.
No.
When a student can no longer pass, they get the factual report, the options that remain, and continued feedback on everything they submit. What they don't get from me is a line about believing in them when the arithmetic is already settled. False hope costs a student a decision they still had time to make.
The help doesn't stop, and neither does the answering of questions after a term ends. The encouragement just has to be true.
The writing is free to quote with attribution and a link; the NASA material belongs to NASA and is public; email me about anything else.
Please tell me. That's not a courtesy sentence.
I have been wrong in public about something I taught for years, and the person who told me did me a favor. If I have some incorrect assumptions, or a number here doesn't hold up, I would rather find that out than get to keep it.