What's with that title anyway?

Let me say a bit about the title of this new blog of mine.

My teaching and scholarship have always centered around striving for understanding, and so I settled on the title "...do we understand" as I reflected on the types of questions I anticipate exploring here. These are the questions that interest me as a teacher, as a researcher, and as a human being.

So I expect I'll be exploring questions like:

• Do we understand the content we are teaching and learning? How? What? Why?
• Do we understand our students' ways of thinking? How? What? Why?
• If not, how can we find out?  

And probably questions like:

• Do we want to understand? Children strive for it, always asking why, but older students begin to replace why with is this going to be on the test? Why??
• Do we understand each other? How can we be sure we're talking about the same thing? 

And almost certainly questions like:

• Do we understand the effects of our instructional choices on learning? Can we anticipate and check for  unintended consequences?
• Do we understand the strengths and limitations of the tools we use, both mathematical and pedagogical?

I could go on, but perhaps I'll write more in another post. Did I mention I'm just getting started with this blog? For now, how about one last bit of xkcd fun?