These are a few of my favorite blogs...

I recently received my first blogging award (no badge included). It's the Stylish Blogger Award, bestowed on me by Laura Grace Weldon. Neither she nor I see ourselves as stylish, so I decided the award needed a little change for us (think of it as evolutionary pressure). The award is meant to be passed along, so I'm passing along the Blogger of Substance Award  to these blogs whose posts I've especially enjoyed chewing on:

Homeschooling & Parenting

• Tiff's FreePlayLife
• Laura Grace Weldon (now you get the new award, too, Laura)

Math, Math, Math

• Denise Gaskin's Let's Play Math!
• Dan Finkel's Math for Love
• Gary Ernest Davis' Republic of Mathematics
• John Golden's Math Hombre
• Pat's Blog
• Ben Blum-Smith's Research in Practice

Other Teacher Blogs

• Doug Noon's Borderland
• Michelle Martin's Rookery

Broadening My Horizons

• Chad Orzel's Uncertain Principles
• Barry Leiba's Staring at Empty Pages
• John Cook's Endeavor
• Civil Eats
• Mary O'Keeffe's Bed Buffaloes In Your Tax Code

In the Community Organizer category is Kate Nowak's f(t). And here's one last category, for my favorite non-blog sources: Julie Brennan's Living Math Forum, Maria Droujkova's Natural Math group, and James Tanton.

There are tons more blogs I love to read, but they may post less often, or may have hidden from my attention this morning for some other strange, esoteric reason. (To accept this award, please pass it forward to some of your favorite Bloggers of Substance, tweaking it in the process if you feel like it.)

The Stylish Blogger Award also required making a list of 7 random things about yourself. I think that needs to morph a bit, too. But to what? I'll list some things I could have blogged about but never have:

1. My first mathematical passion was codes and ciphers. Maybe reading all those books about the use of codes and ciphers in wars started me on my anti-war path.
2. I haven't posted my complete thoughts on the regions in a circle problem because I don't want to post the solution, but I'm planning to submit my 6-page paper on it to the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
3. In my twenties, I taught junior high math for a year and a half, and was fired because I was terrible at keeping the kids on task. I won a grievance, but figured I'd be happier teaching at college level.
4. I flunked Calc II in college. (It was an honors course, more at the analysis level.)
5. I never took trig in high school, because it sounded boring (too much memorization). I was never told that I'd need it for calculus (where I had to memorize lots of the trig identities to get by). When I finally really learned it (to teach it), I fell in love with it.
6. Online math communities have tripled the time I spend playing with math. At least. 
7. If you haven't noticed, I post about the rest of my life (once in a while) at my other blog. You can read there about my son, my chickens, my political views, kids' books, and more.

Let me know if you fall in love with a blog I've introduced you to.