The past month has served as a sieve for my interests and priorities. Now that I'm off contact for the academic year, the pressure to perform is gone. The main realization born of this freedom is how much energy I spend on existential crises. I worry so much about leaving a legacy that I forget to get stuff done. I'll spare you the manifest of the contents of my navel and move on to the actionable bits.
The most recent change is deleting my regular site. The purpose was to serve as a virtual filing cabinet of all my materials. Blogger is capable of serving this purpose with less upkeep. Best to move it all to one place. The pages of this site will expand over the summer. Also, the URL now directs to the blog.
I deleted my TikTok account. If social media were food, TikTok is cake. Baking a cake can be an act of high skill and artistry. However, the nutritional value is always low. YouTube is saturated with instructional videos, so TikTok looked like a fertile place to stake a claim. After some reflection, I realized it is very difficult to post meaningful instructional videos on TikTok. The format is designed to keep a person's attention on the site, not to watch a few videos and start their homework.
Admitting that I'm late to the YouTube game and cannot possibly catch up to other creators is actually liberating. I'll never be Sal Khan or James Sousa. (I never wanted to be the former.) I can make the videos I need for teaching and be happy about it. Keeping one eye on the YouTube algorithm leaves only eye to create content.
My potential calculator channel on YouTube is getting repurposed. The plan was to have a separate channel for short calculator tutorials. YouTube Shorts gets higher views than regular videos. Conventional wisdom says that mixing shorts with regular videos will confuse the algorithm. Since I don't care about appeasing the YouTube algorithm with my math channel, I'm going to give up on the idea of a separate calculator channel. Instead, I'll create a coding channel instead. I have a natural niche in how I use computer programming. Building a channel out of that should be both fun and an opportunity for self-expression.