Taught Complex Variables (Spring 2025), graduate Fractal Geometry (Fall 2024) and Ordinary Differential Equations (Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2025) as the main instructor. Duties include lecturing, creating and providing course material to students (online notes and interactive visualizations of math concepts), holding collective and individual office hours and "active learning" sections (see definition below).
Duties include organizing a stand-alone section as an instructor, i.e., creating a syllabus, organizing 1-hour long lectures twice per week for each section, creating worksheets tailored to the current students’ needs, providing homework problems, exams, and holding office hours for students.
Mentored and supervised 3 Teaching Assistants. Provided guidance on course syllabus creation, class preparation and teaching techniques, frequently observed their class and provided feedback throughout the semester.
Duties include creating worksheets based on the instructor’s lectures, setting up 1-hour long “active learning” sections 4 times per week and holding weekly tutoring and office hours.
Duties include weekly lectures, one-on-one review of the class material, while focusing on applications and problem-solving techniques. Time and frequency based on class and individual student.
Duties include weekly 2 hour long lectures regarding applications and problem-solving techniques accompanying the instructor’s main lectures.
This list consists of instructors and teaching assistants who obtained ratings on the aforementioned (ICES) forms at the top 10% among all teachers ranked as excellent. The lists can be found here.
Active Learning Definition
The active learning approach is an instructional method that engages students in the learning process by encouraging them to participate in learning activities while collaborating with their classmates during the class. In practice, the instructor/teaching assistant divides the students into different groups and assign various tasks to them (usually in the form of a worksheet). The students collaborate with each other within their group, while the instructor/teaching assistant frequently interacts with each group to provide appropriate guidance. Active learning is often contrasted to the traditional lecture where students passively receive information from the instructor.
Merit Teaching Definition
Merit-style teaching consists of using a highly trained graduate student to provide lectures, challenging problem sets and other activities tailored to the undergraduate students' needs, which stimulate student-to-student interactions. In practice, the graduate student acts as an instructor for the merit section. They create a syllabus based on which they decide the students' final grades for the course. Then they prepare different activities for each section, ranging from lectures, to active learning group activities and worksheets that dynamically change throughout the semester to adjust to the students' needs and background. Mock exams are also provided and held in realistic conditions outside of class-hours to effectively prepare everyone for the actual exams. The students are also given frequent feedback individually, and office hours are held by the Merit Instructor to accommodate every student during the semester.
The Merit Program of University of Illinois is a challenging program for a select group of undergraduates that targets students with high potential who are members of groups, such as ethnic minorities and women, who tend to be underrepresented in the areas of science, mathematics and engineering. More about this program here.