Teaching
My goal as an instructor is to help my students foster a positive relationship with mathematics. I am committed to designing students' course interactions with care.
I often have students work in groups (as in the picture to the left) to discuss the content they just learned with their peers. My hope is that this leads students to take ownership over their learning during class. I also use these moments to have conversations with individual students to gauge how the material is going for them.
There are modules below outlining specific courses I've taught, course development, leadership I've been involved with, and math education projects I've worked on.
You can also see my teaching statement for more details on my approach to teaching.
Courses Taught
This fall I will be teaching Calculus I and Differential Equations.
While at the University of Oregon, I taught the following.
Mathematics of Voting [Math 107]
Calculus I [Math 251]
Introduction to Proof [Math 307].
Calculus II [Math 252].
While at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I taught the following.
One semester of Linear Algebra [Math 314].
Three courses for future elementary school teachers, with topics from Algebra, Number Theory, Ratios, Measurement, and Geometry [Math 301, 302, and 802-P]. (Two of these were undergraduate semester-long courses. The last course was a part of a masters program for teachers, which was taught during a 2-week course over the summer.)
Four semesters of College Algebra [Math 101]. (The last two times I taught College Algebra, I also served as an associate convener for College Algebra. For more on this, see the next module below.)
Recitations for Calculus 1 [Math 106] and Calculus 2 [Math 107], one semester each, in which students worked in groups on problems while I walked around addressing questions.
Course Development and Leadership
While at UNL, I helped develop and modify existing materials for a variety of classes. I
worked on workbooks for Calculus II and College Algebra; and
wrote WeBWorK problems for Calculus I, Calculus II, and College Algebra.
I also served as associate convener for College Algebra while at UNL. I coordinated 12 sections of College Algebra in the fall and 10 sections in the spring. We had about 450 students in the fall and 200 in the spring. I regularly met with College Algebra instructors (most of whom are first time instructors) to see how students were doing. I also wrote common exams for the students to take.
Math Education Projects
I implemented mastery grading with a colleague at UNL in one of the classes for future elementary school teachers that we taught, and we collected data to try to understand what impacts this had on their views of learning and teaching mathematics. We wrote our results up in the following blog post.
E. McMillon, G. D. Nasr, Mastery Grading for Future Elementary School Teachers. AMS Blogs. (2021)
I've also worked as a research assistant for the SEMINAL (Student Engagement in Mathematics through an Institutional Network for Active Learning) grant, which is a large collaborative mixed methods research project that is seeking to understand what conditions, strategies, interventions, and actions at the departmental and classroom levels contribute to the initiation, implementation, and institutional sustainability of active learning in the undergraduate calculus sequence (Precalculus through Calculus 2) across varied institutions. I was involved in data collection and analysis of interviews conducted with institutions on their implementation of active learning in their classrooms.