Teaching

My teaching practices are guided by my experiences as a first-generation college student, my time as an undergraduate in Vanderbilt University's Secondary Education program, and my experiences teaching full-time. Some general philosophies include the following:

• teaching the wide range of skills necessary for mathematical proficiency (e.g., Five Strands of Mathematics);

• giving context for the mathematics, both using applications (e.g., a financial mathematics project that my colleagues and I wrote) and interesting purely mathematical questions;

• promoting mastery of general academic, collaborative, and life skills;

• integrating spreadsheets, code, and other software as tools to check work, deepen our understanding, and apply what we learn to the real-world;

• understanding students' backgrounds to improve instruction; and

• passing forward the valuable mentoring that I have received over the years.

Courses as a Teaching Assistant:

1. at University of Washington

   • Math 402: Introduction to Modern Algebra

   • Math 381: Discrete Mathematical Modeling

   • Math 301: Elementary Number Theory

   • Math 125: Calculus II

   • Math 124: Calculus I

   • Math 120: Precalculus

2. at Iowa State University

   • Math 150: Discrete Mathematics for Business and Social Science

   • Math 143: Precalculus

Resources that I have found useful in my teaching:

1. Resources from Desmos, including classroom activities, a graphing calculator, and a Beta version of a 3d graphing calculator. 

2. Some of the interesting tasks from the Mathematics Assessment Project

3. Some of the real-world problems on Citizen Math (formerly Mathalicious)

4. Google Colaboratory as a free online server for running Python code (including some limited access to a GPU)

5. This Pivot Tool for linear programming/optimization with the Simplex Algorithm