Teaching
I believe that effective math teaching empowers the learner to gain content-specific expertise as well as transferrable metacognitive and critical thinking skills. In the classroom I realize this vision with a community-centered approach, using inquiry-based activities, presentations, and focused reflection. Read more in my teaching statement.
For my students, course materials can either be found on the univerity LMS platform (currently eClass) or printed out in class. Sample materials that I have developed and used in the past can be found below my teaching experience.
Teaching at York University
Math 1200 (Problems, Conjectures, and Proofs): Introduces first and second year majors to rigorous mathematical proof and communication using topics from logic, algebra, number theory, and combinatorics.
Spring 2023
Teaching at the University of Colorado
Course Assistant: This role supports the coordination of a multi-section calculus course. This includes making improvements to course curriculum and materials, leading weekly pedagogy meetings for undergraduate learning assistants and graduate teaching assistants, and various administrative responsibilities; additionally this role encompasses leading 1 TA recitation section each week.
Math 2400 (Multivariable Calculus): 2021-2022 Academic Year
ARSC 1440: Offered through the Student Academic Support Center (SASC), a mutlicultural learning community that provides mulifaceted support to a diverse set of study populations. This one-credit course supported sutdents in SASC who were enrolled in a calculus course at the University of Colorado Boulder, with an emphasis on the importance of diversity and inclusive community in mathematics.
Supporting Multivariable Calculus: Fall 2020, Spring 2021
Supporting Intergral Calculus 2: Spring 2020
Math 1300 (Calculus 1): Covers limits, continuity, techniques and applications of differentiation, the concept of integration, and the fundamental theorem of calculus.
Instructor of record: Spring 2019
Recitation/teaching assistant: Fall 2017
Math 2300 (Calculus 2): Covers techniques and applications of integration, sequences, series, Taylor series, separable differential equations, and Calculus with parametric and polar equations.
Instructor of record: Spring 2019, Fall 2019
Recitation/teaching assistant: Spring 2018
Sample course materials
Matching integrals with integration techniques
Developed in collaboration with Sarah Salmon and Rebecca Machen. Do not reuse or distribute without explicit permission from the authors.
Gaining intuition around which technique of integration to use can be a challenging part of mastery of Calculus. This pair of short activities help students build metacognitive and content-specific skills by matching a collection of integrals with known integration techniques before completing the integrals and reflecting on their pairings.
Week one focuses on integration by substitution, parts, and specializations of these two techniques. Week 2 builds on this, adding trigonometric substitution and approaches to rational functions, including partial fractions.
The integral cards can also be paired down to a 15 minute, one-time activity. Using the week 1 cards and this single-use worksheet, students will engage in a guided reflection process about the integration by parts technique.
Building visual intuition for parametric surfaces
Activity 1: Introduction to parametric surfaces
Activity 2: Parametric surfaces for surface area
Developed for remote learning. These activities help students in a multivariable calculus course develop visual intuition for parametric surfaces, first building parametric surfaces with a restricted domain and then revisiting the topic for the purpose of computing surface area. In practice, I used activities 1 and 2 about four weeks apart.
Discovering the alternating series remainder estimate
Developed in collaboration with Andrew Campbell.
Activity
Notes & solution guide
This 50 minute group activity guides students to the statement of the alternating series test, and a variety of applications of this theorem. The first two pages of this activity can also be used as an independent discovery activity for the A.S.T. remainder estimate.