1 Teaching Statement

Teaching Philosophy

I believe the best way to learn math is by making mistakes, getting confused, and struggling toward a solution. I consider myself a coach and a facilitator. I teach with the core philosophy that my primary goal is to provide my students with a welcoming and inclusive environment where experimentation is encouraged, and honest mistakes aren’t penalized. I incorporate active learning in all my classes. A math classroom is a place for students, and even the instructor, to grow as mathematicians.

Use of Technology

Students retain their knowledge better when they engage with a subject through multiple modalities. Technological tools are perfect for accomplishing this. I created weekly Excel worksheets for modeling linear programming scenarios for teaching linear programming. For Discrete Math, I used an online textbook with (mandatory) interactive activities scattered throughout the text and made YouTube videos for each section embedded directly in the book. Student responses to these have been overwhelmingly positive. I intend to use modeling resources provided by SIMIODE1 to teach Differential equations.

I strongly believe in making education more accessible by creating open educational resources (OER). We now have the technology to accomplish this. I have co-received an OER Faculty Grant for adding WeBWorK exercises to my colleagues’ Linear Algebra OER textbook written in PreTeXt. I also intend to turn my Optimization course notes into an OER textbook.

Diversifying Assessments

Students often perform poorly on exams not because of a lack of understanding but because of exam anxiety and a lack of exam-taking skills. Traditional exams do not faithfully represent the challenges students are likely to face in real life either. As such, in every course I teach, I provide a variety of assessments explicitly catered to students’ needs. In my Optimization course, students had to submit an Excel Workbook involving several modeling exercises instead of taking a final exam. For Discrete Math, taught during Covid, we created a repository of new WeBWorK problems over the summer and replaced in-person exams with WeBWorK and Zoom. Students also had to submit weekly short auto-graded assignments within the textbook, which provided immediate feedback. I also made a detailed rubric focused on evaluating the quality of proof-writing. For the Algebraic Topology course, I replaced the final exam with an oral and a written report as I was more interested in testing students’ ability to approach a challenging problem than coming up with rigorous proofs under time pressure. In my current honors linear algebra course, I’m giving students short weekly quizzes during discussion sections with no time limits to ease them into the university exam system.

Course Design

When (re)designing a course, I try to imagine the class from a student’s perspective and adapt it to their level of mathematical maturity while being vigilant of the expert blind spot. It is essential for me that my course is meaningful and intellectually fulfilling to students. I completely restructured my Optimization course to make applications and modeling a critical component. I created detailed notes using RMarkdown as I did not find books with the right mix of theory and applications. I have designed and taught an entirely flipped Honors Single Variable Calculus course at JHU. I learned a lot about how to get students engaged in a classroom from this experience. At Canada/USA Mathcamp, I had to develop and teach a five-day undergraduate math class every week for five weeks while being involved with other camp activities. I could not have asked for better training grounds for course design. Notes for many of these classes are available on my website.

Classroom Environment

I strive to get my students comfortable with the messy process of discovery in math. My classes are fun, interactive, and often flipped. I memorize all my students’ names to connect with them. In every class, I require students to solve problems and roam around to check on their work. I hold many office hours in a collaborative space that encourages group work. My office hours always have high attendance and tend to turn into group study sessions. They allow me to observe how students approach problem-solving, enabling me to provide them with pointed feedback.

I make great efforts to ensure that a course syllabus is welcoming and encouraging, being the first document that students see. While teaching online during Covid, my priority was to alleviate student anxiety and ensure students were not disadvantaged because of the lack of face-to-face meetings and technical difficulties. After each (auto-graded) WeBWorK exam, I reviewed all student responses to reassign any points lost due to minor typos and system errors. I also maintained an active discussion forum on Piazza to foster a sense of community. I have taught coordinated courses where I was the sole point of contact for over 150 students. This challenging experience taught me how to be more inclusive and considerate of students from very diverse backgrounds and ensure that even those with other priorities can benefit from learning math in whatever way possible.

Professional Development

I keep myself updated on the advances in pedagogical techniques and find it valuable to hear about other educators’ experiences. I am a member of the Project NExT’202 cohort. I have completed a certification course at the Teaching Academy at JHU, where I learned about several pedagogical concepts, such as inquiry-based learning, backward course design, and learning objectives, which I regularly incorporate into my teaching. I have regularly attended workshops and seminars organized at the Center for Teaching and Learning at UWO and NU and, most recently, MAA Open Math Workshops, SIGMAA IBL workshops3, and Online Seminar On Undergraduate Mathematics Education. In addition to providing me with new information and skills, these workshops also allow me to take on the role of a student and stay an active learner.

Mentoring

I find it fulfilling to mentor students outside of the regular classroom setting. I am currently a supplementary instructor for the Causeway Postbaccalaureate Program, a yearlong experience in mathematics that seeks to increase the number of graduate students in the mathematical sciences from historically underrepresented groups. I have organized and participated in a Directed Reading Program that pairs undergraduate students with graduate students/junior faculty to undertake independent study projects as a mentor and a co-organizer. I started a DRP chapter at UWO with the help of one of my colleagues. At JHU, I held review/problem-solving sessions for graduate students to prep them for their algebra prelims.

My biggest influences have come from being a mentor (2017-20) and an academic coordinator (2018) at the Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for high school students. Mathcamp allowed me to be a part of a loving and caring community, surrounded by people who love math and love to teach and excel at it. I took on the role of an academic coordinator to contribute back to Mathcamp, challenge myself, and learn more about teaching. The academic coordinators are responsible for designing and running all the educational activities, including inviting and hosting external visitors, planning a balanced five-week class schedule (nearly 60 classes), assigning (110) students to projects, and teaching.

Future Goals

In the future, I want to design and teach more interdisciplinary courses that involve student projects and real-world applications. I am also interested in making existing math courses more applied, especially courses aimed at non-math majors. I want to incorporate active learning in coordinated courses without putting undue pressure on individual instructors. This is particularly challenging as most instructors are primarily researchers and often have limited time to dedicate to teaching. The solution is to develop structured resources (like online asynchronous assessments, modeling first textbooks, programming assignments in SageMath, and IBL scripts) to enable instructors to incorporate active learning in their classrooms at no extra cost. Finally, I am currently contributing to Open Education Resources. I want to expand these projects in the future with a focus on online assessments, as this is the main bottleneck in successfully adapting courses to an online setting.

  1. Systemic Initiative for Modeling Investigations & Opportunities with Differential Equations, https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/simiode↩︎

  2. A professional development program sponsored by the MAA for math educators at the university level, https://www.maa.org/programs-and-communities/professional-development/project-next↩︎

  3. Special Interest Group of the Mathematical Association of America, http://sigmaa.maa.org/ibl/↩︎