I try to not answer questions before students ask them. Most of my teaching, then, is focused on guiding students towards asking those questions. For math, for example, I do this with two main principles:
- Math is a social activity: It is meant to be fun. Doing math is the only way to feel what math feels like, and so my teaching is example-driven to allow students to have their own "Aha!" moments and form their own conjectures.
- Math is a social activity: It must be interactive and sensitive to students as people. The bulk of the thinking should not be happening in my or any one student's head, and most of my teaching focus is directed to asking: Where is the thinking happening in the room?
The techniques I use to realize these principles can be found in my Teaching Statement, and a selection of teaching I've engaged in can be found below.
More generally, I have extensive experience across a wide range of age groups and levels of expertise and I have taught communities and topics ranging from elementary school aspiring scientists, to adolescent and adult dancers in Baile Folklórico, to graduate-level courses in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. To see my broad teaching and outreach experience see my academic CV.
Select Experience
- Created & presented lecture series on math in music software: Geometric Intuitions of the Fourier Transform
- Designed & built educational, interactive tools for music theory and signal processing
- Created & taught Science In A Box: an Introductory Python course on Object-Oriented design via physics simulations
- Coached 30 student developers on utilizing documentation, debugging, finding repos, understanding APIs, and pair programming
- Facilitated preschoolers from diverse communities in outdoor setting with a lot of movement, play, and communicated boundaries
- Helped move them slowly towards independence with their actions, awareness of their emotions, and communication of their needs
- Co-taught ethics in engineeringing through a sociotechnical lens and helped design discussion format for accommodating large class sizes
- Helped direct reading list, co-facilitated class discussions, and graded
- Created lessons on the philosophy of complexity theory using Interactive and Zero-Knowledge Proofs as concrete concepts
- Gave encouraging overview of academia and research for aspiring students
- Helped to adaptively decide flow of curriculum, held office hours, and graded
- Created and taught lessons on Zero-Knowledge Proofs
- Ran discussion sections, held office hours, and graded
- Created and taught lessons on diagonalization proofs, their history, and limitations
- Taught incoming CSU Sacramento underrepresented STEM students
- Guided students through problem solving on recreational math problems and calculus problems to reintroduce them to math as a creative and social activity
- Trained in how to "spread thinking around a room"
- Designed five-week math project for low-income high school STEM students
- Used problem solving of recreational math problems, building to exploring pure math through Symmetry Groups to show math as a creative enterprise
- Helped teach Summer program for exceptional high school students in math
- Guided students through Abstract Algebra and Symmetry problems in lecture format and working groups
- Tutored students in Probability, held office hours, and graded
- Led some lectures on Birthday Bounds
- Tutored diverse undergraduate population in all core math courses
- Helped organize community events for an active undergraduate math population