Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
My ultimate goal as a mathematics professor is to develop students who are not only equipped for their future studies and careers, but who also appreciate mathematics as a human endeavour and who have a strong intellectual curiosity towards mathematics. I am particularly passionate about supporting women and those from other groups underrepresented in math. With this overarching objective in mind, my teaching practices are based around three fundamental beliefs about how mathematical learning takes place.
Between 2017 and 2021 I coordinated and taught the main-term offerings of MAT135 and MAT136 (Calculus 1 [A] and [B]). The syllabi for these courses are below. These courses have between 2000 and 3000 students each year, with 150 to 500 students per section. A big part of the challenge of reinventing these classes was bringing innovation and ambitious teaching to large classes.
As with classes all around the world, the course underwent a major transformation during the 2020-21 academic year as the class was offered entirely online. The efforts to put a course with an initial enrolment of 3000 students online outside of a MOOC framework was previously unprecedented, and (along with my co-coordinator Bernardo) I introduced several innovative elements to the course to stay true to my beliefs about teaching, learning, and engaging with students, even within the large-class, online framework. The syllabus for MAT135 during the online offering is below.
Designing first-year seminars catered to students who may or may not take other University-level math classes is one of my passions as an educator. I endeavour to design courses that provide a challenging and engaging environment for all learners - whether they will become mathematicians or whether they have been fearful of mathematics for as long as they can remember. At the University of Toronto I've taught two first-year seminars: Math in Literature and Poetry and Women's Mathematics.
"Introduction to Abstract Mathematics", or, as I like to think of it, "Masterpieces of Mathematics", is the standard introduction to the mathematics major. We study topics like cardinality of infinities and the great results about prime numbers, in addition to thinking about questions like "what constitutes a mathematical proof?" and "what does it mean to know something in mathematics?" Working with new math majors is a lot of fun: many of them are also majoring or minoring in other subjects, and the diversity of interests and strengths makes this class a lot of fun to teach.
Symmetry and Groups is a first course on group theory for mathematics majors. I taught it for the first time in the Winter of 2022. In this iteration I experimented with a differnet grading approach that was influenced by both standards-based grading and ungrading, but also remained flexible to the my students throughout the semester.
Quest Univeristy Canada was a private, not-for-profit liberal arts University in Squamish, British Columbia focused on undergraduate education. It was established by the Sea To Sky University Act. The insitution is unique in a number of ways; for example, it operates on the Block Plan, which means that students take one course at a time for three-and-a-half weeks each. Syllabi from the courses that I designed and taught at Quest can be found below.