Teaching

Here are some teaching resources I've developed.

The Cantor Set Activity  (grades 6-graduate)

This is an interactive Desmos activity that developed and presented at the CMC-S. It helps students make better sense of the decimal system by exploring the Cantor set. It provides an example of how graduate level mathematics can be made approachable to even grade-schoolers through intuition about mathematical ideas developed in the primary and secondary grades. It is a tiered activity so you can stop the activity when the content gets too advanced, but it is designed primarily for grades 6-12. 

Number Visualization Code

This is a link to some bash codes that take a rational number (or a truncated irrational number) and produce an image of that number by assigning a color to each decimal digit, and assigning each digit to a pixel. If you are a bit comfortable with a command line interface, this code helps illuminate the difference between rational and irrational numbers in a visual way that is very satisfying. Some examples are below. Notice the rational numbers exhibit visual patterns but the irrational numbers do not (except perhaps those induced by the pixels in your screen). You can find full size versions of the images below, and others, on my GitHub.

Here is an insightful talk by Amanda Palmer with a philosophy that I try to implement in my classes.

Amanda Palmer's TED Talk: The Art of Asking

Clearly I did not develop this, but I often think of this talk when I think about my philosophy of teaching and I recommend watching it if you aspire to be a teacher.

Here are some slides from a couple classes I've taught. (All slides made with LaTeX)

MTED 110 - The Real Number System for K-8 Teachers

The textbook used is Sowder's Reconceptualizing Mathematics, and the slides cover the first 11 chapters of the book. I usually mix chapters 2 and 3 together when I teach them, and I pull chapter 11 forward to lie between chapters 5 and 6 so that students (future math educators) are exposed to number theory before making sense of fractions.

Calculus III

The textbook used is the standard Stewart's Calculus (8th ed). I include a discussion of the Riesz-Markov-Kakutani Representation Theorem in section 13.3 since, in my opinion, it is a good motivation for the study of integration, and it is important for students to understand why they are learning something. I also use Mathematica in this course and teach my students basic Mathematica commands.