Division: Upper School
Teaches: Topics in Advanced Mathematics, Accelerated Geometry, Advanced Calculus
In my “Accelerated Geometry” class … I do a lot of inquiry-based learning where students are discovering central results for themselves. You really feel like a mathematician when you do this. You can discover things and prove them with the techniques you have, and it really feels like you’re in conversation with all this math that’s been done before.
I believe that pretty much all math problems should be hard … because you gain so much more from trying a hard problem for 20 minutes than you do trying 8 easy problems. Students will come up and present ideas they have at the board, and someone might show a different method. Someone else might figure out how we can get from one to the other. The most interesting math happens when two different ways of doing the same things start talking to each other. The students can start to find those connections and build those narratives.
This year, I’m teaching a new class called … “Politics and Math.” I’m kind of a political junkie, interested in the connections between social sciences and math. We’ll be covering discrete math, using it to look at things like gerrymandering, voting systems, and different ways to hold an election, like rank-choice voting.
Outside of school I … love doing recreational math. There’s a weekly problem I’ve been doing for many years through the Fiddler on the Proof Substack. I like watching math YouTube videos, too. I’m always on the lookout for fun problems to solve, and I’ve been working my way through a problem-based textbook. You develop crucial ideas through solving problems on your own.