Teaching isn’t just standing in front of a classroom and talking about formulas

After spending close to three years teaching at the University of Tennessee, I’m inclined to reflect on my time as a GTA. I immediately remember that my teaching experience reaches much farther back than this. Well before I first set foot in a classroom as a traditional teacher, I got my start developing teaching skills as a writer. I’ve had two jobs at the ed-tech startups OpenCurriculum and Expii. I was primarily responsible for creating math and science articles aimed at K-12 students, but I also integrated visuals and videos into the articles I was writing. What this taught me is that not only can students at the same level of education have different backgrounds, but they also have different ways of thinking about material. Some are visual learners, while others learn from voices, and others learn most readily from text-based explanations. I also learned that one has to provide enough detail to be accessible, but not so much that students get bored or fatigued.

Around the same time I also had the opportunity to work with a group of talented undergraduate students from underrepresented communities, mentoring them on mathematics research projects in number theory and combinatorics. The beauty of this project is that it sat on the boundary of teaching and research: while I’ve gotten three coauthored journal publications out of these efforts, it took considerable development on my part as a teacher to get to that point. I learned a few other skills that are very important for teachers to have: patience and attentiveness to…