CV-ish part:

Rough outline of my TAing experience:

  • In Spring 2026, I was a TA for Math 3B (Calculus 2) at UCSB
  • In Winter 2026, I was a TA for Math 4A (Linear Algebra) at UCSB
  • In Fall 2025, I was a TA for Math 3B (Calculus 2) at UCSB
  • In Spring 2025, I was a grader for MA470 (Algbraic Geometry) at RHIT
  • In Winter 2025, I was a grader for MA376 (Combinatorics) at RHIT
  • In Fall 2024, I was a grader for MA366 (Real Analysis) at RHIT
  • In Winter 2024, I was a grader for MA470 (Galois Theory) at RHIT

In terms of things other than TAing:

  • In Fall 2024-Spring 2025, I will be an organizer and mentor for the UCSB DRP
  • In Summer 2026, I will be a counselor at Ross
  • In Winter-Spring 2025, I was a UCSB DRP mentor, with the topic of elliptic curves
  • In Summer 2025, I was a counselor at Ross and also a course designer for algebraic number theory
  • In Summer 2023, I was a counselor at Ross

Finally, there is tutoring: I had an internship as a computer science tutor in the summer of 2019, became a private math tutor from 2021-2022, and was a tutor at the Rose-Hulman learning center from 2023 until I graduated.

yap-ish part:

Despite being relatively young, I have been teaching in some form for almost 7 years now, and have always cared about it. I think being a teacher in some form is essential to being a good mathematician, though that can take many forms. (In my view, advising a Ph.D. student or speaking at a conference is a form of teaching!) I think everyone should make an honest attempt to be a good teacher, even though sometimes other obligations may prevent you from doing as good of a job of this as possible.

Some remarks on teaching style, since I think it’s an interesting topic: I am against honorifics in college classrooms, and one of the first things I tell my students is “just call me Connor”. I do this because I think (at the college level) students being intimidated by their teacher is more of an issue than students with too little respect for the teacher’s authority. I am your friend, just your friend that knows calculus.

When lecturing, I try to emphasize the emotional aspects of math. I say things like “this fact sucks” about nondiagonalizable matrices or “this is a miracle” about the fundamental theorem of calculus. I think this has triple benifits: it makes my lectures more engaging, the facts more memorable, and can help associate emotions other than fear with math. It doesn’t hurt that this is how I think about math as well.

I am also against pure lectures as a class format. Pure lectures being bad is pretty much a fact at this point, but for many reasons (many of which are legitimate practical concerns!) most university math has not reworked itself around this philosophy. However, I still do my best to avoid lecturing. I format my sections in a split format: ~25 minutes of lecture, and ~25 minutes letting students work on practice problems (and answering their questions, 1-on-1). This is a format I have stolen (and revised to fit my context) from Dr. William Green and Dr. Sylvia Carlisle, who both taught me in undergrad.

As a counselor at Ross, I do not lecture at all at my family meetings (family meetings=teaching a group of 4-6 for 1hr 30mins, meeting 5 days per week for 6 weeks). At absolute most, I spend the first five minutes explaining notation or some definitions. I have students work collaboratively at whiteboards on interesting problems. I like to go experimental with topics: one surprise success was sheaves and proving that the sheaf of continuous functions is a sheaf, this is an insane topic to teach high schoolers, but they all found it interesting.

When teaching at a college, I think it is important to be aware that not everyone you teach is a mathematician. In fact, if you are like me and teaching lower division math, there are probably 0 people in your class that will go on to get a Ph.D. in math. In this case, you should not just attempt to be the “teacher you’d like”, since future mathematicians are a very specific corner in the space of possible students. However, when I teach at Ross, I take the exact opposite philosophy: basically my only guiding principle is “be the teacher that 16 year old me wanted.” I don’t think this is the only way to be a good teacher, but I think it is a local maximum.