Andrew Thomas Carroll

Teaching over the years

I take great pride in my teaching, both at the University level and otherwise. During the summer terms of my undergraduate time, I taught at the Center for Talented Youth. This is a wonderful and rewarding program run through John's Hopkins University with sites at a number of colleges thoughout the US. I spent two summers as a teaching assistant for Inductive and Deductive reasoning, and one summer as the instructor for Data and Chance with 5th through 7th graders at Stanford University.

After this, I arrived at Northeastern University, where I taught my own classes starting my very first semester. In total, I taught seven different courses, some multiple semesters, ranging from Mathematical Thinking (discrete mathematics) to Calculus and Differential Equations for Biology. My first year of instruction I was awarded the "Best First Year TA" award, and my second I was awarded the "Best TA of the Year" award.

In addition to instruction at Northeastern, I have also been involved in K-12 education. I spent one year with the GK12 program, an NSF program that puts graduate students in high school science classes. This gave me the opportunity to be in an AP Calculus class taught by Jason Joseph at the John D. O'Bryant High School in Boston. I also spent three summers teaching for the Balfour Academy, a high school summer SAT prep program held on Northeastern's Campus. During summer 2010, I assisted Professor Zelevinsky in a PRISM course on Remarkable Recurrence Relations.

At the University of Missouri, I taught two sections of Calculus III. Fall 2012 semester, I taught this course and decided that more practice problem time was necessary. To remedy this, I decided to integrate some small form of "inverted lecturing" (or flipped classroom). Namely, as their Wednesday evening homework, my students watch recorded Beamer (slide-based) lectures, as a replacement for the Friday lecture, and then we spend most of Friday's class practicing challenging problems. With three weeks down, this seems to be going well, but the jury is still out on the effectiveness. I am looking forward to integrating this technique at DePaul.