The Hard Problem of Teaching

8 Comments Posted by on May 5, 2017

Tomorrow, we have our final classes of the year in IdeaMath, a weekend contest math program run by former US International Math Olympiad team coach Zuming Feng that I’ve been teaching at for the last five years. It’s always tough to say goodbye, having spent over a dozen Saturday afternoons with these middle and high school students, helping to teach them problem solving skills and having some fun along the way.

I’m not yet sure whether I’ll be returning to the program in the fall during my last year of grad school here, so this could be my last regular teaching opportunity in grad school, or possibly ever. I joined IdeaMath in my first year partly as a way to give back to the math contest community that I grew up in, and partly as a way to keep up my involvement with teaching while in a graduate program with a light teaching load.

My teaching experiences at MIT were also very positive — in fact, between the teaching I’ve done online with the Art of Problem Solving, Caltech, and MIT, I’ve somehow managed to help teach five different calculus classes. Some were aimed at the strongest students, and some at the weakest (albeit the weakest Caltech and MIT students). Some attempted to be fully rigorous, while others simply provided an upgraded version of Calculus BC. All were very rewarding personally, as I got to see students grasp the material for their first time.

Given my experiences and passion for teaching, I’ve often been asked if teaching is a career I’d consider. The question makes sense; I like to teach. I enjoy being able to inspire another generation of students with neat tricks, clever ideas, and powerful results. Even more than inspiring, I enjoy bringing clarity, helping students better grasp important concepts and form appropriate intuitions around them.

That passion and experience has made me into quite a proficient teacher, if I do say so myself. The MIT Math department administrator was quite impressed with my teaching ratings from students at MIT and my senior year at Caltech, I received a teaching prize meant for graduate students for my TA work there. In a surreal turn of events, one day the Caltech math department head called me into his office, wondering if he could pay me to essentially rescue a statistics class that had gone awry from poor teaching by holding a bunch of recitations and office hours. (I turned him down since I was too busy at that point, and suggested that he make the same offer to a few of the TAs instead.) Given my false starts with various research projects in grad school, it seems pretty clear that I’m generally better at teaching than research.

And yet, despite this passion, experience and success, I actually don’t see myself continuing to teach full-time or long-term. Why not?

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Personal Experience, Weekly Post

Kasich’s Two Paths, Reviewed

Leave a comment Posted by on April 28, 2017

John Kasich is back in the media spotlight this week, touting his campaign reflection, Two Paths: America Divided or United. He was in Cambridge on Wednesday, giving a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School and signing books at the Harvard COOP. Grace and I went early enough to get a picture and briefly chat with him.

The event organizers explicitly told us all that we weren’t supposed to talk or take pictures (“only from the line”), but as I suspected and saw for those ahead of us, Kasich wouldn’t have had it any other way.

When I first found out about this book about a month ago, I immediately pre-ordered it on Amazon. It finally arrived on Tuesday; I read the first three chapters before the book signing on Wednesday, and I just finished reading it last night. This eagerness probably doesn’t surprise many of you since my pro-Kasich blog post back during the primary season, but I was really curious to hear his perspective on the campaign from the inside. I also thought it’d be helpful to others to review it this early, hence why I made sure to finish it in time for my post this week. Read more of this post

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What if we actually believed that life begins at conception?

6 Comments Posted by on April 21, 2017

[Trigger warning: Abortion.]

“Life begins at conception.” The classic refrain forms the cornerstone of the pro-life ethic, which at its best seeks to extend basic human rights to those who have the least power to claim them themselves, the unborn. The principle enjoys broad popularity when pollsters ask; YouGov found in 2015 that 52% of Americans believed it (as opposed to “when the fetus is able to live outside the womb” or “at birth”). There’s a certain elegance to it: Along the complex and awe-inspiring journey of human development, a natural starting point would be that first biological step.

But I don’t think that nearly that many people actually believe it.

To explain why, I’d like to describe some of the most surprising features of a world where we treated every fertilized egg as a human being worthy of the same rights as the rest of us, someone we could empathize with, a playable character in this video game of life. Under that ethic, how would we think, act and feel differently?

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Crucify Him!

2 Comments Posted by on April 14, 2017

Good Friday. The tragedy at the climax of the gospels that none of the characters come out of looking good. The somber holiday that brings us face-to-face with the ugliest parts of our common humanity.

I have long cherished this holiday as an opportunity to reflect on my own individual sins and sorrows, the ways that my own behavior reflects Judas or Pilate or Peter. But this year, I find myself noticing the communal aspects of the story, the ways that our collective behavior reflects that of the chief priests or the soldiers or the crowd.

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Why I Got Into Cooking

3 Comments Posted by on April 7, 2017

Last Thursday, I had the fortunate coincidence of being visited by two of my best friends from college, Timothy Johnson and Peter Ngo. They had both been to Boston back in June 2016 to serve as groomsmen in my wedding, but I hadn’t seen them since. Their trips were independent, but happened to overlap on Thursday, which also happened to be the best day for them to visit me and Grace.

With both of them visiting, along with Tim’s girlfriend Xiao, Grace and I decided to host them at our apartment and make a whole feast of Indian food. We had just recently learned how to make Chicken Tikka Masala, Palak Paneer, Aloo Gobi, and Chicken Tandoori, and we decided to serve all four to them, employing all three of them in the kitchen chopping vegetables and measuring spices.

John Shen, another college friend of ours (and Peter’s host) joined us as well, and he remarked after dinner that he was somewhat surprised that I had gotten excited about cooking. Reflecting, I realized that in the moment, cooking four dishes of Indian food, while more than usual, seemed like just a natural extension of the habits Grace and I had built up over the course of a year. We would actually go on to cook Pad Thai and bake bread for our board game group on Saturday and then turn around and make enchiladas for some of the Et Spiritus journal club team on Sunday. Cooking for three different groups of friends in four nights was certainly beyond our usual pace (and not exactly sustainable), but not by much. It’s worlds from where I was at the beginning of grad school.

So how did we get to this point? Let me walk through some of the factors and explain a bit of our philosophy behind cooking and hosting.

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