• Welcome
  • Welcome
• Background
  • Why Teaching?
  • Teaching Philosophy: College Not a Goal but a Fact
  • Professional and Educational Background
• Experiences in Education
  • Introduction
  • Breakthrough Collaborative Sacramento
  • A Better Chance Program
  • Boston Collegiate Charter School
• Academic Work at Hamilton College
  • Introduction
  • Mathematics Major
  • Hispanic Studies Minor
• Educations Studies at Hamilton College
  • Introduction
  • Issues in Education
  • Curriculum and Decision Making
  • Ethnography and the Learning Enviornment
  • Education Practicum
• Resources
  • Inspriring Instruction and Pedagogical Techniques
  • Bibliography

Mathematics Major

The Math major at Hamilton has been the most academically challenging thing I have ever done. Once you pass Calculus college level math becomes quite abstract, which I have always struggled with because I am a visual learner. I can relate to many of my students because I am a visual learner. This also makes me very aware of trying to hit every type of learning style in each of my lessons, to give every learner a chance to succeed. For example, in my teaching video in the Boston Collegiate Charter School section, I use graphs and sticky dots to give students a visual on where to shade. Furthermore, I try to always include real world examples when teaching new topics to answer the standard question, "Why do we need to learn this?" Similar to students, I enjoy math that I find a purpose in learning, which is why I focus on including these examples in my lessons. One activity that I have used in past lessons is graphing two cell phone companies and trying to figure out which company is the best for them as cell phone users.  

One class I took for my senior seminar was Applied Statistics. This class stood out to me because it was the only applied class, which means not abstract. In this class we analyzed survey data on substance use at Hamilton College that was distributed by the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC). Aside from analyzing that data, I focused my final project on election polling data from the 2012 Presidential Election. After reading many of Nate Silver's articles in the New York Times I decided to look at data from the IBD/TIPP pollster, which was named America's best polling place. In my PowerPoint below I show how this polling place actually smooths out their data, by manipulating their data to make it more pleasing to the eye for people looking at their data set. They manipulate their data by rounding off and taking averages of the four previous days plus that specific day's data so that there are not as many jumps in the data. I presented this PowerPoint at the Hudson River Annual Math Conference in the Spring of 2013. Presenting at this conference was exciting especially when the room filled up with many professors and students from colleges around the Northeast. Since I have worked on my public speaking skills in many classrooms at Hamilton and while teaching, I was comfortable and happy to share my findings.

• • Election Polling PowerPoint