Teaching 

My goal as a teacher is to help students learn to think with data and models rather than simply reproduce them. Quantitative claims are everywhere in the news and in everyday life. I want students to leave my courses able to ask what a model assumes, what a number actually represents, and what conclusions the evidence can and cannot support. To get there, I treat mathematics as a way to make intuition precise rather than as an end in itself. The math matters as it sharpens ideas students can already reason about. That framing invites them to question the models they're learning. When a student says, "But this isn't how the real world works," I treat it as a productive question. We ask what happens when assumptions are relaxed and whether the conclusions change. Through this effort, students can come to see models as tools for asking questions rather than as unquestionable descriptions of reality.  Students don't all begin from the same place. They often have varying levels of preparation, interest, and understanding. So when a student struggles I try to understand the source of difficulty before returning to the formal mathematics. My objective is never to lower expectations, but to give every student a path toward meeting them.