Teaching Philosophy

“Our institutions are organized lovelessness,” as Aldous Huxley put it so bluntly in The Perennial Philosophy. This maxim applies to any system that regards the people who inhabit it solely from an I-It stance. When people are treated as numerical units, interchangeable parts of no interest or value in themselves, empathy is sacrificed in the name of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Daniel Goleman in Social Intelligence

“Effective teaching requires that a teacher know his/her students, to be able not only to explain things to them but to be able to listen to them closely and with understanding.”

Hyman Bass in Mathematicians as Educators

For details about my teaching philosophy, please see my teaching statement; for class notes, please see here.

Student References

I’ve asked students from some of my past classes to send in open reference letters for display on this site. They have not been edited. Please e-mail me if you’d like to get in contact with any of the authors.

[1] T. Cassidy (Oxford, June 2009)
[2] A. Perrins (Oxford, December 2009)
[3] P. Shah (Oxford, June 2009)
[4] K. Sharples (Oxford, December 2009)
[5] R. Sutton (Oxford, June 2009)
[6] D. Wu (Princeton, June 2011)
[7] D. Thomas (Princeton, June 2011)
[8] R. Grinberg (Princeton, June 2011)

Evaluation Excerpts
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