UBC Math Department Colloquium: Sophie Morin

Since defending my PhD in the UBC Mathematics Department in 2023, I have worked as a sessional instructor both at UBC and at Corpus Christi College, which is one of UBC’s affiliate colleges, located at the northeast corner of campus. At UBC, I taught three semesters of an academic and scientific literacy course for first-year science students. At Corpus, in addition to a semester of pre-calculus and two semesters of a differential calculus course equivalent to the first half of UBC’s MATH 110, I pitched, developed, and am now teaching the inaugural session of a history of science course.

In this talk, I will discuss how my mathematics teaching at Corpus Christi has been informed by pedagogical principles and techniques from a range of sources, including from my work in graduate school as an ISW (Instructional Skills Workshop) facilitator and a TA training facilitator in the Math Department. I will discuss some observations I have made about the thought processes of students with extremely weak mathematical preparation, as well as some specific curricular and pedagogical choices that I have made and that I feel have been effective, with a focus on the lessons that I think may be transferrable to the UBC Math Department’s courses for non-math majors.

This talk is intended to be entirely accessible (and interesting and relevant) to undergraduates.