Adventures in Mathematics
Andrew M.H. Alexander


Mathematics is beautiful, and should be taught as such. It should be taught as an abstract, axiomatic art, and not as a series of formulas to be memorized, or a tool to be used in solving engineering problems.

From 2009 to 2011, I taught at Veritas Preparatory Academy, a small charter school in the Southwest. Veritas is a school devoted to rigorous, academic inquiry, modeled loosely after St. John’s College. All students take the same courses, which include two years of physics and two years of calculus, as well as a daily, two-hour literature and philosophy seminar based on the Great Books.

I taught the 11th and 12th grade math course. My teaching philosophy has already been best explained by Paul Lockhart, though my letter to the editor of the New York Times (image) describes it succinctly. (My 2009 teaching statement is pretty good, too.) Below are PDFs of my notes and problem sets. (If you want the original LaTeX source code, or any of my tests and quizzes, send me an email and I’d be happy to pass them along. Or just visit my house and take a look)

Algebraic synæsthesiaLogsTrigDerivativesIntegralsDiff. EqsInfinite SeriesLogic/Set Theory/Abstract Algebra