My name is Lincoln Knutson, a fourth-year mathematics student at the Ohio State University Honors College. My goals include pursuing a PhD in mathematics and entering academia. While people in academia are often considered to be educators in some capacity, they often receive significant criticism for their poor teaching ability. This is partly because faculty members at universities are financially incentivized to do research, and teaching is sometimes seen merely as a task that interferes with a professor's ability to do research. Because of this, there is a need for strong educators in academia, and I endeavor to enter academia with the goal of being the best educator possible for my students.
I enjoy teaching mathematics because of my love of the subject and because of my belief that mathematics is categorically poorly taught from kindergarten through college. My experiences with students inform me that math has been taught to them as an algorithm for symbolic manipulation. My goal when working with students is to help them understand the logical progression of math in order to be able to transcend trying to "remember the rules". Instead, I try to focus my students on what is meant by the symbols and what logically follows from this meaning.