Joshua S. Aaron
I am an insatiable learner based in Toronto and Berlin: creating educational material, programs and teams that grow together. I am just endlessly fascinated by what we can create when we work together toward a common goal. Thanks for visiting!
About Me
I love learning! This remains the strongest thread connecting the various endeavors and happenings of the past decade and a half. Those years have led me to various cities and jobs where I have had the good fortune of learning from fantastic teachers and students over the years. My original academic background is in Computer Science and Mathematics from McGill Univeristy, but the most interesting and exciting stuff always seems to happen when one mixes the technical fields with the humanistic. My more recent academic focus lies in Machine Learning, Intelligent Systems (and their societal implications) while at the Technical University of Berlin.
For professional inquiries please have a look at the consultancy I am associated with here, though you are welcome to reach out to me directly using the contact form below.
Teaching Materials
While most of my materials are unfortunately the property of organisations I have made them for (Nelson and Paper, being prime examples), I have a few samples of classroom materials and explanations here. Along with the recommendations below, this is a great way to get a feel for how I teach (or at least how I taught a few years ago before I started producing content professionally). Should you find something interesting or would like to use a worksheet of mine, just send me a message with the contact form below! (If you are a teacher, I will almost always say yes! :) )
CV & Professional Experiences
For a copy of my CV, try the document icon on the right. Click the arrow just below to connect to the consultancy I am a part of.
Recommendations
This page is never up to date as there is just so much cool stuff out there, but if you are looking for some resources and recommendations for sites, books, channels, and methods that I have used over the years, this is a great place to start. This gives a pretty good overview of both how I teach and why.
Contact
Thanks for reaching out! For inquiries relating to content, curriculum design or other opportunities I would greatly appreciate some indication of your timeline and budget in addition to whatever project description you feel comfortable sharing. If you represent a public school or nonprofit and are worried about costs, never fear, transparency builds trust: I am confident that we can come up with an arrangement that suits your organisation's context.
Teaching Materials
My teaching and content (and management) styles are informed by progressive education movements in both a European and American context, though are also influenced heavily by the praxis-oriented methods of Paulo Friere. Below are a few examples of my work from my time teaching, unfortunately, the vast majority of the work I produced for organisations such as Nelson and Paper remains their property and I am not able to share them here. Here are a few exercises, learning material and workshops I have produced along with some context surrounding their creation or delivery. Since some of them are several years old now, they are not exactly a depiction of my current pedagogical preferences, but they offer a way to see how I used to teach, which certainly informs my current practice.
Measuring the World: an Introduction to Modeling and Scientific Notation.
This series was delivered to a fantastic 8th-grade bilingual Math class under the mentorship of David Brown. It served as part of teacher-practicum evaluation while at Nelson Mandela School during the Computer Science and Mathematics Education Masters Program at the Freie Unversitaet zu Berlin. These kids had a blast, and while my evaluator initially thought there was no way to have 8th graders learn the material this way, by the end the students showed that often the biggest barriers are those placed in front of learners by teachers, without them the sky is the limit… or perhaps the stars?
Fun With Functions (11th-12th Grade)
This multipart-series served as an Introduction through the lens of Information and Coding Theory administered to an 11th-grade and 12th-grade class as an experiment in norm-setting and reflection and how those might inform my teaching practice. Dr. Sainza Fernandez was an amazing mentor supporting my focus on what are often considered ancillary, less content-focused goals. I had previously not produced material relating to the practice of writing reflections and giving guidance to learners about how to actively play with the types of problems posed (more open-ended, exploratory questions). The results were mixed, it turns out a few months of me talking at them and getting discussions going did not undo the years of conditioning of the German school system toward closed problems and "right/wrong" binaries. There were just too many changes all at once, though some students did really latch on to these differences in approach. While the results were positive and learners produced some truly inspired coding schemes and seemed to digest the concepts well, these days I would treat the material quite differently: fewer words, more hands on experience and student-led and defined problems.
Evaluation of the Impact of Comics on Exam Performance:
Interspersed with far-side comics, (here provided without those to avoid a copyright issue), this exam serviced as part of the masters research project while studying at the Freie Universitaet zu Berlin administered at the Nelson Mandela School to two (lucky?) 10th-grade math classes. Research results were inconclusive as they were based upon too small a sample size, but the project was fun, and it was the first time most kids had ever chuckled during a math test. Creating a fun and challenging standardized test was a blast, though of course timing and differences to their normal exam structure surely influenced results. Caveats aside, I think multiple choice gets a bad reputation because most are not particularly fun, funny or challenging, fixing those three things yields significant benefits for the learner (and the teacher)!
Socio-Emotional Learning in STEM Contexts:
(Pending) These handouts were produced as part of a series of workshops given to STEM and Humanities tutors while working at Paper.co under a great manager and informed by a great head of teaching and learning. I learned a great deal giving these workshops: that often we, as teachers, are informed and shaped by our own educational experiences in ways that are difficult to notice, assess, and (should we find them unhelpful) change. As I now often work in adult learning contexts, I find focusing on this very aspect, what habits and expectations an adult learner brings with them from their schooling, is often more important than access to quality teachers or content.