From a reluctant teaching assistant but high-energy snowboard instructor to an award-winning assistant professor, supervisor and mentor

Caroline Junkins made a last ditch appeal to get out of teaching.

Junkins was a grad student with an extreme fear of public speaking. On the eve of teaching her first math tutorial at Mac, Junkins begged to be made a marking assistant and relieved of her teaching duties.

Her supervisor held firm and told Junkins to pretend her students were snowboarders.

Junkins had been a snowboard instructor back in high school and during her undergrad at McMaster. Before she bought a car, Junkins would take the GO bus from Hamilton into Toronto on weekends and hitch a ride with family friends to Caledon Ski Club.

She didn’t see how instructing novice snowboarders on the slopes translated to teaching math to undergrads in a classroom. “As an instructor, I’d stand on a hill, shout at people who were far away and show them how to sideslip, turn, and carve by doing a whole lot of exaggerated full body movements.”

It turned out her enthusiastically kinetic approach to instructing – minus the yelling and snow pants – played well in classrooms. She made peace with her fear of public speaking and discovered a passion and aptitude for teaching as a PhD student at the University of Ottawa, a postdoc at Western University, a preceptor in Harvard’s Mathematics Department and then back at Mac as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics.

It was at Harvard with its engrained culture of observation where Junkins learned how to teach. She sat in on classes and watched how her colleagues introduced concepts and interacted with students. No two colleagues did it the same way – each played to their unique strengths. She knew better than to try and mimic what she was seeing.

“I realized the best way to teach is to be authentic to your own personality and to how you understand the material. It’s why I’m constantly moving around and using a lot of props in my teaching – it’s a way of illustrating for students what I’m seeing in my mind. If you’re not being authentic, you’re reduced to copying someone else and putting on a show. That’s not going to work for you or your students.”

Junkins started teaching level one calculus to first-year students in the Arts & Science program in 2025. This is when she learned another lesson about teaching – how you teach depends on who’s in the classroom.

“All of the students in Arts & Science are academically oriented but they have a wide range of experiences and varying degrees of confidence when it comes to calculus. Not everyone feels comfortable in a math class.”

So Junkins doubled down on inquiry-based learning, with students working together to actively explore, question and solve real-world problems so they could build their own understanding of mathematical concepts.

It doesn’t always go perfectly – sometimes the problems are too hard to interpret and other times they’re too easily solved. “But the students have a genuine love for learning and are willing to go along with it as I adjust on the fly. We have a good time.”

Her work with the Arts & Science students was just recognized with a Teaching Excellence Award from the McMaster Students Union and Macademics. The annual awards recognize outstanding instructors and TAs based on student nominations for excellence in teaching, accessibility, and enthusiasm. Students credited Junkins with checking all three boxes.

Along with her own love for teaching, Junkins takes pride in instilling it in undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants. Supervising and mentoring are key so Junkins meets weekly with TAs to recap lectures and tutorials and work through any issues and challenges they’ve run into. Junkins says she learns as much from the TAs as they learn from her. “They can relate to students in ways that I can’t.”

Job one in working with TAs is to build a community, says Junkins. “The need for community is so strong among teaching assistants. If you don’t provide one, they’ll figure it out for themselves and build their own. But as their supervisor, you absolutely need to be part of it and actively contributing.”

Junkins has yet to tell a TA to pretend their students are snowboarders – she finds other ways to support and reassure anyone who’s wrestling with a fear of public speaking. She offers herself as proof that they can overcome that fear.

It’s also been a few years since she’s strapped on her snowboard and made fresh tracks. Junkins says when her kids are bigger she would love to take her big energy, full body movements out of the classroom and back onto the slopes where it all began.  “But for now, our family’s sticking to hikes around Hamilton’s waterfalls.”