MATH 599: Mathematics Teaching Techniques

When: MWF 12:00 noon–1:00 pm
Where: Mathematics 102
Course web page: http://www.math.ubc.ca/~gerg/Math599/index.html
Textbook: Any reading materials we use can be obtained from the instructor.

Instructor: Prof. Greg Martin
Office: Mathematics 212
Email address: gerg@math.ubc.ca
Phone number: 822-4371
Office hours: By appointment

Announcement: I have collected together the things to consider while giving a lecture that you submitted in your Top Ten lists.

The schedule for the second presentations has been decided. These presentations will be 40 minutes long and are intended to be an entire lecture from a first-year calculus class (pretend you have to hand homework back in the last 10 minutes or something); you will be responsible for stopping yourself at the 40-minute mark. If you feel that the topic you have been assigned would take more than a single lecture to fully present in an actual calculus course, don't feel that you have to cover the entire topic in your presentation.

I would like one person to take full notes from the students' perspective during each lecture. To make it simple, whoever is going to give the following lecture should take notes in a given lecture. Therefore Kyungkeun takes notes in Alexandra's lecture, Catherine takes notes in Kyungkeun's, and so on.

As promised, each of you will be assigned a day of the week where you don't have to come to the lectures, although of course you are welcome to come. Here are those assignments:

Here is the schedule we had for the first, 15-minute presentations:

Friday, September 12
Richard: Compound interest
Carl: Calculating derivatives from the definition
Monday, September 15
Steve: The Chain Rule
Alexandra: Partial fractions
Wednesday, September 17
Katya: The Quotient Rule
Kyungkeun: Integrating using substitution
Friday, September 19
Catherine: Integration by parts
Zhenguo: L'Hôpital's Rule
Monday, September 22
Matthew: Partial derivatives
Alex: The area between curves
Wednesday, September 24
Wan: The second derivative test for local extrema
Rob: Separable differential equations
Friday, September 26
Amin: Critical points
Maggie: Changing variables in integrals

Course description: The purpose of this course is to provide students with training to help them become more effective teachers, and also to give the mathematics department a means for evaluating the suitability of students to teach undergraduate courses in mathematics. Virtually everybody is capable of becoming a competent and skillful instructor, but virtually nobody would do well if made to teach a course without preparation or forethought about effective teaching practices. Structuring a course, preparing lectures, delivering information, responding to questions, assigning homework, dealing with problem students, and so on are all areas where a little consideration of certain guidelines can vastly improve a teacher's performance.  Much of what comprises excellent teaching is quite different from individual to individual; most of what comprises bad teaching, on the other hand, is universal yet easily avoided with some experience.

Evaluation: The course is graded on a pass/fail basis. Passing the course is based on the following criteria:

Students will give up to three presentations during the semester, one of length 15 minutes and two of length 50 minutes.  The first, short presentation will be to critique the students' mechanics and classroom presence, while the long presentations will be to critique their organization of material into a beneficial lecture.  Students will teach typical topics from first-year calculus as if the audience were actually a first-year calculus class, after which they will receive feedback from the rest of the class and the instructor.  Clearly, the focus of the class will be not on the final grade but rather on thinking about issues of teaching and course management and giving and receiving constructive feedback on our skills in the classroom.