Outline
Lectures:
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 12 noon-1 PM, room Math 202
Office hours: by appointment
Office: Math 212 (Mathematics Building)
Email address:
Phone number: (604) 822-4371
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:
- Attendance
- Participation in discussions and class activities
- Completion of teaching presentations
Students will give two presentations during the semester, one of length 15 minutes and one of length 40 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.
Supplement: I found a teaching statement I wrote in 2005, and it's surprisingly lucid. It could be thought-provoking for you to read over.
Announcements
The schedule for the semester is as follows:
- I. Preparation for short presentations
- Wednesday, September 5: Overview of course
- Friday, September 7: Description and scheduling of short presentations
- Monday, September 10: Example lecture and discussion
- Wednesday, September 12: Blackboard technique
- II. Short presentations
- III. Preparation for long presentations
- Wednesday, October 10: Lecture design and modularity
- Friday, October 12: In-class group activity, practice lecture design
- Monday, October 15: Description and scheduling of long presentations
- Wednesday, October 17: Feedback and discussion of practice lectures
- Friday, October 19: Asking and receiving student questions and feedback, classroom psychology
- IV. Long presentations
Short presentations
Each short presentation will last 15 minutes, either from 12:00-12:15 or 12:25-12:40 PM. Students should imagine that they are giving a full lecture on the indicated topic and then deliver a 15-minute-long portion (typically the first 15 minutes) of what the full lecture would be; in short, there should be no pressure on completely covering the given topic. Students should also think about where their topic would fall in a typical (non-honours) first-year calculus curriculum, although any reasonable assumptions in this vein are acceptable and need not be made explicit.
The schedule for the short (15-minute) presentations will be:
- Friday, September 14
- Bruno: Logarithms in calculus
- Amir: Asymptotes
- Monday, September 17
- Michele: First Derivative Test for local extrema
- Andrew: Integration by parts
- Wednesday, September 19
- Keira: Seperable differential equations
- Ryan: The area between curves
- Friday, September 21
- Jenn: Integration by substitution
- Monday, September 24
- Frank: The Chain Rule
- Patrick: Improper integrals
- Wednesday, September 26
- Evgeniy: Continuity
- Dennis: Critical points
- Monday, October 1
- Maria: Trigonometric functions in calculus
- Jun: The Quotient Rule
- Wednesday, October 3
- David: l'Hôpital's Rule
- Alex: The Product Rule
- Friday, October 5
- Jun Ho: The Intermediate Value Theorem
- Erick: Second Derivative Test for local extrema
Long presentations
The schedule for the long (40-minute) presentations will be:
- Monday, October 22
- Frank: The slope of a graph
- Wednesday, October 24
- Jun Ho: Improper integrals
- Friday, October 26
- Jun: Finding all zeros of functions (bounding zeros, Newton's method)
- Monday, October 29
- Maria: Second Derivative Test for local extrema
- Wednesday, October 31
- Alex: Continuity
- Friday, November 2
- Erick: Logarithms in calculus
- Monday, November 5
- Bruno: l'Hôpital's Rule
- Wednesday, November 7
- Patrick: The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus
- Friday, November 9
- Amir: Integration by substitution
- Wednesday, November 14
- Jenn: The Intermediate Value Theorem
- Friday, November 16
- Michele: Critical points
- Monday, November 19
- Ryan: The Mean Value Theorem
- Wednesday, November 21
- Dennis: Seperable differential equations
- Friday, November 23
- Keira: Trigonometric functions in calculus (including inverse functions)
- Monday, November 26
- David: Asymptotes
- Wednesday, November 28
- Evgeniy: First Derivative Test for local extrema
- Friday, November 30
- Andrew: One-variable optimization problems
Each student can skip one day per week, according to the following schedule:
| Skip Mondays | Skip Wednesdays | Skip Fridays |
|---|
Amir
Andrew
Erick
Jun
Jun Ho
|
Bruno
David
Keira
Maria
Michele
Ryan |
Alex
Dennis
Evgeniy
Frank
Jenn
Patrick |
|
