Outline
Lectures:
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 12 noon-1 PM, room MATH 104 (Mathematics Building)
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.
The schedule for the semester is as follows:
- I. Preparation for short presentations
- Wednesday, September 3: Overview of course
- Friday, September 5: Description and scheduling of short presentations
- Monday, September 8: Example lecture and discussion
- Wednesday, September 10: Blackboard technique
- II. Short presentations
- III. Preparation for long presentations
- Friday, October 3 (second half of class): Scheduling of long presentations
- Monday, October 6: Lecture design and modularity
- Wednesday, October 8: In-class group activity, practice lecture design
- Friday, October 10: Asking and receiving student questions and feedback, classroom psychology
- Wednesday, October 15: Feedback and discussion of practice lectures
- IV. Long presentations
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.
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 12
- Mike: The Intermediate Value Theorem
- Ben: Integration by substitution
- Monday, September 15
- Andrew: Logarithms in calculus
- Steve: Trigonometric functions in calculus
- Wednesday, September 17
- Will: Seperable differential equations
- Scott: First Derivative Test for local extrema
- Friday, September 19
- Jerome: Continuity
- Ian: The area between curves
- Monday, September 22
- Daniel: Improper integrals
- Shane: The Chain Rule
- Wednesday, September 24
- Cindy: The Product Rule
- Erin: Asymptotes
- Friday, September 26
- Avishka: The slope of a graph
- Craig: The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus
- Monday, September 29
- Cam: The Quotient Rule
- Tyler: Second Derivative Test for local extrema
- Wednesday, October 1
- Owen: Integration by parts
- Felipe: Critical points
- Friday, October 3
- Hesam: The Mean Value Theorem
Long presentations
The schedule for the long (40-minute) presentations will be:
- Friday, October 17
- Mike: l'Hôpital's Rule
- Monday, October 20
- Shane: Critical points
- Wednesday, October 22
- Scott: Finding all zeros of functions
- Friday, October 24
- Steve: Integration by substitution
- Monday, October 27
- Will: Continuity
- Wednesday, October 29
- Cam: The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus
- Friday, October 31
- Jerome: Improper integrals
- Monday, November 3
- Ian: One-variable optimization problems
- Wednesday, November 5
- Ben: The Mean Value Theorem
- Friday, November 7
- Daniel: Trigonometric functions in calculus (including inverse trig functions)
- Monday, November 10
- Cindy: Logarithms in calculus
- Wednesday, November 12
- Hesam: Second Derivative Test for local extrema
- Friday, November 14
- Avishka: First Derivative Test for local extrema
- Monday, November 17
- Erin: The slope of a graph
- Wednesday, November 19
- Owen: The Intermediate Value Theorem
- Friday, November 21
- Craig: Integration by parts
- Monday, November 24
- Tyler: Asymptotes
- Wednesday, November 26
- Andrew: The area between curves
- Friday, November 28
- Felipe: Separable differential equations
Each student can skip one day per week, according to the following schedule:
| Skip Mondays | Skip Wednesdays | Skip Fridays |
|---|
Avishka
Ben
Cam
Felipe
Hesam
Owen
|
Daniel
Erin
Ian
Jerome
Steve
Will
|
Andrew
Cindy
Mike
Scott
Shane
Tyler
|
|
