Math 600: Graduate Teaching Seminar - Fall 2019

Announcements

• Homework is due at 5 PM on the assigned date. I will provide LaTeX templates of the homework assignments below.
• Don't forget to read the syllabus.

Agenda Week of 12/2

• Read Rishel’s chapter Problems of and with students, Mike Adams 20 year long study of the affects of college level exams on grandmother mortality rates The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society and the following two articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
  • Prozac Campus: the Next Generation
  • How to Help the Students With No Homes?
• Review the information available on the UAF Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities website, and think about what questions you would like to ask the director (who will be meeting with us on 12/4).
• Bring your suggestions for a mathematically themed movie to watch during the final exam period. Bonus credit will be given for suggestions that address teaching.
• Submit Written Homework 12 by 5 PM 12/3.

Agenda Week of 11/18

• Read §1-3 of Writing in the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics by Meier and Rishel, Assess- ing Expository Mathematics: Grading Journals, Essays, and Other Vagaries by Annalisa Crannell and Rishel’s Chapter Finding Voice Through Writing in Mathematics.
• Complete Homework 11 and send it to be on 11/19.

Resources

The course syllabus.

Latex:

We'll be using LaTeX throughout this course. My colleague, David Maxwell, has prepared some excellent installation instructions, which I updated last spring. If you are using a Mac, you should download these, and if you are using a PC, you should download these. Let me know if you notice any errors in the instructions, and I'll update them. If you are running a Linux distribution, you are on your own (but probably don't need any help anyway). You may also find this list of LaTeX math symbols helpful. Detexify is a useful tool for discovering the command that goes with a symbol.

Outside Resources

First, some books we'll definitely be using.

• Assessment Practices in Undergraduate Mathematics.
• How to Teach Mathematics. Steven G. Krantz's classic (now in its 3rd edition).
• Teaching First, a Guide for New Mathematicians. It is available in print and web versions.

Some other resources you may find helpful/interesting:

• An Introduction to Teaching Mathematics at the College Level
• A Mathematician's survival guide. A very amusing and frank article on aspects of the profession (take it with a big grain of salt!).
• More to come!

Homework Assignments by Due Date

Be sure to follow the instructions for the formatting of written assignments. Assignments will be available to download below.

Corrections to assignments due dates will be written in red.