NOTE: This information is displayed as originally presented. Please direct questions and comments to MathEd@nd.edu.
The basics
Each year, the Notre Dame Math Department holds a teaching seminar for the training of its first and second year graduate students. All students and faculty members are welcome to attend, but attendence is mandatory for first and second year students. The seminar will begin Friday, April 1, and will meet most subsequent Tuesdays and Thursdays in April. A more detailed schedule is provided below. Please communicate any conflicts, concerns, or ideas to Dan Bates.
The official announcement from Professor Alex Himonas may be found in pdf format here.
Some days, there will be panels of grad students and/or faculty members which address specific topics. Each panelist will be given about five minutes to speak (to be enforced by the moderator), thereby leaving plenty of time for discussion. Participants should feel free to ask any questions they have during the discussion periods. It is recommended that the panelists communicate in advance so as to split up the material to be covered.
Other days, second year grad students will give 20-minute lectures on material that one may find in a first year undergraduate course (e.g., calculus). On those days, the speaker(s) should treat the audience as an actual class and the audience members should behave as such. After each presentation, the members of the audience should provide feedback to the presenter. Although all useful feedback should be communicated to the presenter at some point, it would be best to give technical or minor feedback after the seminar, in person or in an email. There has been a tendency in the past few years to comment on the same minor concerns for each presenter (e.g., which board to write on first). Again, such feedback is appropriate, but it should be delayed until after the period is over. This year, there will also be a "focus topic" each day. Although there will likely not be time to discuss the focus topic during such seminar meetings, students should consider each focus topic before the second half of the seminar, when Professors Himonas and Hahn and Dean Kolman will address related issues. Material regarding each day's "focus topic" will be distributed prior to each seminar meeting of this type.
Finally, there will be a couple special presentations by very talented educators from the faculty. These presentations will take the form of lectures addressing pedagogical topics chosen by the speaker. These seminar meetings may be of particular interest to graduate students beyond the second year and faculty members.
This year, the proceedings of the seminar will be posted online. To view these, just click on the links in the schedule below. The proceedings consist of summaries of the discussions and/or lectures from each day (except for the presentations of the second year grad students) and remarks from the seminar participants. It is strongly recommended that seminar participants write to Dan Bates with any remarks about the material covered in any of the seminar meetings. These remarks will then be posted (anonymously, if you like) on the appropriate page. Students are also encouraged to contribute any other remarks about teaching that they may have, to be displayed under "General comments" below.
If you have advice, ideas, or any other thoughts that you would like to share regarding teaching, please forward them to Dan Bates, and they will promptly be posted here.
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