[The following notes are about Steven Kleiman’s 2010 Undergraduate Seminar in Computational Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry, in which the students give the lectures and write a term paper. The main page for this course is here.] The term paper is to be a ten-page essay on a topic related to the course. The goal is for you to learn something new, and to explain it clearly to others in the class, or better, to other upper-class math majors. The paper must be written in a professional style, and formatted in AMS-LaTeX, like the papers in MIT’s Undergraduate Journal of
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Writing well requires mastery of writing principles at a variety of different scales, from the sentence and paragraph scale (e.g., ordering information within sentences so content flows logically) to the section and paper scale (e.g., larger-scale structure). To simplify teaching, you can begin the term with shorter assignments to address the smaller-scale issues so you can more easily focus on the larger-scale issues when you assign longer assignments later in the term. At all scales, students best learn to communicate as mathematicians if the assignments are as authentic as possible: if the genre and rhetorical context are as similar as
Read more →If one of your objectives is for students to learn to communicate as mathematicians, then consider creating a presentation context that is comparable to those encountered by mathematicians (e.g., conference talk, colloquium talk, poster presentation, lecture to students, informal presentation to collaborators). Short Talks Assigning short talks at the start of the term acts as an ice breaker and helps the class get to know each other gives you a quick way to assess which students will need the most help with presenting helps the students to start becoming more comfortable speaking in front of the class If students will
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