his lesson plan outlines a workshop on giving seminar presentations. The workshop was conducted in Mia Minnes’ Undergraduate Seminar in Logic at M.I.T. after each student had presented to the class once. The workshop included a discussion of the students’ experiences presenting, two sample presentations given by the instructor to illustrate common pitfalls and how to avoid them, a discussion of the rhetorical differences between seminar presentations and class lectures, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of various forms of presentation (slides, board, overhead).
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This 18-page resource for math instructors addresses questions of how to teach communication in an undergraduate math seminar. Most of the document focuses on questions of grading and providing feedback to students on their writing. It was written for a workshop with M.I.T. math instructors preparing to teach communication-intensive undergraduate math seminars.
Read more →This one-page reading assignment presents questions for students to consider as they read a draft of one of their instructor’s published papers. This assignment precedes a workshop on how to write a paper, in which the students discuss the draft and a revised version of the paper as well as writing process. From Pedro Reis’ Undergraduate Seminar in Physical Applied Mathematics at MIT.
Read more →LaTeX2e style file for theorem and proof environments, by Glenn Tesler
Read more →LaTeX2e style file for papers in M.I.T.’s Undergraduate Journal of Mathematics (no longer published), by Glenn Tesler modified by Thomas Mack 1999 and Steven Kleiman 1999, 2004–5, 2007
Read more →This student information sheet is given to students to fill out on the first day of class to indicate their writing backgrounds and their interests relevant to the class. From Pedro Reis’ Undergraduate Seminar in Physical Mathematics at M.I.T.
Read more →A short example illustrating the use of AMS-LaTeX commands
Read more →This assignment asks students to assess their participation in class over the course of the semester, supplying themselves with both a grade and comments. The self assessment is guided with five questions. Written by Mia Minnes for her Undergraduate Seminar in Logic at M.I.T.
Read more →This assignment for a term paper asks students to propose a topic, list at least two sources, and provide an outline of the paper. Included in the assignment is a list of suggested term paper topics related to the focus of the undergraduate seminar: Kolmogorov complexity and algorithmic randomness. From Mia Minnes’ Undergraduate Seminar in Logic at M.I.T.
Read more →This one-page outline summarizes a workshop on how to give a mathematics presentation. The instructor begins by giving a practice run of a real talk he will be presenting shortly in another context, students critique the talk in pairs and then the class as a whole discusses the highest priorities for improving the talk. This workshop occurs at the beginning of the term before students have begun giving their own presentations, so the instructor concludes the workshop with some “veteran advice” for how to prepare a presentation. Links are included to handouts for critiquing a presentation and for preparing a
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