Teece grant, Math 5
For the past few months I had the opportunity to create a new Math 5 course at CPS. This work was funded by a Teece Grant.
To begin creating the materials for the course, I spent a considerable amount of time deciding on the textbook for the class. After browsing through several books on the subject, I finally narrowed the list of choices down to three. From this point the real fun began, and although I had read all three books from cover-to-cover I still enjoyed re-reading them. While the time spent reading the books was enjoyable, it did begin to wear me down. Luckily, after a few weeks, I decided on the perfect book for our class, Tom Apostol’s ‘’Calculus, Volume 1,” the book that is currently being used in Math 4.
My next major piece of the project was to decide how I was going to structure the class. Here at CPS we have traditionally structured our math classes around a discussion-based environment, and not a lecture-based setting. After much deliberation and discussions with fellow colleagues and students, I have decided that a hybrid between the two philosophies is the correct way to go. As such, I needed to create lecture notes along with our typical worksheets, which contain the discussion problems. With this approach each class will begin with a student-led discussion of the previous class’s worksheet/lecture, followed by a short lecture introducing a new key concept, or a deeper look into previous ideas via worksheet (students working in groups).
After having the book chosen and the global structure mapped out, the next step in the process was to create lecture notes for the course. This task required me to read the chosen section of the textbook, highlight the key ideas and concepts, and then to write some notes and create examples to better help the students digest the material. These lecture notes are very important because they will be the first look for the students at the key concepts of the course and the daily worksheets that they will complete inside and outside of class. They will also be the spark that will ignite our daily discussions in class.
With the lecture notes compiled, creating the daily worksheets, the last part of my summer work, took the main stage. While a few of the problems appearing on the worksheets came from the book, most of the problems were completely original. This required a significant amount of time and effort, which I was able to devote thanks to the Teece Grant. The worksheets were typeset using LaTeX. Both the .tex files and the .pdf files have been uploaded to a Google Drive directory. This will allow for anyone with permission to access the files (both faculty and students), and to make updates and annotations as desired.
Future work to be done consists of typing out the handwritten lecture notes and uploading the .tex and .pdf files to the same directory on Google Drive. This process might begin during Christmas break and should make it easier to disseminate the notes throughout the department, and on to the students.
I would once again like to thank the Teece family for giving me the opportunity to devote a significant amount of time working on creating this course. Due to their generous gift, I was able to create the course from scratch which, in its current state, is ready to go.
What an exciting summer project!
.png){kind=logo}
男装CONSCIA REPI
识时务者为俊杰