Teaching

I have started keeping a teaching diary of sorts. Skip to things below:

First semester 2011

Almost all teaching is now organised centrally by the university-- timetables are available on the Portal and lecture notes, reading lists, example sets and so forth on the VLE. The only exception is if you are a project student with me, in which case, you already know how to contact me.

MATH1010

I will teach the second half of this new module, MATH1010 Mathematics I concentrating upon multi-variable calculus, and also an introduction to linear algebra. Roughly, this takes ideas from A-Level which were developed in one or two dimensions, and generalises them to many dimensions, with a view towards applications (which are more fully explored later).

Tutoring

I will also tutor students on the project module MATH3083, and will run workshops for MATH2015, Analysis 2-- the timetable for this is organised centrally!

Admissions work

This year, I will be the new deputy admissions tutor, working with Dr Daniel Read. Not strictly teaching, but rather recruiting the next generation of undergraduates.

Year 2010/11

I lectured the first semster of MATH1035, Analysis I (which is the final year this course is running) and also the course MATH2200, Linear Algebra 2 (now lectured by Dr Schuster). As ever, I also supverised students on the project modules MATH3000 and MATH3083, and tutored on MATH1060.

Year 2009/10

I lectured MATH5015, Linear Analysis I, and MATH1035, Analysis I, in the first semester, and MATH3181, Inner-products and Metric spaces in the second semester.

Year 2008/09

I lectured MATH5015, Linear Analysis I, in the first semester, and MATH3181, Inner-products and Metric spaces in the second semester.

Year 2008/09

I lectured MATH5015, Linear Analysis I, in the first semester.

Popular talks etc.

I helped Richard Elwes give a popular talk, to sixth-form students, on knot theory. This was part of the Leeds Festival of Science. Special thanks to Ruth Holland, Hazel Kendrick and David Pauksztello. We recently repeated the effort as a "Reach for Excellence session".

The following are some handouts (with LaTeX source) which I produced. The margins of the PDF files are off, probably because I used pstricks, and hence ps2pdf, instead of pdflatex.

I ran a "Quiz night" as part of the annual 6th Form Conference held at the university. Thanks for Alan Slomson, on whose idea this was based. Contact me if you would like further information: I won't post the quiz, to discourage cheating!

Video mini-lectures

As part of taking the ULTA2 teaching course at Leeds, I have been experimenting with making video mini-lectures: basically narrated PDF files of small, important sections of my current lecture course, MATH3181.

I plan to post more details here in the future, but for now, the bare minimum of details.

I produced PDF files using the standard LaTeX package Beamer. I then recorded the beamer presentation with my narration using the free package CamStudio. This produces AVI file output, and can also produce Flash output.

CamStudio refused to record the window of Acrobat Viewer, so I had to use my DVI previewer, YAP. Audio was recorded using an old, very cheap clip-on microphone. I uploaded the video to the University of Leeds video hosting project, LuTube. You can see my mini-lectures:

On the VLE I also added the PDF file and an MP3 of the extracted audio, so students could download the files and use them away from an internet connection. Obviously the PDF is no longer syned to the audio, but an advantage of this system is that it's not at all hard to see where in the PDF I am narrating.

Links

IT links

I'm a bit of a cynic about the possibility of using IT in teaching mathematics. So here I'm trying to prove myself wrong by collecting links to uses of computers in teaching.

  • How to invert a sphere - Great video, which is long and goes into a lot of detail, but without becoming tedious, about some basic topology. Would be a fun way to motivate a first course on algebraic topology, but is so long that students would essentially have to watch it in their own time (or maybe you could break it up and make a whole lecture out of it -- assuming you had a spare lecture going...) Anyone else think that the woman sounds just like Marina Sirtis? (Hat tip to John Baez).
  • Moebius Transformations Revealed.