Here are some miscellaneous items that have been suggested by past TA’s for adding variety to your section, say after a midterm or if your students are flagging and look like they need a break.
Section Variety
- Play a math-based game in class. The format could be Jeopardy, Name That Sequence, etc. Be creative. In general, it’s better if you play after the students feel comfortable with each other and the students compete in groups. You should encourage whole groups to be responsible, for instance by selecting a random member of the group to explain their answer.
- Lana has helped TAs run a kind of parlor game which moves students around the room depending on their opinions about various topics, often controversial. This is a nice breather and helps to build a certain community feeling, if done wisely (avoid screaming matches over volatile issues!).
- Do a demonstration in class involving physical objects. Here’s an example around rates of change: using 2 (or more) differently shaped (clear) vases, a ruler, and water with a measuring cup, show how the rate at which the height of water in the vase increases is related to the shape--in particular the width--of the vase at a given point.
- Arrange a computer demonstration. Past sections have used graphic displays of hard-to-visualize stuff, like volumes of revolution or families of solutions to differential equations. Ask Lana or Eric about wheeling in a Mac with a big monitor or an overhead projector and LCD screen. We can get our hands on Maple , Mathematica or MathCad, and we have a few old demos on some old hard drive.
- Tell math-related stories. They can be topical (e.g. the story of how Newton was, in addition to being crazy, a virgin) or not. Calculus: An Historical Approach, which is a Springer-Verlag UTM text, for interesting stories and quotes.
- Have students present projects. Past projects have included reports on the lives of famous mathematicians, personalized math projects, and (in the humanities) multimedia reports on chosen topics.
Project Resources
There are a gazillion books on math education in the Dana Center which include projects. In particular:
- MAA Notes 29: Applications of Calculus (this has text and exercises for students learning calculus, centered around various applications--from voting schemes to modeling epidemics. It includes answers to some of the exercises and comments for the instructor.)
- Cohen et al, Student Research Problems in Calculus (this is a year’s-worth collection of 1 or 2 week projects for students to learn calculus. It includes comments for the instructor on the difficulty of each project, what the students need to know before beginning, and what the students should get out of it. This is the New Mexico State project.)
- MAA Notes 27: Problems for Student Investigation (these are lab investigations--some on paper, some with computer--also with comments to the instructor.)
- MAA Notes 17: Priming the Calculus Pump: Innovations and Resources is worth looking at. This is one of the original documents discussing calculus reform, with descriptions of many calculus reform projects including sample problems.
Group Work Variations
Here are a few variations on the group work theme.
- Roundtable. Each group has a sheet of paper and a pencil. The teacher poses a problem with multiple answers. A student writes down an answer and then passes the sheet to the left. The process continues until the teacher stops it. A student may pass on one round, but must eventually respond.
- Cooperative Review. Groups of students iare responsible for preparing a review sheet before an exam. Groups take turns posing their questions to the other groups.
- Jigsaw. Divide a task into several different components, topics, or representations of the same problem. Each student in a group is designated expert in one of the parts. Experts for similar parts meet and discuss until they all feel prepared to report to their original group. Finally, students report back on the problems to their groups.
- Conceptual Webbing. Groups are given a list of related concepts. The group creates a large diagram organized to explain how the concepts are related. The diagrams are shared with the whole class.