How to use the Math 130 Materials and Instructor's Guide

You should be able to download a complete set of course materials (mostly problems that the students work on during class) and a sufficiently complete Instructor's Guide so as to be able to teach the course without reference to further materials. Completeness of the materials and Instructor's Guide does NOT, however, reduce the need for training in the Socratic / Cooperative learning pedagogy.

Most of the materials are in PostScript so that they may be downloaded in finished form, printed out and used. You can preview them, e.g., with Ghostview. If you need LaTeX source files, contact me. The Instructor's guide contains solutions which, for obvious reasons, are not available at this site. You can e-mail me for a copy. If you are unable to contact me, Eric Egge (egge@math.wisc.edu) is the other curator of this archive.

The best way to see how to use the materials here is to start reading the Instructor's Guide, using Ghostview. It will tell you what the course is about, how to assemble a coursepack, how to plan the course, and how to learn the accompanying pedagogy. The part of the Guide that discusses creation of a coursepack is reproduced here.

There are two ways to create your coursepack. The easiest is to download the activities set as is, and add to it a course information page, adapted from the sample given in Section 3 of the Instructor's Guide. If you number the pages of the course information handout i, ii, ..., the activities set will be correctly pagenumbered. Then you privately go through the activities and plan a day-to-day syllabus, detailing which activities you plan to do and in what order. The coursepack will contain some activities you don't plan to use, but that is not a problem.

The second way to construct a coursepack is to create your syllabus and then re-order the materials in the order you plan to use them, possibly regrouping units as well. Unless you are certain you don't want to use a given worksheet, it's safest to include it in the coursepack at the end of the appropriate unit. You may choose to add new worksheets of your own design, and will certainly also add your own course information sheet. The advantages of the second method are that you are forced to go through all the materials before the semester starts, that you will probably better internalize a sense of direction for the semester's curriculum, and that you will fee less bound to stick to someone else's ordering and topic selection. The disadvantages are that you have to renumber the pages and that you have to make a new table of contents. You'll find that the first sample syllabus at the end of the activity notes is compatible with the idea of using the activities set as is, while the last has regrouped things enough that you'd probably want to reflect that in the coursepack.