Teaching Seminar

Spring 2019

All talks are from 12:00-1:00 p.m. in the Seminar Room, unless otherwise specified.

• Apr

  24
• Handling disputes among team members in group projects

  Sommer Gentry

  USNA

  Time: 12:00 PM

• Mar

  27
• Discussion of Grading Policies for Core Courses

  Time: 12:00 PM

  View Abstract

  Discussion of how we determine grades in core courses. How do we assign extra credit? How should 6- and 12-week grades compare to exam grades and final grades? How do our expectations compare to the learning goals of the course? How can we balance academic freedom of instructors with fairness to students over different sections of the course?

• Mar

  20
• Student Opinion Form Revision Discussion

  Aurelia Minut

  Time: 12:00 PM

• Feb

  13
• Reading and Research Courses and the Honors Committee Process

  Irina Popovici

  USNA

  Time: 12:00 PM

• Feb

  06
• Introduction to LaTeX

  David Seal

  USNA

  Time: 12:00 PM

  View Abstract

  LaTeX is a professional typesetting language that is used to produce beautiful mathematical equations. It currently serves as the gold standard in the academic world enabling scientists and engineers to produce modular documents for textbooks and research publications. For our day to day operations here on the Yard, this language can be used to create professional looking documents for quizzes, exams, reading materials, worksheets and exams. In this talk we provide an overview of the workflow required to typeset a document in LaTeX. The goal is to provide enough tools so that any attendee can do something like write a quiz, an in class worksheet, or an exam for any scientific course that is taught here on the Yard. In this session, we will walk through a couple of examples of documents found in our shared drive folder that can be used as templates to be modified. Interest pending, we can look at some tikz examples for constructing graphics.

• Jan

  09
• Teaching Writing in our Courses

  Sommer Gentry

  USNA

  Time: 12:00 PM

  View Abstract

  The speaker will share a variety of approaches she has used to teach writing skills in her courses; chiefly capstone courses but these concepts apply in any course where students are doing more than incidental writing - that is, any place where students craft sentences into paragraphs into longer pieces. Topics include: teaching students to write longer pieces by reading and deconstructing good writing in the format they're aiming for, whether that's an academic manuscript or an executive summary with technical appendices; a book to help students understand how to write vividly, with descriptive verbs and concrete details; a sentence-level revision exercise; and a peer writing evaluation rubric.