Workshops
Mathematical Systems
Emerging Scholars Program Workshops
These workshops were written for the 2009-10 Mathematical Systems program at The Evergreen State College, and are loosely based on the Uri Treisman Workshop Model. Each week, the students were given a set of problems, and then asked to work together in groups to solve them with little to no help from the teachers. The goals were to get them used to working with other people, to persevere through challenging problems, and potentially mimic the real life challenges of group research situations.
ESP was not designed as a remedial program and is often used for honors programs focusing on academic excellence. Proof writing, and many of the courses associated with it, are a notoriously troublesome undergraduate hurdle for students of mathematics. This course was designed to give students a chance to discuss proofs and difficult problems requiring them. One of the hopes was that by discussing difficult math problems with their peers, students might notice the imprecision in their language and processes that might be hard for them to notice on their own.
Two of the workshops that quarter were a crash preparatory course for the William Lowell Putnam mathematics competition. For those two workshops I had the students pick problems from Putnam exams from 1994 and 2001 and work on them in groups.