>When we hired our last mathematics faculty, we sent pages from a text and
>had the prospective teacher "teach" a calc class. This was very
>enlightening. Even people on the committee who were not familiar with
>calculus could tell when a person was a good teacher and when a person could
>"put the class to sleep."
When we interview full-time math candidates, we do something
similar: we ask each candidate to present a 5-minute lesson on any topic
of his or her choice, alerting the candidate to this procedure in advance.
In contrast to Nancy's procedure with uniform math content, this has the
disadvantage of making the presentations somewhat harder to compare, but
has the advantage of revealing to the committee more about the candidate.
Incidentally, we also ask each candidate to write a one-page grant
proposal. We think that grant-writing is an important part of the job
today (as our job ads specify), and this procedure also reveals in another
way from the oral presentation the candidate's communication skills.
Geoff Akst
Geoffrey Akst
Mathematics Department
Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street
NY, NY 10007
(v) 212/346-8530, -8531, -8532
(f) 212/346-8550
(e) akst@idt.net
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