Graduate students spend a large majority of their degree receiving technical training in doing research mathematics. What is often underemphasized is that these students also must give presentations and eventually teach classes.

Often times, students receive very limited training in these facets of their degree, especially from trained mathematicians whose role it is in part to give these talks in their discipline. To help bridge the gap in training, we discuss a seminar for graduate students looking to teach their first course that a group of colleagues have been getting under way in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo ran for the first time in Winter of 2018 and are running again in 2019. This was based on experiences gained in part from a similar course offered at the University of British Columbia.

I will discuss our seminar format, including micro teaching sessions, practicum, assessment design and presentation skills. I will also discuss some of the challenges of this seminar and some of the ways we are trying to overcome these difficulties. Lastly, I will talk about some improvements we will be making from the first to second iteration based in part on some instructor training at the 2018 CoMInDS workshop in Orono, Maine.

This is joint work with Brian Forrest, Diana Skrzydlo and Dan Wolczuk at the University of Waterloo and discussions with Fok-Shuen Leung at the University of British Columbia.

Bio: Carmen Bruni is a Lecturer in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He has been at the university since 2015, first spending two years with the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing. He obtained a doctorate in 2015 from the University of British Columbia with his thesis on Twisted Extensions of Fermat’s Last Theorem. He now shares his love and passion for mathematics and computer science with his students provided many open free resources to them available on his personal webpage <https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cbruni/>.