Nominations for the 2007 MAA Section Awards for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics are now being accepted. The (name) Section Selection Committee will determine the recipient of the award from those nominated. The awardee will be honored at the Spring 2007 meeting of the Section and will be widely recognized and acknowledged within the Section. The awardee will also be the official Section nominee for the 2008 MAA Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics. There will be at most three national awardees, each of whom will be honored at the national MAA meeting in January 2008 with a certificate and check for $1000. A special session at that meeting is devoted to talks by the awardees on aspects of their teaching.
Anyone may make a nomination, but nominations from chairs or MAA liaisons in departments of mathematical sciences are especially solicited. For this reason, this call for nominations is sent to both department chairs and MAA liaisons so that the responsibility for nominations can be shared between them. An outline of the nomination process can be found on the web site http://www.maa.org/awards/teachingawards.htm
We urge you to submit a nomination for the MAA (name) Section Award if you have someone eligible and qualified in your department. Even if not selected this year, it is an honor for someone to have been nominated, and your candidate can likely be nominated again in a future year. Your department will receive recognition for its commitment to excellence in teaching, and the work done in preparing a nomination folder for your candidate is a tribute in itself. Self-nomination is not permitted.
Please discuss this memo with your colleagues and post it in a prominent place in your department.
Nominees should
* "teaching" is to be interpreted in its broadest sense, not necessarily limited to classroom teaching. It may include activities such as preparing students for mathematical competitions at the college level such as the Putnam Prize Competition or the Mathematical Contest in Modeling, attracting students to become majors in a mathematical science or to become Ph.D. candidates, working with pre-service or inservice teachers, etc.
** "influence beyond..." can take many forms, including demonstrated lasting impact on alumni, influence on the profession through curricular revisions in college mathematics teaching with wide-ranging impact, influential publications or innovative books concerned with the teaching of college mathematics, etc.
Nominations must be submitted on the enclosed "Nomination Form." Please follow the instructions on that form precisely to assure uniformity in the selection process both at the section and national levels.
If a file on a Section awardee significantly exceeds the prescribed limits (as stated on page 2 of the Nomination Form), it will not be considered for a national award and will be returned to the Section.
Please send six copies of each nomination packet to
Nominations for someone from another Section should be sent to the Secretary of the nominee's Section.
The Section Selection Committee will select the Section awardee during February and communicate its selection to the national MAA Secretary by no later than March 1, 2007 so that the national Committee can then make its selections.
We look forward to your participation in this exciting MAA venture of taking substantive action to honor extraordinarily successful teaching. We want to see such teaching recognized at all post-secondary school levels. We depend on you to help us identify those who merit such recognition.