The Mathematical Association of America Maryland-District of Columbia-Virginia Section

Nominations

Call for Nominations

Nominations for the 2014 MAA Section Awards for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics are now being accepted. The Award Selection Committee will determine the recipient of the John M. Smith Teaching Award from those nominated. The awardee will be honored at the Spring 2014 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 2014 MAA Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.

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 John M. Smith Teaching 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.

Eligibility

• College or university teachers who currently teach a mathematical science at least halftime during the academic year in a public or private college or university (from two-year college teaching through teaching at the Ph.D. level) in Maryland, Washington DC, or Virginia. Those on approved leave (sabbatical or other) during the academic year in which they are nominated qualify if they fulfilled the requirements in the previous year.
• More than seven years experience in teaching a mathematical science.
• Membership in the Mathematical Association of America.

Guidelines for Nomination

• Be widely recognized as extraordinarily successful in their teaching.*
• Have teaching effectiveness that can be documented.
• Have had influence in their teaching beyond their own institution.**
• Foster curiosity and generate excitement about mathematics in their students.

* "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.

Submitting a Nomination

Bruce Torrence, Section Award Committee Chair
Randolph-Macon College
P.O. Box 5005
Ashland, VA 23005-5505

Nominations must be submitted on the Nomination Form and must be postmarked by November 22, 2013. The Section Award Committee will review these "short" nominations, and finalists will be invited to submit a full nomination packet. The two-step process is designed to make it easy to submit an initial nomination, and so that only a few nominators need to go through the rigorous process of furnishing the full set of materials. Nominators will be informed in mid-December if their candidate is a finalist. For the finalists, the full nomination will include, in addition to the short form,

• a narrative (at most five pages),
• additional documentation (at most three pages),
• and letters of recommendation (at most five).

Complete instructions are available online here. The full nomination packets will be due on January 24, 2014.

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, 2014 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.

Sincerely,
Bruce Torrence
Chair, Section Award Committee, MD-DC-VA Section of the MAA
email: btorrenc@rmc.edu
office: (804)-752-7331
fax: (804)-752-4724