Write-in comments:

What do you like best about this course?:

the excitement of the instructor on the subject and the fact that this course was directed at students from math, engineering, biology and physics.

This really was a great class that brought together many, many things that I am very interested in.

Blackboard instruction worked better for me, personally.

the way of teaching by Professor

The in-class discussions brought out many more interesting problems and made the course well-rounded.

Inspiring presence of teacher esp. his enthusiasm.

The enthusiasm the teacher brought to the class and the resulting student participation.

Fantastic course - the breadth of material covered was great.

If you were teaching this course, what would you do differently?:

focus on the main point i want to make and not be distracted by a proof that didn't work...

Course seemed to move very slowly at the beginning.

Have a TA grade the homeworks and so have more regular problem solving.

Definitely change the timings. 10.20 in the morning is like midnight for many graduate students.

I wouldnt be as effective.

I really would have loved to find some way to incorporate Partial Differential Equations! I realize this is more a time constraint than anything else.

In what ways, if any, has this course or the instructor encouraged your intellectual growth and progress?:

The course has elicited interest in mathematics and done away with my long standing belief that anything complicated should be simplified with assumptions.

Made math relatively interesting for the first time.

The paper presentations were particularly effective in this regard.

Other comments or suggestions::

The male students were more often heard than the women.

Prof. Sontag is easily the best professor that I have had during my time here at Rutgers (9 semesters). His methods make the class very enjoyable.

Develop a an effective approach for other instructors to learn teaching from Prof. Sontag. Perhaps videotape his lectures with teaching experts editing it to provide a useful case study for young instructors.

My Comments

I am very happy with the comments, but there are a few points that I would like to address:

I would like to especially address the comment that "male students were more often heard than the women". I constantly encouraged everyone to participate, but participation was self-initiated. In undergraduate courses, I get broader participation by calling on students. On the other hand, I don't like, in more advanced graduate courses, to call on specific people (and "put them on the spot"), since many people taking such courses do so as a side interest and cannot be expected to devote much time to the material. Suggestions welcome.
"Course seemed to move very slowly at the beginning". True, it did. This was a very interdisciplinary group, and many students had almost no background in topics such as differential equations. So a slow ramp-up was unavoidable.
"Focus on the main point i want to make and not be distracted by a proof that didn't work". I believe that this refers to the fact that I like to show why some issues are more subtle that they appear at first sight. To do so, I usually show that a simple-minded approach does not work, and then go on to show the "right" way to approach a problem. This is a question of taste.
PDE's: the notes were written and available online, and the material was ready to be presented (as it was in past semesters). However, we traded-off PDE's, by popular demand (if I recall right, there was only one vote against) for the detailed study of stochastic chemical kinetics. Zero-sum!
"Have a TA grade the homeworks and so have more regular problem solving". Good idea in theory, but it is hard to impossible to find TA's that know the material. :( Thus, I graded the problem sets by myself. (In any event, I like to always grade by myself, so I can better gauge how students are understanding he material.)

Student Instructional Rating, Math 613 (Grad course, Math Intro Systems Biology), Fall 2009

Numerical overall score:

Write-in comments:

My Comments