The materials below were used in a course for prospective elementary school teachers. I did not do any lecturing in the course. The students worked on the problem sets in groups of five, and I circulated among the groups and gave help as appropriate.
Many students in the course had a background consisting of only high school algebra, and many of them remembered very little even of that. In the past, the materials for the course had been not much more than a bunch of definitions. I was determined that my students should learn something of real substance.
My main objective, though, was not to teach my students any particular subject matter. What I hoped to accomplish was to teach them how to learn mathematics, and -- even more important -- how to be interested in mathematics. I tried to do as little as possible in the course that was routine, or boring.
About once every two weeks I gave an assignment consisting of non-routine word problems based on elementary algebra and logic. (For instance the problem of the missionaries and the cannibals.)
One of the ironies of courses like these is that many of the topics -- such as the Euclidean algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two integers, or Horner's Method for evaluating polynomials -- are are never learned by many science majors because everything in the usual mathematics curriculum is oriented so strongly around calculus. A lot of the files listed below are in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format. Alternate versions are in DVI format (produced by TeX; see see here for a DVI viewer provided by John P. Costella) and postscript format (viewable with ghostscript.) Some systems may have some problem with certain of the documents in dvi format, because they use a few German letters from a font that may not be available on some systems. (Three alternate sites for DVI viewers, via FTP, are CTAN, Duke, and Dante, in Germany.)