SUNY Geneseo Department of Mathematics
Wednesday, September 2
Math 221 02
Fall 2020
Prof. Doug Baldwin
I will need to split this class into 3 cohorts rather than 2 — we have one (or now maybe two) more student than can fit with 2 cohorts, plus we need room for Emiliana.
So watch for an announcement this afternoon or evening breaking you into 3 cohorts, and brace yourselves for a slightly more confusing pattern of coming to in-person classes (you’ll come to every third class instead of every other).
We’ll start the new cohorts with tomorrow’s (Thursday’s) class.
The downside of mastery grading for students is that they are more responsible for keeping up than in a conventional course. I will try to help with this by suggesting time frames for doing problem sets, and warning you during our individual weekly meetings if I think you’re falling behind.
Start those individual meetings next week. The easiest way to set them up is by making appointments through Google calendar. The sooner you do that the better, since with lots of students wanting meetings you might get closed out if you wait too long. This video from CIT is a good introduction to making appointments through Google calendar:
Submit work to me in the individual meetings, you don’t need to submit it ahead of time. The simplest way to “submit work” is probably to take photos of it before the meeting and then screen-share them with me during it. Or you could also scan your solutions and share them through Google drive, email them to me, prepare them completely electronically and share the files, etc. I will try to make almost anything that works for you work for me.
Also regarding the meetings, if video chat doesn’t work for you, we can do something else. In the worst case, I’ve done these meetings via a simple phone call, with solutions shared through Google drive or email ahead of time.
Most of you were OK with my hay fever (thank you), though some had some cautions about coming to class with symptoms.
And in fact, this is a “better safe than sorry” thing now that we have all the COVID public health measures. I will actually not hold in-person classes if/when I have bad hay fever symptoms, just in case they are disguising COVID symptoms. But the course will keep moving along on those days thanks to its online nature.
And please take the same approach yourselves: if you even might be sick, don’t come to classes or mingle with others.
A preview of calculus.
Read section 2.1 in the textbook.
Do this discussion by class time Thursday.