SUNY Geneseo Department of Mathematics
Thursday, January 23
Math 223 01
Spring 2020
Prof. Doug Baldwin
Lots of questions from reading the syllabus, summarized under the syllabus discussion below.
Think about something you’ve learned outside a conventional school setting (e.g., a hobby, game, etc.) How did you learn it?
In my own experience, backed up by research others have done on learning psychology, practice is hugely important. So I’ll run this course in a flipped and active manner, where I ask you to read things before class, and then we use class time to discuss questions stemming from that reading, do small activities that build on them, etc. I and the textbook authors play a role of experts who can provide information necessary for the practice, answer questions, generally guide and mentor the process.
Grading? The grading scheme in the syllabus accomplishes 2 things: by being coarse (i.e., only having 6 or 7 grades you can get) it avoids any need to make subtle and likely inconsistent decisions about small differences in grade for answers with small but different errors. By giving numerically lower grades than most graders (i.e., being willing to give grades of 20% or 40%, etc.) it uses the full grading scale. I take this into account when assigning letter grades to numeric averages, e.g., a 70% average is most likely right in the middle of the B range. See the table of grades I assigned last time I taught this for concrete evidence of this.
Turning things in? Homework will generally be problem sets, rather than something like WebAssign. You’ll turn solutions in by meeting with me to present and discuss them. But this does include having a written solution prepared, so we have something to talk about.
Calculators? The idea behind the calculator policy is that I’m mainly interested in you showing your knowledge of calculus at an “application” level (see yesterday’s discussion of learning levels), which (1) calculators aren’t all that good at, but (b) doing the mechanical sort of things calculators are good at distracts from. So to help you concentrate the limited time available in a test on the things I want to see, you can use calculators on tests. On the other hand, lots of practice doing math by hand does gradually build insight/intuition for how math works, so I want you to have experience not using calculators - and problem sets, where you have lots of time, are a good place to get that. Thus the policy forbidding calculators on problem sets.
Collaboration? The policy on collaboration probably sounds harder to obey than it is. Collaboration on problem sets is fine, the crucial goal of the policy is just for everyone to realize when it’s happening. The most common form is when students form study groups and turn in collective solutions as a group; then, thanks to the face-to-face grading, it’s obvious that there is a collaboration because the whole group meets me as a group. The subtler case is when people get help from a learning center tutor or each other on a single question, and I eventually start to realize during grading that I’m seeing the same solution over and over; that’s where it would be nice to have a note that you got help from a tutor or whatever.
Suppose a problem set asks you to do A, B, and C, and you do exactly A, B, and C and nothing more. What grade should you expect to get?
80%
Why?
Because education is one of the few places where doing what’s expected and excelling tend to be conflated together; insisting on something beyond expectations in order to receive an “excellent” rather than “good” grade makes those judgments more consistent with how the rest of the world acts.
But it’s not hard to exceed expectations. Some ways I’ve seen include...
Using a LibreTexts book is something of an experiment — any reactions you have to the book would be very interesting to me, any time.
Quick tour of the textbook. Especially notice that some figures are interactive, e.g., let you zoom in or out and rotate graphs, etc.
Quick tour of this course’s Canvas site. Especially notice the “modules” page as the place almost everything for the class (lecture notes, assignments, etc.) is collected together. Also notice that the main page has a button that links to the textbook.
3-dimensional coordinate systems.
Read the “Three-Dimensional Coordinate Systems” & “Writing Equations in R3” subsections of section 11.2 in the textbook.
Come to class with either a question you’d like answered about this reading, or a couple of what seem to you to be the key ideas from it.
Hints about reading math: