Course Policies

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Misc

New Classroom

Starting Friday (January 27) we meet in Bailey 102.

Math Learning Center

Hours have been announced. See the MLC web site (https://www.geneseo.edu/math/mlc) for the exact details, but the rough outline is…

• Monday through Friday: mid-morning through early evening (opens 9:00 or 10:00, stays open ’til 6:00 or 7:00).
• Sunday: late afternoon (3:00 - 5:00)
• (Saturday: closed)

The MLC is a good resource for help with coursework, getting questions answered, etc.

Course Policies

Based on the syllabus.

Key Ideas

Grading in this course focuses very much on mastering and understanding: “mastery grading.” Key aspects of this are…

• You aren’t graded for behaviors, for example you don’t get penalized for missing deadlines (except at the very end of the semester, when there’s an unmovable deadline for me to turn in your grades), nor, for example, do you get extra credit for doing extra work outside of class.
• Grading is in some ways designed to maximize your ability to show understanding, and not to penalize you for not understanding things. For example, you can redo problem sets (basically once per problem set) in order to improve understanding that may not have been perfect the first time, and your numeric grade for each learning outcome is an average of the most recent grade (to capture where you are now) and your highest two earlier ones (to capture how well you understood that outcome, while setting aside places where you may have struggled on the way to good understanding).

A lot of the implementation of mastery grading is through face-to-face meetings outside of class.

You can also meet with me outside of class for any reason you like, not just for grading. Many people also meet to ask questions about problem sets, check their ideas for solving the problems on a problem set, etc.

Questions

How will “distributed oral exams” work?

• You should meet with me for half an hour each week to grade that week’s problem set.
• The easiest way to set up these meetings is to schedule them via Google calendar. I’ll demonstrate how to do that when we get close to the start of grading for the first problem set. Setting up a time that repeats every week all semester is a good way to make this a regular thing that’s easier to remember and prepare for than one that changes each week.
• In the meeting, we’ll go over your solution to the problem set, i.e., I’ll look at your answers, answer questions you still have about the problem set, and you can explain your thinking behind the answers. I’ll also ask you to answer a couple of new questions that are variations on the ones from the problem set.
• My impression is that once students get used to this, they generally find it less stressful than traditional high-stakes exams. But if you aren’t prepared in a grading meeting, it will probably show (though I’ll try not to be judgmental about it).
• There are no paper exams — no midterm(s), no final, no quizzes, etc.
• I’ll hand out problem sets online, and they will spell out what learning outcomes they address and when you should complete them by (i.e., be ready to start another one) and grade them by (separate from “completion,” so you have a few extra days after finishing a problem set to grade it). Here’s an example problem set from an earlier offering of this course, to show what ours will look like.

Why mastery grading? It’s basically an equity thing, arising from a realization that a lot of what professors typically do in a course is based on an unconscious assumption that students are “like me.” This means that classroom rules and grading systems tend to slightly favor students who are indeed like the professor was as a student — have a similar level of interest in the subject, have similar amounts of time to devote to it, etc. This in turn biases academia toward perpetuating itself generation after generation, which at least historically in the US meant something done by white, male, Protestant, etc. faculty. That can and has changed over time, but the “like me” assumption means that higher education still has a lot of unexamined bias in it. Mastery grading is an attempt to strip the “like me” out of grading, and consciously focus it only on what it’s supposed to do: measuring how well students understand the material a course is meant to teach.

What will we use Mathematica for? We didn’t get to answer this question in class, but I found it in the notes afterwards, so here’s an answer: In the real world, lots of the mechanics of “doing math” is done by calculators or computer programs these days, and so you should know how to use those tools. Mathematica is the example of such tools that I’ve chosen to focus on for this course, and I’ll be teaching you, and expecting you to practice, some of what it can do.

Practice

Which of the following are ways to meet with me outside of class?

• In-person in my office
• Via videochat
• In-person somewhere other than my office
• By telephone
• Via email
• Other

I very much prefer in-person meetings, and think that they are more effective than the alternatives at getting things done. But all of the not-in-person alternatives here are better than not meeting at all, and I have in fact used them in the past when I had to. So if an in-person meeting is hard for you to do for some reason, let me know and I’ll try to work out an alternative with you.

Next

3-dimensional coordinates.

Please read “Three Dimensional Coordinate Systems,” “Distance in R³,” and “Writing Equations in R³” in section 1.2 of the textbook for Friday. Come to class ready to mention a question about the material that you’d like clarified, or something from it that seemed to be a central idea.

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