Policies and Practices

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Anything You Want to Talk About?

Cohorts

You can find the list of who’s in which cohort in the “Introduction” Canvas module.

Cohorts will alternate class meeting days, i.e., Cohort A will meet in person next Monday, then Cohort B next Wednesday, Cohort A again on Friday, then Cohort B on the following Monday, and so forth. To reduce confusion, I’ll try to post in announcements and Canvas calendar entries which cohort comes to class on which day.

Comments on the Syllabus

Based on the syllabus itself, and the Canvas discussion of it.

Comments from the Discussion

Mastery grading requires self-discipline to keep up with deadlines. Even though there’s no penalty for missing a deadline in the short term, there’s a big and unavoidable deadline when the semester ends and I have to submit final grades. Don’t get into a position where you can’t finish everything you need to before the end of the semester.

See my post about the “2-tier reminder” system I plan to use to encourage people to keep up.

Discussion posts are also very accepting of allergies (thank you), but while we still have the COVID pandemic going on, a whole variety of seemingly minor symptoms might mask COVID. So if I’m not feeling right, even if it’s most likely just allergies, I won’t be holding in-person classes. Please do similarly yourself, i.e., don’t come to in-person classes (or other events) if you aren’t completely well.

Comments Beyond the Discussion

Mastery grading (or, really, teaching generally) and equity. People generally saw advantages in mastery grading for themselves, which is good — it does ask some self-discipline of you, and that will be easier to maintain if you see how it benefits you. But that’s a “like me” point of view, i.e., thinking about how a teaching practice works for students who are like you. Students, but even more so professors, need to realize that students are not all “like me,” and think about how the ways they teach and contribute to a class affect students with different backgrounds, motivations, etc.

For example, I’m no longer giving extra credit for going to talks or doing other out-of-class work, because it assumes that students have time for those things (like me, when I was in college). Students who don’t have the time, e.g., because they have to have a job, they have to help care for family members, etc. might in principle find other opportunities to get similar points, but over the long run, by small increments, the extra credit policy pushes a certain group of students towards top grades while not pushing other students.

Can you think of other examples?

• Professors assuming students come into their classes with a certain level of knowledge that in fact they might not have. Particularly in introductory courses, professors may assume students come from strong high schools when in fact not all do.
• Due dates for assignments having no evident rhyme or reason, particularly during pandemic/remote learning. Professors responding to rejuvenation days by making apparently random changes to deadlines.

Also related to mastery grading, don’t forget that you can redo problem sets, or parts of problem sets, if you want a higher grade for certain learning outcomes. Each problem set will address some of the course’s learning outcomes, and you’ll get separate grades within the problem set for each learning outcome. If you want to redo some of those outcomes from that problem set, just let me know and I’ll give you some similar problems to do as another problem set. When you show me that “problem set” for grading I’ll include whatever grades you get in your averages for the relevant outcomes.

Weekly meetings. Start holding an individual meeting with me each week from next week. You can make appointments via Google calendar, either a recurring appointment for the same time every week (which I may need to reschedule in occasional weeks), or making a new appointment each week. Add a Google meet or Zoom meeting to the appointment when you make it, or, if you don’t, we’ll meet in my Google office hours at https://meet.google.com/boo-wyaj-hcr. This video from CIT is a good introduction to Google calendar:

I hope to hand out the first problem set this Friday, although I don’t expect you to grade it next week. Instead, I expect next week’s meetings to be mostly to get to know you, answer questions you’ve discovered that you have, etc. You can grade the first problem set the following week. I plan to hand out roughly one problem set per week for the rest of the semester, except maybe for breaks in weeks with rejuvenation days.

One of my later posts mentioned “distributed oral exams.” What exactly do I mean by that phrase?

“Distributed oral exams” basically means that I evaluate how well you’re learning in this course via the weekly meetings with me. Instead of having a small number of high-stakes midterm and final exams, evaluation is distributed over all the problem sets. In talking about solutions (i.e., doing the evaluation orally), I get a good sense of how well you understand the material, especially because I’ll ask variations on a few of the questions.

Don’t forget that in the end, your grade depends on the average of your most recent and highest 2 earlier grades in each outcome, so there’s really no such thing as “failing” a distributed oral exam. If you don’t do well on a particular problem set, you can redo it, and/or get better at its outcome(s) so that you get higher grades when it comes up again in later problem sets.

About the Process

What you’ve done since Monday is a good model for how I hope this course will work between every pair of class meetings. In particular…

• There was reasonably robust discussion in the Canvas discussion forum — a good number of people participated (though it’s always nice to have more), and some important ideas or questions came up that could either be dealt with in the discussion, or that provided a basis for discussions here in class.
• Notice that I also joined the Canvas discussion, to answer questions, comment on posts, or suggest new questions that build on things people said. I will try to keep doing this.
• People did the reading! This is important, you really will learn more if you do, or try to do, the assigned readings so that Canvas and in-person discussions can be a place where you start to work with the material for yourself, or focus on the questions that really need to be answered.

Next

Mathematical statements, or propositions: assertions that are either true or false, and therefore are the building blocks for mathematical thinking and proofs.

Please read “Beginning Activity 1 (Statements),” “Statements,” and “How Do We Decide If a Statement is True or False?” in section 1.1 of the textbook.

Please also contribute to this statements discussion to get some conversation started about them before Friday’s class.

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