My (only half-joking) hypothesis has been that my calc instructor is going to just give me 100s on all the assignments from here on out. Homeworks #11 and #12 have already come back with 100s and no notes/comments on the pages. I just now checked my progress report and homeworks #13 and #14 are also graded with 100s. So far, so good.
Of course, homeworks #17-19 are where the hypothesis is really going to be tested, since I have at least one problem on each assignment that I know is wrong.
I am working on my last (four-part) problem on my last homework assignment (#19) for the class! I have finished part a but am baffled by parts b-d. Determining the convergence or divergence of improper integrals that lack elementary solutions is annoying; I am not good at coming up with appropriate "comparison" functions for these. I have already given up on one such problem in this assignment set and consider it likely that I will bail on the remaining three.
Blah! I say.
Finding useful information online for the tougher problems on my math homework has been quite difficult. Too often I find that the recommended methods of handling the problem (or a very similar problem) use methods that I don't have in my Calc 1 toolbox yet - polar coordinates, multivariate calculus, Fourier series. And much of the time, it's just about impossible to find anything at all about the problem that's confounding me. At a minimum, the fact that google doesn't consistently recognize the use of mathematical symbols in the search (when you can even express the mathematical symbols using the standard keyboard) means you get a lot of garbage as you try to find pages that use precisely the text "sin x/x" and not some other combination of "sin" and "x." And I don't speak LaTeX.
Fortunately, I have been able to make good use of my inhouse tutor, but lately, even he has been saying things like "I don't remember ever doing this" and "OK, I've read the material in the book, but this book sucks." His thinking about the book's style, which I had not considered before but makes sense to me, is that this method of teaching by example works particularly poorly when there is no instructor to fill in the gaps. This would explain why it always seems to me that they show us a few simple examples of problems and then spring really hard problems on us in the homework; maybe the examples really are inadequate to teaching the material without an instructor.
In any event, I'm going to be happy to have a professor to actually go over future material in a classroom. This will be especially true as we approach the introduction of the dreaded Taylor series. I might also be allowed to use a calculator. And take advantage of the 3-D imaging capabilities of Mathematica instead of trying to visualize things all in my head, and failing, and trying to actually create my own models using glasses and balls and pieces of paper, and failing. (There is a "lab" section that accompanies my class; surely that means we will be using Mathematica or Maple or something.)
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2 comments:
I had a similar run of hundreds in my intro stats course. I didn't always know what I was doing, but the tests were all open-book and open-note. Still there were definitely some lucky guesses involved.
It was especially scary when the class average was a thirty-something, but no one saw my grade.
Our final grade was based on the best six of seven tests. My instructor said he finally got me on that last test.
About getting good comments, good luck. People tend to focus either on the worst people or the people in the middle. The people at and near the top of the group tend to get ignored, even when there is still plenty of room for improvement. At least that's been my experience. "You're doing fine" can get old.
Your lab might not really be a lab. When I was a TA for statistics, the lab was really just a homework session. Still, it was a smaller subset of the class, so you had reasonable access to someone who could answer questions.
It hadn't occurred to me that the lab might be a homework session - thanks for the suggestion.
I don't think I would mind getting rubber stamp 100s from here on out, as long as he does this on the final also.
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