4 ms·

I can imagine the students now. All of them like, "omigod we're being forced to learn something by investigating things and being creative omigodomigod it has n

I can imagine the students now. All of them like, "omigod we're being forced to learn something by investigating things and being creative omigodomigod it has no known answer gasp". Yeah, that'd be embarrassing.

ghshephard 11y ago
It's more like, "Student has a standard 15 credit semester, means 15 hours of classroom lecture + 45-60 hours of study/assignments outside of class. Student is micro-scheduling the number of minutes they have to answer each of the standard 20 Calculus questions (God, it was always 20 question) which they have to have in to the TAs before next lecture. 60 questions/week, every week, and you have about 12 hours allotted, which works out to no more than 12 minutes per question. Any questions you go over that 12 minutes, you need to steal from other questions and somehow solve more quickly, and remember, this is all new material for the student. If you blow your budget on math, it either comes out of other classes, or sleep. That's the context in which being thrown a heretofore unsolved problem in calculus is not particularly amusing for an undergraduate.
- paulpauper 11y ago
  let it go, man. You keep belaboring the point
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    I was traumatized by my undergraduate calculus courses. And that was without the profs (who were all excellent) slipping in any "Unsolved Research problems." This entire thread has been like Trauma Trigger [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_trigger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_trigger] I just want to make sure the undergraduate instructors reading this thread realize that doing this on the sly in a standard problem set would be a very, very bad idea. Not cool.
    - Kalium 11y ago
      With that in mind, what do you think is the acceptable way to get students out of the answer-getting mentality?
      - ghshephard 11y ago
        I think what the professor did was exactly correct, have them experience something new mathematically, but give them the heads up that they weren't (likely) to be solving it, as it's a new pattern they hadn't recognized before.
        Kalium 11y ago
        I wonder how well things are likely to work if you give students explicit license to not try in an effort to keep them from feeling failure.
        Retra 11y ago
        Not knowing is the important part. If you know the question is unsolved, you already have an 'answer' for it: it's 'unsolved.'
- kaitai 11y ago
  Students actually study that much these days?! I don't see it! Not being facetious or judgmental either. And there's strong pressure for calc profs these days to not assign more than 30 problems a week. Sensitivity about workload is very high at many institutions.
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    30 problems/week, 10/lecture would actually make calculus enjoyable, you could stretch out, and spend 20-30 minutes on some of the more challenging problems without freaking out.
- ColinWright 11y ago
  This sounds more like secondary school than university. Certainly for first year undergrad there are worksheets and a significant workload, but it sounds like you're describing what I think of as straight school-type work.
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    Maybe I was just a lazy student in high school, but I don't ever recall stressing over math homework. I'm struggling now to remember if I even had math homework -presumably I did, but it didn't lay down any memories. But SFU (a not so bad University in Canada), - Calculus 151 in Images theater, and Calculus 152. I recall the workload in those two courses very, very distinctly. Both first year courses. In hindsight, I think they served the purpose of filtering out students who weren't prepared to work hard...
  - to3m 11y ago
    I had courses like this as part of my degree, though of course the ones I had could easily turn out to be something completely different. If you're any good at maths, it's very possible you just never noticed that these courses exist ;) They seemed to be designed for people who hadn't done (or had done poorly at, or mature students who had forgotten the material for) later secondary school maths exams. This was university maths, in that it was maths, and you were at university, but in terms of the syllabus it was pretty much later secondary school standard, and there was very little emphasis that I can recall on preparing people for further study of maths. So no proving anything. Just telling you how stuff worked, and then a zillion exercises for you to do to try to make it stick.

ghshephard 11y ago

It's more like, "Student has a standard 15 credit semester, means 15 hours of classroom lecture + 45-60 hours of study/assignments outside of class. Student is micro-scheduling the number of minutes they have to answer each of the standard 20 Calculus questions (God, it was always 20 question) which they have to have in to the TAs before next lecture. 60 questions/week, every week, and you have about 12 hours allotted, which works out to no more than 12 minutes per question. Any questions you go over that 12 minutes, you need to steal from other questions and somehow solve more quickly, and remember, this is all new material for the student. If you blow your budget on math, it either comes out of other classes, or sleep. That's the context in which being thrown a heretofore unsolved problem in calculus is not particularly amusing for an undergraduate.

paulpauper 11y ago
let it go, man. You keep belaboring the point
- ghshephard 11y ago
  I was traumatized by my undergraduate calculus courses. And that was without the profs (who were all excellent) slipping in any "Unsolved Research problems." This entire thread has been like Trauma Trigger [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_trigger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_trigger] I just want to make sure the undergraduate instructors reading this thread realize that doing this on the sly in a standard problem set would be a very, very bad idea. Not cool.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    With that in mind, what do you think is the acceptable way to get students out of the answer-getting mentality?
    - ghshephard 11y ago
      I think what the professor did was exactly correct, have them experience something new mathematically, but give them the heads up that they weren't (likely) to be solving it, as it's a new pattern they hadn't recognized before.
      - Kalium 11y ago
        I wonder how well things are likely to work if you give students explicit license to not try in an effort to keep them from feeling failure.
      - Retra 11y ago
        Not knowing is the important part. If you know the question is unsolved, you already have an 'answer' for it: it's 'unsolved.'
kaitai 11y ago
Students actually study that much these days?! I don't see it! Not being facetious or judgmental either. And there's strong pressure for calc profs these days to not assign more than 30 problems a week. Sensitivity about workload is very high at many institutions.
- ghshephard 11y ago
  30 problems/week, 10/lecture would actually make calculus enjoyable, you could stretch out, and spend 20-30 minutes on some of the more challenging problems without freaking out.
ColinWright 11y ago
This sounds more like secondary school than university. Certainly for first year undergrad there are worksheets and a significant workload, but it sounds like you're describing what I think of as straight school-type work.
- ghshephard 11y ago
  Maybe I was just a lazy student in high school, but I don't ever recall stressing over math homework. I'm struggling now to remember if I even had math homework -presumably I did, but it didn't lay down any memories. But SFU (a not so bad University in Canada), - Calculus 151 in Images theater, and Calculus 152. I recall the workload in those two courses very, very distinctly. Both first year courses. In hindsight, I think they served the purpose of filtering out students who weren't prepared to work hard...
- to3m 11y ago
  I had courses like this as part of my degree, though of course the ones I had could easily turn out to be something completely different. If you're any good at maths, it's very possible you just never noticed that these courses exist ;) They seemed to be designed for people who hadn't done (or had done poorly at, or mature students who had forgotten the material for) later secondary school maths exams. This was university maths, in that it was maths, and you were at university, but in terms of the syllabus it was pretty much later secondary school standard, and there was very little emphasis that I can recall on preparing people for further study of maths. So no proving anything. Just telling you how stuff worked, and then a zillion exercises for you to do to try to make it stick.