How do you deal with courses you just hate?

[JasonRox]

Jason, I had an accelerated calculus course in my freshman year of engineering school. The course was at 8:00 and the instructor was never even awake when he showed up. Worse, one of my classmates (J.H., a very sharp guy) used to catch him in mistakes almost daily and the instructor would look at the board and say "Oh yes, just a mistake in the algebra" and erase the problem without completing it properly, so people were just sitting there shaking their heads wondering HOW to attack the problem. When you pay for a college education, you should expect to get some education, not the crap that Hooper delivered every morning. When I confronted him, he said that I was not performing well and that he had decided to fail me, so I could not drop the class without penalty. I told him that I was going to haul his ass before the dean if he did not allow me to drop the class, and he did so. Some instructors are fabulous, and some are there to collect a paycheck. Patronize the former and shun the latter.

I'm glad you did what you did. Mistakes are fine, but if it's daily, that's just pathetic.

Like, I do problems in front of a class for my Linear Algebra class, but I always do them before. I know how to do the problems without any big difficulty, but this just avoids making errors, which can confuse students more. That's the last thing I want.

 

[turbo]

I'm glad you did what you did. Mistakes are fine, but if it's daily, that's just pathetic.

Like, I do problems in front of a class for my Linear Algebra class, but I always do them before. I know how to do the problems without any big difficulty, but this just avoids making errors, which can confuse students more. That's the last thing I want.

That's admirable, and it's important to emphasize WHY you are doing particular operations in a certain way. There's a lot of stuff that you have internalized and said to yourself "that's the way you do this" that at least some of your students will not recognize or that they haven't formalized to the point where they can appreciate what you are doing at the board. Go back to the fundamentals frequently - Feynman was a great lecturer, but one of his strengths was that he would readily say "we do this and it works, but nobody knows why" or something similar. He was pragmatic, and if someone asked him what was the source of inertia, instead of spouting some crap, he would immediately have said "nobody knows".

 

[JasonRox]

That's admirable, and it's important to emphasize WHY you are doing particular operations in a certain way. There's a lot of stuff that you have internalized and said to yourself "that's the way you do this" that at least some of your students will not recognize or that they haven't formalized to the point where they can appreciate what you are doing at the board. Go back to the fundamentals frequently - Feynman was a great lecturer, but one of his strengths was that he would readily say "we do this and it works, but nobody knows why" or something similar. He was pragmatic, and if someone asked him what was the source of inertia, instead of spouting some crap, he would immediately have said "nobody knows".

Sounds like what I do!

It's just the way it is.

 

[Ki Man]

for the subjects you find really uninteresting, try to find something within that topic that really interests you

 

[oksanav]

My calc II teacher was atrocious. Near the beginning of the semester I asked him to work a problem on integrating something like csc^2xcosx. He looked at me and said in a cocky voice," well, what did you have a problem with it seems pretty obvious to me." He then proceeded to work the problem out, incorrectly, until he finally realized it wasn't an easy memorized one. And then he ran out of time to do it the right way. I was so confused, because I tried to follow him when he did it the wrong way, even though it didn't seem right. I quickly saw the futility of going to this guys class.

 

[mattmns]

My calc II teacher was atrocious. Near the beginning of the semester I asked him to work a problem on integrating something like csc^2xcosx. He looked at me and said in a cocky voice," well, what did you have a problem with it seems pretty obvious to me." He then proceeded to work the problem out, incorrectly, until he finally realized it wasn't an easy memorized one. And then he ran out of time to do it the right way. I was so confused, because I tried to follow him when he did it the wrong way, even though it didn't seem right. I quickly saw the futility of going to this guys class.

If I were in that class, and asked that question, when he made the mistake, I would have said, "pretty obvious, huh?" in a cocky sarcastic voice.

 

[Ki Man]

theres a business teacher at my school that said she would never single a student out, and right after saying that she singled out a kid for something they did before class

its a wonder that some of these people are actually paid to sit around all day when they don't know how to teach

 

[matt grime]

Yeah, probability and statistics just suck. I hesitate to even call it math.

Then you are judgemental and wrong, not to mention leaping to conclusions based upon your uninformed position of what maths is, and what these subjects are. You're actually saying "this does not fit with my preconcieved ideas of what maths ought to be". Only the young tend to be so black and white about things they know little about.

Of course, since you're just using the title of the course which *conveys no idea of what the actual content of the course is*, we are all in the dark about what it is you loathe.

If you dislike genuine probability then you should be careful about ever taking any advanced analysis courses since measure and probability are essentially the same subject - borel sigma algebras, fubini's theorem, dominated convergence, lebesgue integrals - probability is measure theory in spaces of finite total measure.

Anyone who's done markov chains, queuing theory, some nice stuff like that would never say it was not real maths. Not to mention probabilistic graph theory, one of Erdos's contribution to maths. Then there's the necessity of things like probabilty in modelling dynamical systems, quantum mechanics...

I wish people would distinguish between the two topics, probability and statistics, since they are vastly different subjects and should not be lumped together like this.

 

[JasonRox]

Then you are judgemental and wrong, not to mention leaping to conclusions based upon your uninformed position of what maths is, and what these subjects are. You're actually saying "this does not fit with my preconcieved ideas of what maths ought to be". Only the young tend to be so black and white about things they know little about.

Of course, since you're just using the title of the course which *conveys no idea of what the actual content of the course is*, we are all in the dark about what it is you loathe.

If you dislike genuine probability then you should be careful about ever taking any advanced analysis courses since measure and probability are essentially the same subject - borel sigma algebras, fubini's theorem, dominated convergence, lebesgue integrals - probability is measure theory in spaces of finite total measure.

Anyone who's done markov chains, queuing theory, some nice stuff like that would never say it was not real maths. Not to mention probabilistic graph theory, one of Erdos's contribution to maths. Then there's the necessity of things like probabilty in modelling dynamical systems, quantum mechanics...

I wish people would distinguish between the two topics, probability and statistics, since they are vastly different subjects and should not be lumped together like this.

Haha, I didn't mean it like that. Just as a joke.

I'm dealing with it. I find solving general things tolerable, in fact it doesn't bother me whatsoever. I'm sure neat problems are to come.

The things that bother me are the tedious things like... if you get 1$ here, and so on. I hate doing that stuff. It seems like these problems are just merely knowing which formula to use. Honestly, I don't always know which one to use and maybe that's why I hate it. I have no idea. We will see.

 

[JasonRox]

Pick up a measure-theoretical probability book from the library, maybe it helps.

Would this teach me all the probability tools I need?

That's my main concern for now.

 

[Cyrus]

Hey Jason, Prob and Stat does suck, until you see it in action.

At work, it is used HEAVILY for Kalmaan filtering processes where you have statistical uncertainties in position and attitude estimates from sensors and you use statistical analysis to filter out these errors. Its very very powerful stuff and not to be underestimated.

If you don't think so, there would be no such thing as GPS without it.

 

[JasonRox]

If you don't think so, there would be no such thing as GPS without it.

I can't say what I think since I never saw it yet.