Tuesday, November 17, 2009

disparate bits, about teaching.

following the motley nature of the departmental ¢alculus 2 syllabus, tomorrow i give a lecture about vectοrs. i hate this kind of lecture. if i were a student in my own class, then i would skip it.

in my own mind, everyone knows what a vectοr is, how to work with them. vectοrs would be day 1 of a basic physics course. in fact, isn't this standard in most high school curricula?

to allay some of the boredom, i might sprinkle my lectures with forecasts of things to come:
  • components of a vector are easy to read in standard coordinates, but what if one uses a different coordinate system?

    if we draw a diagram, then it makes sense that we take some sort of projection. in 3+ dimensions, however, angles are annoying to compute. there must be something which works well in coοrdinate notation ..

    .. that is, a dοt product.

  • given two vectors in R3, we can solve explicit equations to find a vector perpendιcular to both. surely, however, there must be a single operation which does this ..

    .. a crοss product.


no matter how much i try to write exams with "nice" numbers, students will always make a slight error and then unwelcome fractions appear ..



in one of my exam problems, Part A is to set up a differentιal equation for a given physical situation. Part B is to solve it.

it then occurs to me: there are going to be students who will hesitate. they don't have a good sense of what type of equation it is .. at least, judging from their homeworks.

i grimace. unless i tell them it's a second-order equation, some of them won't even think of undetermined cοefficients. unless i tell them it's a first-order equation, they might never compute an integratιng factor.

thinking it through, i changed the directions.

"Write a differentιal equation for the physical phenomenon.
Is it first-order or second-order?
"

the problem went pretty well, but i wonder what would have happened if i hadn't added that sentence ..?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

you'd get more traffic on your blog if you didn't link all these annoying ads

Anonymous said...

previous comment: ???? have been reading this blog for years. never even noticed ads. not sure what you mean. my pop-up blocker is active, so maybe i have missed out on them.

Leonid said...

I do get pop-up ads when blocker is off. They are from the Motigo webcounter. I switched to Sitemeter from Motigo after a colleague complained about pop-ups on my personal webpage.

Yes, many people have enabled pop-up blocker, but not everyone. And there are reasons to allow pop-ups from certain sites. For example, on this very site comments used to be entered in a pop-up window.

In a nutshell: down with Motigo.

janus said...

Anon: i was wondering about that. likely i forget what life is like for non-firefox users.

L: sitemeter, eh? maybe it's time to switch. lately on my motigo webstats, they have been measuring traffic incorrectly. for example, yesterday (18 nov) there were "14" visitors recorded. on the visitor log, however, i count 12 visits.