From Ethan – I taught both sections today since Maura is out of town.
This is class 8 even though it’s a week from last Tuesday since there was an exam on Tuesday. I’ll report on than in next Tuesday’s blog.
In each class there was one person who didn’t bring an an exam retake because s/he didn’t know that was allowed – even though each had cheerfully written “I understand the instructions” for free five points.
Started the averages chapter (5). In each class I did a simple example (5 quizzes with two different grades), then the CPI (as a weighted average of inflation figures for each of eight weighted categories), the GPA computation.
Maura’s class seemed wider awake than mine, but more people in my class knew how GPA was calculated. In both classes the material I’d prepared didn’t take nearly as long as I expected. That might mean that I prepared it well and explained it well – or that I went so smoothly and quickly through it that they didn’t have time to realize that they didn’t really grasp the idea.
In each case I tried to make qualitative as well as quantitative arguments: if you get A’s in four credit courses and C’s in an equal number of three credit courses then your GPA will be nearer to A than C – the A’s are heavier.
In Maura’s class I showed why even straight A’s in your senior year won’t pull a low GPA up as much as you might hope – that was in answer to a student’s question. In mine I actually did the same problem in reverse – what GPA would you need as a senior (20 credits) to raise a 2.9 GPA (100 credits) to 3.0? We worked the problem first with cut-and-try, then with algebra.
In Maura’s class I responded to a student question by saying that I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for complaints about hard problems, because hard problems were what forced/helped you to learn things – and that although the problems that were hard for them were easy for me, in my life as a mathematician I dealt with hard problems too. They wanted an example, so I spent the last ten minutes telling them about my current struggle trying to understand the bedtime game, which I described for them. I won’t describe it here – you have to have been there.
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