Read the first homework and will return it today. I think that on average it was better than usual. Many more typed responses, which were therefore legible. Many more people paid attention to writing more words – not always successfully, but the attempt was important and rewarded.

I hope/expect today’s class – doing the units homework – will be better than the last one, since I think I made my point about reading ahead. We’ll see …

… I was right. We solved problems all day and I didn’t need to lecture at all.

The most interesting conversation I had repeatedly was a discussion of the need to tell yourself the short story that goes with each exercise. For frying eggs on the Green Monster you really needed to imagine laying the wall flat. The best way to figure out how many eggs per square foot was to visualize breaking them onto a piece of paper – at 8.5 by 11 inches it’s just about a frying pan one foot square. That way you come up with 9 or 10 eggs easily, with no formulas. Several students had never fried an egg or eaten a fried egg. That was a useful starting point for the observation that all the problems in this course come in a context. If it’s a foreign context then you will have a lot of trouble with the question – I advise saying so and skipping it. (I don’t ask any questions about cricket.)

Several students (groups of students) needed reminding/coaching/explaining about units of area and volume. There are way more than 12 cubic inches in a cubic foot!

The whole room was buzzing with activity the whole time, but only about half the students asked for (and got) individual attention. About a quarter of them got almost all of it. I wonder if there’s a way to distribute myself better.

 

---

blog home page