Asians in Junior College

College Life
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<p>I should clarify: it was a relatively recent trend AT MY CC, which was Columbus State Community College (the uni being OSU).</p>

<p>I took all of my calc there, linear algebra, discrete math, and differential equations (one class for ordinary and partial). I often ran into students who had taken the same classes earlier at OSU and asked them about it, or asked the teachers (some of whom also worked at OSU or knew math teachers there). My multivariable calc exam was harder. And like I said, we covered more material. Especially in the case of discrete math, where we covered about five times what they covered at OSU.</p>

<p>This was due to a few reasons:

  1. nearly everybody who took higher math than calc II at CSCC was going into engineering and so the math classes were either taught by engineers or by mathematicians who knew to focus on methods rather than proofs and properties. In diffy qs we spent all of our time solving various types of diffy qs, rather than proving minutia and going over lots of properties that weren’t relevant to using the math, in discrete math we covered everything from logic to set theory to proof by contradiction to proof by induction. At OSU they spent all of their time on proof by induction.
  2. Not a single teacher was a grad student
  3. The teachers knew what material was important and so they taught it.
  4. “Weeding” wasn’t a priority, teaching material was.
  5. Small class sizes allowed for more class interaction and questions to be answered (I guess this is what recitation is for, I don’t know if 4-year math classes have recitations but we didn’t need it)
  6. I only had one foreign-born math teacher, and that person spoke perfect English
  7. Teaching was the priority, not research, so the job kind of weeds out people who aren’t good at teaching or don’t want to do it.
  8. Small class sizes means no multiple choice tests or homework, and our homework was graded by the person who taught.
  9. I said it before but I’ll say it again: bad math teachers (for an English-language student body) are heavily represented in grad students at 4-year universities, and in tenured profs for whom teaching and social interaction is like walking on hot coals.</p>

<p>At a four-year university, things get much better in junior or senior level classes. Class sizes become smaller, you tend to get more professors and fewer grad students, etc.</p>