<p>^ Aha! So common mythology notwithstanding, grade-grubbing, gunner preprofessionals are NOT the exclusive province of Penn! :)</p>
<p>i’m not picky about accents and delivery. i’m from singapore so i would say i’m pretty good at making out weird accents and funny english. but if i have to second guess every 3rd word you say and not understand the lesson, then i’m pretty worried.</p>
<p>This is actually an interesting topic. I’m a new Ph.D. student in math at Penn and because of my fellowship I won’t be required to teach until the fall of 2010. I worked as a TA as an undergrad at my old institution and I was really fed up with people only caring about their grade (or even worse; just passing) instead of actually learning anything.</p>
<p>On the first course I taught, I actually did the following:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Encouraged students to drop by asking me to join them for lunch to discuss the course and what the material was used for in later courses. Only one guy regularly showed up (he’s now thinking about a Ph.D. in math…).</p></li>
<li><p>I tried to get people to volunteer to write down the lemmas and theorems covered each week on their computer (using LaTeX typesetting), so they would have a list of results covered. The point being that they should try to learn the material well enough to fill in each proof without looking at the book and doing it collaboratively would have saved everyone’s time. The same guy volunteered to write down the material from the 1st week and not a single person after that (he kept doing it, but privately).</p></li>
<li><p>During sessions where homework was covered, if there was time over, I usually tried to prove some interesting results relating to the material for those interested. However, most people just walked out after I started to go through stuff that would not show up on the exam.</p></li>
<li><p>I tried to write example solutions where each problem was solved in as many different ways I could think of. Usually also showing solutions that depended on future courses to show how stuff was related.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>One of the things I am actually hoping to find at Penn is genuinely interested students who want to learn stuff instead of getting some number on a paper to impress employers. The funny thing is that I actually got incredible good ratings from the students and consequently got a department teaching award. Thus, I don’t think the students ran out due to my lack of teaching skills, but instead their lack of interest. This was at a national univerity in Europe. Anyone care to enlighten me on the typical american student? :)</p>
<p>eof:</p>
<p>Math, unfortunately, has something of a unique situation. Relatively few students have a bona fide interest in math per se, but lots of students – in some universities, all students – are required to take a certain amount of math, either for general education requirements or as prerequisites to advanced courses in their majors. As a result, there is a lot of demand for TAs for basic math classes, but the classes tend to be full of students who would rather not be there, and whose interest in the subject matter is purely instrumental. Plus, lots of them are aiming at fields where their undergraduate grades can matter a lot to get to the next step, so they care a lot about doing well in the class, without actually caring about learning what the class has to offer. That’s rarely going to produce a happy relationship between students and teacher.</p>
<p>My daughter is a genuinely intellectual kid with broad interests. She sincerely liked the graduate student who was teaching her calculus, and appreciated his efforts to explain things he thought were interesting or cool, and to engage her in math. It didn’t matter, though – she still wasn’t going to do more than the minimum amount of work required to pass the class (and there were times she didn’t even do that).</p>
<p>eof: some kids are math phobic- probably not at the level you teach though. I for, instance, will do the math requirement, but you better believe that I’m only going to care about my A. I will never do anything again with math and I am simply taking the class to fulfill the requirement. Perhaps it’s not the students you should always question for their lack of enthusiasm, but rather, the administrators who force these non-math people to take classes for which they have no passion.</p>
<p>^ But Susie, just think of how well-rounded you’ll be after fulfilling those distribution requirements. :)</p>
<p>45 Percenter: I don’t mind the requirements. I think that they’re good. I’m simply saying that it would be ridiculous to expect me, a non-math person, for example, to be excited about math.</p>
<p>^ I knew that–I was just joshing you a bit. :p</p>
<p>Thanks, 45 Percenter, I should have known.</p>
<p>SusieBra: So you are basically admitting that the reason you’re getting an education is because you want to get a job? For me at least half the reason is that I want to understand our world and this also seems to be the kind of students that Penn is searching according to their marketing material (I’m sorry, but you just write everywhere that Penn was a perfect fit, so I had to mention this ;)). I’ve studied myself lots of stuff that I am never ever going to need for anything. For example, I followed a course in art history and one covering modern methods in agriculture at my university as an undergrad. However, I have a hard time telling if I’m never going to do anything with the courses in philosophy that I took as I expect they might have influenced my thinking.</p>
<p>It’s just a fact that e.g. math, philosophy and history are subjects that are at the core of western civilization. It’s funny, because often people tell you that they are “intellectuals” and want to learn about everything. Once you mention math, they are suddenly like “ouch, I hate that”. For some reason philosophy does not get the same reaction, even though lots of research in philosophy has gone into figuring out what makes an argument or a logical deduction. For some reason it’s sexy not to know math in our society.</p>
<p>I do actually agree that it’s completely pointless to force everyone to take a course in calculus. I would much rather have everyone take e.g. an axiomatic treatment of basic number theory. This was what the Greeks were mostly doing. This is also the subject where you need to learn how to make proofs that assume nothing except the axioms and your arguments need to be precise. This is in my opinion the part of math that teaches strict logical deductions and critical thinking and is also what the subject really is about.</p>
<p>I’ll add here a nice quote from Homer Simpson:</p>
<p>“If something’s hard to do, then it’s not worth doing.”</p>
<p>It’s interesting how many follow this wisdom. :)</p>
<p>lol. eof: i love penn, and i really don’t mind the requirements. ultimately they’re just necessary skills that penn thinks you should have, and they’re right. Penn is very practical.
when i take some of those required courses, however, you better believe i’m going to care about my grade. and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you get the skills at the same time.
good luck with everything, eof. I think Penn’s a great place to be.</p>
<p>eof:</p>
<p>If you search the Parents Forum, you will find a loooong thread I started some years ago entitled “What’s So Great About Calculus?”, which provoked a lot of interesting discussion of math requirements from a lot of knowledgeable, intelligent people. I think that could provide you with something of a lexicon of Americans’ attitudes about math, ranging from fear-and-loathing to head-over-heels love.</p>
<p>I think you are dead right that focusing on calculus to the extent we do is a poor way to get students to understand the beauty of math and its role in Western thought. On the other hand, it seems to be an important tool in a number of fields, and so the compromise winds up being that calculus is the one area of math that everyone at elite institutions is expected to study.</p>
<p>To return to my daughter – she was not in the least motivated by getting a job. She was an English major, for heaven’s sake. She loved learning for the sake of learning, just like you. But not learning math. Unfortunately, she is a good example of a classic pattern among American women. She was a very good math student until about age 14, considered excellent at learning and manipulating concepts, placed in accelerated math classes. Then she got one bad teacher and pfffft, she hated math. She still did OK in her high school math classes (B+ generally), and on math SATs (700, 730 on the SAT II), but she was permanently hostile to it.</p>
<p>I second SusieBra’s commentary. I am a person who loved learning for learning’s sake, but I certainly didn’t fall in love with my required math/quantitative courses.</p>
<p>Math is probably, as SusieBra pointed out, the most likely place to find people taking it because they have to as a requirement. Students who love it are there, but they are few compared to how many you’d find in a history class.</p>