My d is a freshman She is a smart kid and has handled anything in high school. (AP classes, bad teachers) She is taking finite math for business. It is required for her major and also satisfying her math requirement. Her first day of class she got to class and the prof says he’s skipping the first chapter and starting with the second and all the work, assignments had to be done in students own time. No introductions, no talk of syllabus . At the same time further chapters are being done in class. When she respectfully asked him whyhe was skipping the first chapter he said if you don’t know why you may as leave. Now she is struggling to get both chapter one and two at the same time. She has gotten a math tutor and is going to the math lab. He is the type of prof who shows one or two examples and the rest of class is to do it yourself. My question is this typical for a 200 math class which is mostly freshman and sophomores.
Mathematicians want their textbooks to be self-contained because they think it’s more elegant. As such, the first chapter of a math textbook is often “just” a review of foundational material. It’s very common for professors to skip around in textbooks, and the first chapter isn’t necessarily required to understand everything else.
If it isn’t necessary to understand the rest why must the students do the work, which according to my daughter is longer than any other chapter.
College will usually be a jump up academically for most students. Students spend a lot less hours in class and a lot more hours independently reading and studying on their own time. Good for your daughter for utilizing the math lab and a tutor. Is there a TA for the class?
He sounds like a jerk and, sadly, being a jerk IS typical for many profs. BTW, he is most likely required to have a syllabus available to students by the first day of class.
He wrote the math handout(book) which all the other profs use. When my d went to other profs to see if she could get into their class she asked if they skipped the first chapter and none of them did. Are there any suggestions that she could use to get into already full classes that have waiting lists. Like really good reasons that they would make exceptions?
I’ve had teachers skip chapters before or run out of time and not be able to cover everything in the chapter. There’s only so much in class time available so whatever isn’t covered in class is still the student’s responsibility. It happens.
For what it’s worth, the math classes I took did maybe 1 or 2 examples on a topic, and if you didn’t get it from that, you had to figure it out yourself. The pace was faster, and there is much more responsibility on the student to learn the material on their own and much less hand-holding from the professor. There’s only so much class time available. However, different professors will do this to different degrees.
There are good professors and there are bad professors, like with any other profession, and there are professors that just don’t click with your daughter’s learning style. Something I would recommend your daughter do in the future is try to be more diligent about picking professors with good reputations among the students, if she can. You can often get somewhat of an idea about professors from websites like ratemyprofessor or the school may have statistics about the professors and certain classes. Asking students who have previously taken these classes is usually a good way to figure out who are the awesome professors and who are the jerks. Her school may have an club/organization for her major/field of study, and joining it can be a good way to meet older students who can give her advice about what professors to take and what professors to avoid.
I do think she should have a syllabus for the class, however. Is one available for the class even though the professor didn’t discuss it? Most are self-explanatory, and don’t really need the professor to read it with you. There should be one available even if it’s not mentioned in class. If nothing else, so she can know when exams are and what assignments are due.
It’s not that the material isn’t necessary to understand. It’s that the material in the first chapter may be simpler or may be review material that the student can learn on their own, and the professor doesn’t think it’s necessary to spend class time on it. He might think it’s something relatively basic that students will be able to learn on their own. It’s still important that they know it, but not necessarily important for the entire class to go through together. He may prefer to spend the time that the class saves by skipping the first chapter, and use it to cover more advance topics in greater detail later on in the semester/quarter. Some professors who spend too long in the minutiae of the early chapters, end up rushing through or skipping some of the more advanced material, which is the exact opposite of what you want to happen.
All she can do is ask, and if nothing can be done, get on the waitlist.
At my school, there was nothing professors can do to get a student in a class. There is a maximum number of students allowed (usually the limit is the number of seats in the lecture hall), and the professor can do nothing about it. It’s also unfair to let her skip the wait list when other students have been waiting on it to get into the class. There’s probably not a whole lot she can do, but she can always ask.
My college algebra professor skipped the first three chapters of the textbook, so it’s not uncommon for professors to do that. Does the first chapter contain material that is a prerequisite for the course? Maybe the professor chose to skip that chapter because he assumes that the students taking this math class already know it.
I don’t know about your daughter’s university, but my university requires all professors to provide a syllabus for their students. Can you find a policy stating whether or not a syllabus is required to be distributed?
My school will also let students switch into a different section of the same class with sufficient reasoning. Maybe your daughter’s university does the same? Tell your daughter to speak to her advisor and see if he or she can help her.
Yeah, professors are not all created equal. My daughter was using YouTube to figure out what her Calc 4 teacher was trying to teach after the first couple classes left her frustrated. After that, and going to office hours right away, she was able to get the teacher’s style more easily. Unfortunately, freshman don’t have the benefit of learning professor’s reputations from other students before they sign up for classes.
This is really why parents should not get overly involved in their kids’ college academics. Your D will work through it. A year from now it will seem like a pebble in the road of freshman year. And… though some pooh pooh it, and you have to take some comments with a grain of salt, RateMyProfessor is available to freshman.
Agree with @intparent. Encourage them to seek resources and help as needed, and remind the kid who is accustomed to getting all A grades in high school that they might not be able to maintain that, and that is okay. Funny enough, the only time our daughter mentions a grade is when she is not satisfied with it.
^Yep.
It’s not uncommon at all for professors to skip the first chapter of a textbook, or several chapters in the middle or end. Most textbooks are far more comprehensive than a single professor can cover in one class, and some textbooks are designed to be used across several classes (Fundamentals of Calculus comes to mind - that book is good for cal 1-3). If the first chapter is mostly review material - very common in math books - the professor might want her to complete the exercises for review’s sake but not want to waste class time covering the material for students who should already know it.
There are few “really good reasons” that would cause a professor to allow a freshman to leapfrog the entire waiting list to get into a full class when she’s already registered for a different section of the same class. Sometimes in college we get professors or class times we would not prefer; we suck it up and we trudge through. (And there’s no guarantee that any of those other professors are better, just because they don’t skip the first chapter. Maybe they all run out of time, or maybe they compress the material into much shorter chunks of time.)
Professors do skip around, because as other people have said, the 1st chapter is often review and semesters are short. That doesn’t condone how rude he was about it though. I also do find it weird that he didn’t bother to mention the syllabus. Even if my teachers started teaching from day 1, they would at least spend 5 minutes on course semantics.
I hear helicopter blades.
Well, I understand that temptation the first semester, especially if the kid calls home to complain. You want to do SOMETHING. But this is not a very atypical college experience, and it is a good growing experience for your kid to work through it and figure it out. Unless there was a pre-requisite course she is missing, everyone else in her class is in the same boat.
Whatever the prof intends to do, there should still be a syllabus detailing what’s being covered., especially for an intro course. Bad math professors have been around for eons, but even they give out a syllabus.
Tell her to take advantage of math tutor etc. Chap 1 is usually a review. She should do the chapter test or review at the end of that chapter and see if she is comfortable enough with it. If it’s finite math for business, then Chapter 1 is usually basic algebra review. Try to see if there is a student solution manual available for the book on Amazon. A lot of students rely on those b/c profs usually do only a couple of examples. Is the instructor using any online homework system? Those usually have a lot of helpful aids. Youtube is good too - just search for the title of the section and you will find many helpful videos.
When I was an UG math major, I found the math profs to be the least helpful out of all the subjects I took classes in.
The physics ones were a close second. So we trudged through ourselves with study groups , Schaum’s outlines etc. (This was in the pre-Internet era). The whole experience has helped many of us newer profs to try and be more helpful to our students.
Clarifying question: the OP said “no talk of syllabus.” Does that mean that one doesn’t exist or that the prof just didn’t have “syllabus day” like many do? There’s a huge difference and if there’s no syllabus, I’d complain to the department or ombudsman ASAP because that is quite simply unacceptable.
Is it possible for her to drop this course and take it another semester with another prof?
When did the syllabus become a legally binding contract?