<p>Who are the good Math 114 professors? From PCR, it definitely looks like they aren't Powers, Rimmer, or Haglund (who are teaching this semester).</p>
<p>Should I wait to take Math 114 in the spring?</p>
<p>Thanks in advance!! :)</p>
<p>Out of them, Rimmer is by far the best. His ratings are actually pretty decent, why do you think he isn’t a good teacher.</p>
<p>Actually, I think in Math 104 during the Fall Semester of 09, everyone basically skipped out going to their lectures because their professor were horrible and they all wound up going to Rimmer and basically filled the classroom over capacity.</p>
<p>Oh only that he has the highest difficulty rating of Math 114 profs.</p>
<p>Are the professors typically different/better in the spring? </p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>just self-teach by the book and beat all the kids relying on the professor to spoon feed them material. I had Tong Zhu fall freshman year and she just read from the textbook.</p>
<p>Necrophiliac, would you say that you can learn everything you need in most sections of math 114 from the textbook?</p>
<p>I would say you can if you read math the right way. I did while I was a high school student.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Learn every definition like you would learn vocabulary for a language. You need to know exactly what something means the second the professor mentions it without having to look it up or stop to think for a minute. If you don’t, you can’t follow lectures properly and you end up flipping back and forth in the book.</p></li>
<li><p>For every definition, learn an example that demonstrates what it is and if it’s something that can be expressed by a picture, learn a picture that you always think of when you hear it. Calculus is essentially learning to express pictures in exact symbols in order to make mathematical deductions.</p></li>
<li><p>Write down a list with every word that has been given a special meaning (i.e. definition) during the course and update it after you have read new material. Go through it daily to check you haven’t forgot anything.</p></li>
<li><p>Similarly, for every major formula you should learn an example together with a picture that demonstrates what the formula means. It’s often easier to learn a good example and knowing one can help you deduce the formula/theorem if you don’t remember it.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>If you follow this advice and do the homework, you should have no trouble understanding this material. Calculus really is quite easy. If you have trouble digesting what something means or you think you have understood it incorrectly, the best advice is to look at the easiest problems in the text and do those and check if you get the answers you should. Only after you have done those should you look at the actual homework (which is usually harder).</p>
<p>That’s interesting. I was under the impressions that the professors might try to expand some of the proofs beyond the book. Usually when I’ve used that textbook (we used the first 12 chapters of Stewart for BC), I’ve followed along the proofs before doing the homework, sometimes copying the diagrams to visualize concepts better.</p>
<p>I think the issue is that professor will give you examples that are not in the book. Often a professor mentions how it fits together with other unrelated problems. However, these things, while interesting to prospective math majors, are often the stuff that makes other people complain that the professor wastes time on abstract non-essential things.</p>
<p>Exam problems are doable if you have done the assigned homework and know the stuff in the book. There might be some problems though that were partially discussed during lectures or are related to some example given during the lectures. This means that some problems might be easier, because you have seen something similar before, but the problems will be doable based on what’s in the book. Though doable might mean something different for different people…</p>
<p>@magnito</p>
<p>That is only because for the Fall 104 classes, the section leader was Pemantle who gave out insanely hard supplementary problems across all sections that even gave some of the other professors some trouble.</p>
<p>Anyways, the calculus progression can probably easily be self-taught…I basically didn’t go to lectures at all for Math 114 or 240 and I did really well in either. The prof really only went through the stuff in the book which you can probably do just as well in a much shorter amount of time.</p>
<p>^^ yeah, in much shorter amount of time. And you can learn everything you need for the exam on your own. I ended up still attending lectures but they were boring and not the least bit helpful.</p>
<p>@tevash: ah, did they finally get rid of those annoying things? I heard one of the profs gave out all the solutions during a review before the final. Agree that they were insane considering none of the TAs had any clue about them :/. 1 or 2? fine… 20? :S </p>
<p>I applaud whoever had the time to do these amidst cramming for other exams.</p>
<p>@disgradius</p>
<p>I think that whole thing was thought up by Pemantle and I’m pretty sure he isn’t doing Math 104 this upcoming semester. Yeah…they were pretty bad…I took pity upon by friends doing Math 104 and spent quite a bit of time helping them figure them out.</p>