I hate bad lecturers

[alias_sqbr]

I've been tutoring a Finance student in calculus recently before his exam on Wednesday. I warned him I didn't know any Finance stuff but he said it was straight maths. And afaict they were just taught plain calculus, he showed me the last few worksheets and chapters and the latter could have come straight out of any not-very-good first year calculus course.

Unfortunately, the worksheets couldn't, and contained finance terms I had never seen before and which the notes didn't mention. And there's no textbook.

One question said "what is the marginal production?" but once google revealed that "marginal product" was a quantity I'd already calculated in a previous question I was ok.

But another said something like "Use the Mean Variance Portfolio Method to calculate the optimal value of L". I have never heard of the Mean Variance Portfolio Method. And what the hell was L? Google was no help until I realised the lecturer might be using a slightly off phrasing again, at which point I found Modern portfolio theory. The student paled at all the equations, I paled at the stats and finance, and even with the answers to the worksheet question in front of me I only managed to reverse engineer about half of it before he said "You know what, I'm never going to learn that by Wednesday. I'll just concentrate on the stuff I almost have the hang of."

I've encountered this sort of thing a lot, where students are made to feel stupid for not being able to answer questions they haven't been given the tools to solve. This combines badly with the common misconception that maths is hard and makes no sense, and that if you don't get it immediately you must just be too dumb to ever understand.

Grr!

Comments

[sanguinity]

:: ...with the common misconception that maths is hard and makes no sense, and that if you don't get it immediately you must just be too dumb to ever understand. ::

I HATE THAT. And I see it all the time. Also, the thing where any error at all means you're stupid and will never get it. Hello? I multiply two and three and get five ALL THE TIME. I drop negative signs. I make stupid errors. But witness that I am not beating my head against the wall and bewailing my never-getting-it-ness. Know why? Because stupid arithmetic errors are just stupid arithmetic errors.

More on topic, I've heard undergrad economics explained as a sleight-of-hand effort in keeping students from realizing that it's all calculus. Which kinda explains my feelings during the few econ classes I've taken: my god, it's just all calculus! It'd make so much sense if they just taught you a term or two of calculus!

[alias_sqbr]

I multiply two and three and get five ALL THE TIME

Me too :)

I remember tutoring a highschool student doing remedial-ish maths who was greatly encouraged by the fact she was as good at arithmetic as me.

[greteldragon.livejournal.com]

That's the thing I remember most about first year maths. Not that I couldn't do what was being asked at the earlier stages, it was that I couldn't work out what I was being asked to do.

That combined with a lot of other stresses, including lecturers with incredibly heavy accents that I couldn't understand... did not end well.

[alias_sqbr]

First year maths was nothing to first year physics for me. They kept using mathematical ideas we didn't know yet, and then a year later when we learnt it in a maths unit I'd go "Oh! THAT'S what they were talking about!"

[the-riviera-kid.livejournal.com]

Me too. If I'd done second year calculus before first year physics I might have been more interested in doing second year physics.

[alias_sqbr]

If I'd done second year calculus before first year physics I might have been more interested in doing second year physics.

You'd want to do third year mathematics first :/

[the-riviera-kid.livejournal.com]

Of course, I should have known.

Now that you mention it, I have now done third year mathematics... It's never too late to become a physicist is it?

[alias_sqbr]

I guess not. You could always teach it to yourself via one of those universities that puts their coursework online like Berkley.

Or, you know, not :)

[david adam <zanchey> (from livejournal.com)]

My discipline is similar; in fact, people deliberately ask you questions they know you don't know the answer to. You eventually get used to it.

[alias_sqbr]

Or you don't and you fail and spend the rest of your life berating yourself for your stupidity.

[evil-megz.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of grade 5 or 6, when I missed a couple of lessons or there was a bad relief teacher or both or something else... and I Didn't Learn Long Division.
There was absolutely no way for me to work it out from any other resources and I panicked and believed I would never be able to do maths well ever again.

A couple of weeks later they decided we had finished with learning long division, and you know.... the fact I didn't learn how to do it has never been a problem.

[alias_sqbr]

I was sick for long division in year 4 and panicked and taught it to myself, then practiced it during a very incompetently taught year 5, so in year 6 I was the only person who knew it and the teacher told everyone else they were stupid. (She was a different sort of incompetent..)

But I never got the hang of solving quadratics without the formula. I even went down a maths group and stayed there feeling very stupid until we learnt the formula, and now if students ask me to help them solve quadratics and they don't know the formula yet I teach them :) (Actually I think I do have the hang of it now. But it took like ten years and 2 maths degrees)

[patternsofchaos.livejournal.com]

...I still don't know what long division is. I think we had a relief teacher try and teach it to us in yr 7 (aghast that no one had heard of it), and I thought the whole concept was stupid and refused to pay attention.

[alias_sqbr]

My immediate response to this is "But how do you divide polynomials?!" and then I thought "Well, maybe she doesn't NEED to divide polynomials" but I just can't get my head around the idea :)

[auntpol.livejournal.com]

I didn't learn it until I needed to divide polynomials, I think, in calc (or intro calc, or something...)

[flyingblogspot.livejournal.com]

Bah, how ridiculous. They're still teaching a fundamentally flawed theory as fact, and trying to communicate common-sense ideas of risk v return in the most esoteric and useless way possible. No wonder we have so much trouble finding good grads to recruit, if this is what they're learning. *headdesk*

[theducks.livejournal.com]

Heh

"Not only haven't you taught the students the thing you're asking, it's a stupid theory you shouldn't be teaching anyway!" :)

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately this isn't one of those situations where two negatives cancel out!

[alias_sqbr]

As theducks points out: they're not teaching it! They're just assessing it.

[mattsmodernlife.livejournal.com]

"I've encountered this sort of thing a lot, where students are made to feel stupid for not being able to answer questions they haven't been given the tools to solve."

Same here, when I tutor. One specific example: Last night I helped an anonymous student solve a trig problem involving the law of sines, which I wasn't even sure I could solve quickly enough. So we started by filling in some of the missing angles on the given diagram - which the student was clueless about, because they didn't know that the angles in a triangle add up to 180. And also didn't know that supplementary angles (when adjacent, the two non-adj. rays form a line) add up to 180. And honestly believed that h^2 + h^2 = h^4.

The student hadn't been prepared to do this problem. I can't imagine how much trouble they have with other problems in the class. And I felt horrible because there wasn't anything I could do beyond encouraging them to review stuff from algebra and geometry, and keep practicing in order to get more confidence (since it's an anonymous, one-problem-per-session deal).

Anyway. TL;DR: I agree.

[bunny-m.livejournal.com]

because they didn't know that the angles in a triangle add up to 180.

And honestly believed that h^2 + h^2 = h^4.

Buh?!? I know better than that, and I literally haven't studied any maths since 1992! Hell, you can lop at least 5-10 years off of that to get back to when I first learned it. It's basic maths, people, how can you not know this stuff?

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

It sounds like this was probably a kid of about thirteen. Having tutored kids of that age for a while when I was a university student, I can state with confidence that only about half of them know anything about what it means when "you put a little two at the top right of an X". And that half don't know much.

[alias_sqbr]

Welll...I've seen plenty of students not know things they have in theory been taught, even stuff they have been taught repeatedly over several years (third years maths students at UWA always protest that they've never seen polynomial division before, even though it's on the syllabus in both year twelve and first year)

But as with the student in my post sometimes they're really not given the tools they need, and even when it's their "fault" for not having grasped something they were taught previously it's still pretty tragic when a student is that ill equipped, becuase there's not much you or they can do at that stage.

[grahame.livejournal.com]

I hated stats the way it was taught at university. I think the lecturer was honestly well intentioned and trying, but I just failed to absorb it. There was a huge emphasis on simply remembering the names and major formulae for all the distributions, but without much explanation or context for the distributions - eg. why you care about them, where they come up, some explanation for the formulae that would help remembering them.

IMHO tests where you need to remember formulae should be phased out. You'll need to remember this at work is IMHO a stupid position, because if that's -actually true- you will. There's no way that a first/second year stats course can know where you're going to end up. Rote learning kills me.

Ended up frustrated and bored, and now have a vague and irrational fear of statistics as something hard and incomprehensible. Attempting to conquer this with occasional study myself!

[patternsofchaos.livejournal.com]

I thought stats was taught quite well in psychology...though I suppose it helped that we had to constantly apply what we learned.

[grahame.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking my comment over, and I think I've been a little unfair. I remember there being examples in terms of electronics things, which is fair enough as I was doing an engineering degree. Trouble is, I wasn't actually interested in that stuff much - did the wrong course :( So perhaps I'm being a bit unfair.

Definitely very dryly taught and the need to remember a bunch of formulae really bothered me. I know now that working if I can't remember a bit of maths I just look it up - it's mostly useful to know that the maths _exists_ and what it's applicable to.

[alias_sqbr]

I found stats boring and pointless and calculus logical and involving. Afaict my friend who went on to a stats degree had the opposite experience :)

It's funny: I found myself tutoring a lot of stats at uni since stats graduates tend to get actual careers rather than hanging about becoming tutors (unlike us Pure Maths majors :)) and after a while it actually started to make sense and the same boring formulas and textbooks are kind of interesting now.

[nico-wolfwood.livejournal.com]

Uh, I have someone willing to talk to you about the finance stuff but he's in sg. Interested?

[alias_sqbr]

Given that the exam's today, thanks but no thanks :( (I don't tutor this sort of unit enough to bother trying to learn the extra material just to forget it all by the time I tutor it again)

[nico-wolfwood.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I get that. EE watched me trying to create an algebraic equation to figure out which home loan was better for us and discovered I'd forgotten that +x changes to -x when I take it out of brackets. Arg.