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

[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.