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!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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*

[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.

[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!

[nico-wolfwood.livejournal.com]

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