This midterm was brought to you by the numbers 1, 2, and 3, and the letter F
By Thoreau
Let’s say that I announce at the beginning of Tuesday’s class “Nothing that I cover today will be on Thursday’s midterm, because I only test you on things that you’ve had a chance to do homework on.” Let’s suppose that I repeat this announcement multiple times in response to questions. Let’s suppose that I also post on the course website an announcement that the midterm will not go past section 3 of the latest chapter (i.e. sections covered the previous week and on the previous homework).
Is it really necessary to send a bunch of emails asking if section 8 of the latest chapter (a section covered on Tuesday) will be on the midterm? Well, is it? If you don’t know that the number 8 comes after the number 3, perhaps you shouldn’t be taking physics.
EDIT: On a slightly related note, if after 3 weeks of computational physics, including several lab sessions and a whole bunch of example codes that I let you download and study, you still can’t write a single line of working Matlab code, maybe this class isn’t for you. Oh, and that computer science minor that you’re planning on? Well, if you can’t figure out how to write a single line of Matlab code, maybe programming just isn’t for you. Yes, I’m well aware that CS majors don’t do many assignments in Matlab, but the basic concepts of handling arrays and creating loops and logical structures and functions that call other functions are all pretty universal. I’m just saying.
See that computer science major sitting next to you? When he makes a mistake it’s because he decided to streamline the calculation and while farming out different parts of the calculation to different functions he forgot that certain steps of the algorithm need to share some intermediate variables. That’s the sort of mistake that some of my students don’t even know enough to make. He gets an A just for making that mistake. You made a mistake because you haven’t figured out what a FOR loop is. You get an F just for making that mistake alone. Capisce?
Comment by Hired Help —
October 16, 2008 @ 9:05 am
Fellow college instructor here. The first problem you mention is, I think, a direct result of the extreme passiveness that many (most?) college students seem to come in with these days. (”It’s not my responsibility to come to class, listen to other students’ questions and the answers, read the class website, etc.”) When the question pops into their head they just do the easiest possible thing: email the teacher.
Case in point: my class sometimes requires very basic math knowledge, like how to add/subtract/multiply/divide fractions. Granting that my students may not have had to do this for a year or two, they should at least be able to look it up! Instead I get e-mails asking “how do you add two fractions if the denominators are different?” This is in college!
On your second point, have your students had any programming experience before? If not, I think you should cut them a little slack. I teach introductory programming and I could never expect my students to understand loops and arrays in only three weeks. Constructing algorithms requires a very different kind of thinking than the modelling/formula application that makes up most high school math and science courses, and it often takes a while to get the hang of it.
Comment by Thoreau —
October 16, 2008 @ 10:55 am
The prerequisite for my computational physics course is passing an introductory computer programming course. Presumably they wrote some basic loops, handled a few arrays, and did other stuff like that.
Comment by Ian —
October 16, 2008 @ 2:36 pm
Man, if they can’t write a line of Matlab then C will eat them alive. And some of them can’t do fractions? That’s just sad.
Yes, you should send the email because the university considers the opinion of these semi-students to be a measure of your teaching ability.
Comment by Name withheld to protect the guilty —
October 17, 2008 @ 1:38 am
Anecdote:
I once worked tech support at an elite Canadian university. At one point, a student asked me to help with a simple economics package. I explained the syntactical point to him, and then he plaintively asked how they expected him to calculate the savings rate with only the income and consumption stats provided. Keep in mind that this university accepted only the top three percent of all students for its economics program.
At that time, university policy strictly forbade tech support people from advising on substantive points of the assignment, so I simply told him he might have overthought the problem. Then I went back to the office, wondering whether it would make more sense to jail this young man’s previous teachers for child abuse, or to shoot them for high treason.
Comment by chris y —
October 17, 2008 @ 4:48 am
but the basic concepts of handling arrays and creating loops and logical structures and functions that call other functions are all pretty universal.
I was told in my youth by a very experienced software engineer that there is only one programming language. There are various spelling conventions.
Comment by Barry —
October 17, 2008 @ 10:41 am
That may be true, or it might be an example of a saying “a good programmer can write Fortran programs in any language”. I crashed and burned trying to transition from beginning Perl to object-oriented Perl; the approach is quite different.
Comment by Barry —
October 17, 2008 @ 11:15 am
Upon reflection, it definitely is an example of “a good programmer can write Fortran programs in any languageâ€. Object oriented programming is different from non OO. I’ve seen a programmer/project manager/guy who’s now running a software company commenting that many programmers just didn’t get pointers.
Comment by Thoreau —
October 17, 2008 @ 11:38 am
True, object-oriented is different from non-OO, but within those categories of programming tasks there are certain universal concepts regardless of language. And even in OO programming (something I do rarely) you still have to do a lot of the basic programming tasks.
Comment by dhex —
October 17, 2008 @ 2:00 pm
Is it really necessary to send a bunch of emails asking if section 8 of the latest chapter (a section covered on Tuesday) will be on the midterm? Well, is it? If you don’t know that the number 8 comes after the number 3, perhaps you shouldn’t be taking physics.
oh thoreau. while your engagements with generation veal are no doubt painful for you to experience, they also make for great reading.