Blog Home : May 2004
The end is here
This will be the last entry in this blog. This, of course, coincides with the end of the semester and the end
of Calculus III for me (for awhile). I'll be on sabattical in the fall and hence won't be teaching. Perhaps
next spring I'll revivie this blog. A few final notes. After computing the grades for the semester, I noticed
that the grades were normally distributed. Why is this remarkable? Usually, grades end up being bi-normal,
with a cluster up top and a cluster down below. The mean of the distribution was 74, and the standard deviation
was 9. There were only 2-3 students that made up the D-F range outlier region. (This is out of 50 students). I think
this is a good sign. The other notable event was the lack of general anxiety about the final. Because final grades
depended only 20% on the final, there were fewer students scrambling to change their grade with their
final exam. I'd like to think the semester long effort on projects and team exercises also made the individual mastery
higher.
Spoof and Goofs
Class presentations again today, these for the final team project of the semester. Presentation skills have certainly improved since the last
round. Only one team had a poor PowerPoint design (unreadable text due to color choice). If nothing else, these students will enter their
Junior year more adept at making presentations than they were starting their Sophmore year. Two teams gave entertaining presentations
that spoofed the "Jack and Diane" characters I introduced in several of this semesters PBL exercises. One team wrote dialog for Jack
and Diane and used it to introduce their presentation. Here is an excerpt:
Diane: Wait a minute Jack, don't you ever finish anything you start? You were just working on all that couch nonsense
last time I checked.
Jack: Please Diane. I finished that awhile back. I'll tell you about that in a minute. I'm really excited about this visibility maximization
though. Check it out. I was so stoked that I went and made a PowerPoint presentation to give to the professor.
Diane: Seriously Jack, I think you have a problem. My mom's a psychiatrist. Maybe she would be willing to see you.
Jack You're funny Diane. (Laughs playfully and goes right back to bringing up the presentation.)
The other spoof cast Jack in the role of the local mailman, Diane as his wife, "Couch" as an angry pitbull, and posed the optimization problem
of walking around "Couch" while minimizing the distance travelled. A third group caught the John Cougar reference implicit in our PBL exercises
and "goofed" on the Jack and Diane theme.
Ok, but what about content? I think the content level was a bit lower than the content level of the last two team projects. I imagine there are
two factors contributing to this. The first is simple end of the semester burnout. In talking to the students many projects and exams are due and
occuring at this point in the semester. I have the feeling that teams did the bulk of the work on these projects this past weekend. Although
since many students did talk to me last week, they must have at least thought about the project a bit earlier. This factor can be adjusted for in
the future. The other factor requires more thought. In this exercise I asked for a good deal of original thought. One-half of the project was to
come up with a multi-variable max-min problem that was interesting and challenging. Students had to formulate the problem and then solve it.
Only one team came up with what I felt was a really solid problem. This was drawn from one student's experience growing up on a farm in
New Mexico. His grandfather was a "waste not want not" type of person and used to make pig troughs from scrap metal he'd find on the side
of the road. This led to an interesting maximization problem about where to bend the sheet metal and at what angle in order to enclose the
greatest volume. It was assumed that the sides of the trough were made of wood and not constructed from the sheet metal. Other teams came
up with fairly standard variations on textbook problems. One team tried something novel and formulated a risk function based on the movie "Speed."
They were trying to compute how fast to drive and how many people to get off the bus. Good try, but their attack on the problem was not terribly
strong.
A second content related issue that arose involved evaluation of solutions. Every team introduced their solutions to various problems, but did
not explain their meaning, interpret them in the context of the original problem, or otherwise evaluate them. That's a bit harsh, one team did do
some evaluation of their solution and made some actual progress. But, otherwise very little in that direction. In the handout for this project I did
not spell out these types of quesitons. I wanted to see if the students would carry over their thinking from previous exercises where these questions
were spelled out. They did not.
One of my favorite presentations may be found here
A final concern - class participation was not very high today. I did have students evaluate each other using
the rubric from last time. But there were almost no questions or comments. How do I encourage more feedback?
Un-edited feedback
On a lark I decided to check ratemyprofessor.com to see if any of my Calc III students had left feedback. I found two entries, both added in April. From April 20th we
have:
his teaching style wasn't my favorite. he focused more on the why than the what. i know that frustrated me a lot. definitely don't take him if you like a straight-forward teaching style that most people are used to. he also assigned way too much work.
very engaging, he makes sur eyou understand everything. not a cakewalk though, great guy, take him, youll learn the stuff
May 28, 2004
May 17, 2004
May 10, 2004