Excerpt from all my syllabi: "Meta" guidelines for Taking My Math Course
Here is some advice for ensuring that you do the best you can in this course while avoiding running into major issues. Much of this goes beyond mathematics and may be applicable to many of your other courses.
(1) Find a way to make sure that you are receiving Moodle messages in a timely manner from your instructor (suggestion: have them forwarded to your Wesleyan email), and make sure that you read them. This is the “most meta” guideline to follow, because the only way I am able to communicate anything else whatsoever pertaining to the course with my students as a whole (outside of speaking in a class meeting, which fails anyway for any individual student who does not attend that class) is to message you through the Moodle platform.
(2) Never be afraid to reach out to your instructor for any kind of help or request regarding an assignment, quiz, understanding new or old material, or just generally feeling that you are falling behind. It may not be practical to require meetings to check up on each of my students this semester, but I am always there to help anyone who asks for it. I may not be willing to fulfill all requests regarding grading/accepting assignments, quizzes, and exams, but you should not feel that there is any risk in asking for these things. As a corollary, if you are concerned about a particular request being too demanding of my time, please ask anyway and then let me, and only me, decide whether I am able to fulfill it. I will not be offended by you asking.
(3) The introduction of new material through lectures during class meetings is just the beginning of the process of learning the material. It is the spark that lights the fire, but a lot more is usually needed to keep the fire going. Therefore, while I highly encourage coming to class meetings and follow the lectures as much as possible, I expect that for most of you, digesting and studying the material afterwards outside of class will contribute far more to your understanding of it and that in fact, working on the homework assignments will very likely be where most of the learning takes place. This course contains fairly advanced and difficult material. As a corollary to all of this, please do not expect in general to understand everything in lectures while they are happening; there is no need to feel worried if you don’t. As another corollary, yes, the examples used in lectures during class will absolutely be easier, in general, than your homework, quiz, or exam problems; this is necessary given that in-class lecture examples come with the introduction of material that is completely new to you, and examples have to start out simple for that reason and also because of class time constraints.
(4) Your responses on assessments (for a mathematics course of this level) are primarily about communicating that you understand what is going on mathematically, not precise wordings or particular notation or forms of mathematical expressions. (Accuracy is assessed as well but with much less weight in scoring answers!) This means in particular that if you want to use a particular notation in your work that differs from the notation I have been using in class, you should go ahead with what you are more comfortable with as long as you can reasonably expect me to be familiar with and able to follow your notation. Moreover, you should not lose points off for minor notational sloppiness (such as round brackets instead of angle brackets for vectors) provided that it does not confuse me or wind up confusing you.
(5) Let us be kind and charitable to one another throughout the semester. In this context, charity means by default assuming the best intentions of the other person – I will be earnestly doing my best to teach you multivariable calculus and assume you will be earnestly doing your best to succeed through honest means in the class, so we are on the same team.
(1) Find a way to make sure that you are receiving Moodle messages in a timely manner from your instructor (suggestion: have them forwarded to your Wesleyan email), and make sure that you read them. This is the “most meta” guideline to follow, because the only way I am able to communicate anything else whatsoever pertaining to the course with my students as a whole (outside of speaking in a class meeting, which fails anyway for any individual student who does not attend that class) is to message you through the Moodle platform.
(2) Never be afraid to reach out to your instructor for any kind of help or request regarding an assignment, quiz, understanding new or old material, or just generally feeling that you are falling behind. It may not be practical to require meetings to check up on each of my students this semester, but I am always there to help anyone who asks for it. I may not be willing to fulfill all requests regarding grading/accepting assignments, quizzes, and exams, but you should not feel that there is any risk in asking for these things. As a corollary, if you are concerned about a particular request being too demanding of my time, please ask anyway and then let me, and only me, decide whether I am able to fulfill it. I will not be offended by you asking.
(3) The introduction of new material through lectures during class meetings is just the beginning of the process of learning the material. It is the spark that lights the fire, but a lot more is usually needed to keep the fire going. Therefore, while I highly encourage coming to class meetings and follow the lectures as much as possible, I expect that for most of you, digesting and studying the material afterwards outside of class will contribute far more to your understanding of it and that in fact, working on the homework assignments will very likely be where most of the learning takes place. This course contains fairly advanced and difficult material. As a corollary to all of this, please do not expect in general to understand everything in lectures while they are happening; there is no need to feel worried if you don’t. As another corollary, yes, the examples used in lectures during class will absolutely be easier, in general, than your homework, quiz, or exam problems; this is necessary given that in-class lecture examples come with the introduction of material that is completely new to you, and examples have to start out simple for that reason and also because of class time constraints.
(4) Your responses on assessments (for a mathematics course of this level) are primarily about communicating that you understand what is going on mathematically, not precise wordings or particular notation or forms of mathematical expressions. (Accuracy is assessed as well but with much less weight in scoring answers!) This means in particular that if you want to use a particular notation in your work that differs from the notation I have been using in class, you should go ahead with what you are more comfortable with as long as you can reasonably expect me to be familiar with and able to follow your notation. Moreover, you should not lose points off for minor notational sloppiness (such as round brackets instead of angle brackets for vectors) provided that it does not confuse me or wind up confusing you.
(5) Let us be kind and charitable to one another throughout the semester. In this context, charity means by default assuming the best intentions of the other person – I will be earnestly doing my best to teach you multivariable calculus and assume you will be earnestly doing your best to succeed through honest means in the class, so we are on the same team.