Online Course Discussion Forum

General Question on Math Challenge II-A Combinatorics class

 
 
zhengEddy的头像
General Question on Math Challenge II-A Combinatorics class
zhengEddy - 2018年12月15日 Saturday 19:09
 

I am sorry to use this forum. I am the parent of the student for this class. I am looking for other channel to raise my concern, but I cannot find any other.

For this class, I had an impression the class so far never covered the whole materials that are required to do all the homework. I am assuming the student will learn the method to solve questions and apply the similar to do homework. But, it looks they did not learn the knowledge for some of the homework at all. Are you expecting student and parent have to look for other materials to cover what you did not cover in order to finish the homework?



 
LensmireJohn的头像
Re: General Question on Math Challenge II-A Combinatorics class
LensmireJohn - 2018年12月17日 Monday 11:06
 

Hello,

I'm happy to answer a bit here, and I'll also share this with our Student Services Director and have him get in touch as well in case you have more questions.

The goal of the live class is to give students the ideas and concepts they need to solve each week's homework. You are correct that sometimes not all the example questions are covered, but this is usually because more time is taken to go into details about the tricks and tips of the handout. Each class I (or other instructors) try to cover what we think are the most important examples the students should see covered, and any examples we do not get to have solutions in the course textbook.

One thing I want to stress for the Combinatorics counting and probability questions in particular is that the problems are often hidden or disguised versions of problems we have done before. The difficulty is thinking about a problems, writing out a few examples, etc., before realizing that one scenario is very similar to another scenario we have done before. In this way, an ideal counting problem seems at first glance like something the student has never seen before, but after working with it a bit, they realize that, in fact, it is similar to something they have done already.

Feel free to ask any more questions you have here, and you can also expect our Student Services department to reach out later today or tomorrow.

Best,

John Lensmire
Director of Curriculum and Instruction