Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department • Hacker News Board

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#201

Post by wbillingsley » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:16 PM UTC

berkmathstudent wrote: post #97

I took his Math 1A class (1st semester of calculus) in Fall 2013, which was his first semester here. Pros: 1)He made calculus engaging, exciting, and worth going to for an 8AM class. I never felt like it wasn't worth it. 2)Convinced me to be a math major by inciting my passion for math. 3)He genuinely cares and spend an enormous amount of time working 1-on-1 with students to help everyone. He freely gives out his cel…

Some of this might be from his Oxford background -

Oxford and Cambridge have a very strong culture of small-group tuition, where the tutor ("supervisor") has an enormous amount of freedom. And students typically have end-of year exams -- everything up until that is formative.

If you look at it from a semester course-by-course system's perspective it would seem very strangely designed. But Oxford and Cambridge's pedagogy is very effective at producing independently-minded, creative, and somewhat fearless students, who "get" the subject matter.

And there is quite a lot of research elsewhere supporting the effectiveness of small group tutoring (which might go a long way to explaining why the Oxbridge teaching style works as well as it does there).

So when you say that in his first semester, he gave a great deal of independence to the TAs, especially in small-group discussions, and gave students freedom for all the mid-term testing to be just formative if they wish, that sounds to me as if perhaps he was experimenting with bringing some of what he valued about Oxford's teaching practice to Berkeley.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#202

Post by spaceflunky » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:21 PM UTC

wbillingsley wrote: post #181

His lectures are up on Vimeo, eg: https://vimeo.com/140890185 From what I can see, he's a talented lecturer. He's articulate, genuinely interested in his students' understanding, and has some uninhibited dramatic enthusiasm that keeps the audience engaged. He's doing a start-up centred on teaching skills for lecturers/professors; I wonder if behind the scenes the issue is simply about that? Not sure how this particul…

I don't know much about this guy's story, but I do remember from my time as a UC Berkeley undergrad that being a popular lecturer with the students is a sure fire way to get yourself unpopular with the tenured staff.

The brass professors at UC Berkeley seemed to be catty like that in all departments. They didn't like it when some young gun became more popular than them for teaching the same topics that they'd been teaching for a generation. Which makes sense, popular professor sell things and get rich, and they way they saw it, they weren't going to lose to some young upstart.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#203

Post by caskance » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:25 PM UTC

argonaut wrote: post #200

caskance wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I studied there, and during that time, spoke to and tutored many such students. Anecdotal evidence is better than no evidence.

And I brought to you a non-anecdotal, total-population statistic. Again, justifying the null hypothesis (that there is no evidence he was any harder or easier on students in the grade distribution).

No, you repeated Coward's own assertion, stripped of its original context.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#204

Post by willyt » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

berkmathstudent wrote: post #97

I took his Math 1A class (1st semester of calculus) in Fall 2013, which was his first semester here. Pros: 1)He made calculus engaging, exciting, and worth going to for an 8AM class. I never felt like it wasn't worth it. 2)Convinced me to be a math major by inciting my passion for math. 3)He genuinely cares and spend an enormous amount of time working 1-on-1 with students to help everyone. He freely gives out his cel…

I can also remember my teacher explaining calculus and doing stuff like deriving the formulae for volume of a cone, it was pretty interesting to me; I remember having lots of ideas for engineering problems that could be solved with techniques like this.

I know the system is different in the US, you start university earlier I think? Are the students taking this class 17-18 yrs?

I'm curious to know more about what your syllabus and exam is like, are there past papers online? Here is the maths exam[0] I took when I was about 17 (it's been a while) http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/249523-question... By the way, I doubt I could answer any of the questions now...

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#205

Post by nilkn » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:38 PM UTC

Bahamut wrote: post #100

squirrel wrote: post #90

I was a grad student and teaching assistant in Berkeley maths 1998-99. I observed that the department intentionally admitted many more grad students than it could possibly put through the full PhD, and had a well-tuned system for weeding them out after a year or two - chiefly a "preliminary exam" that was notoriously tough and (in my view and that of many others) unfair. A charitable view would be that the department…

It should be noted that this is a fairly common pattern in graduate mathematics departments at public schools - IMO, it is to give students a chance when given outstanding resources. I experienced something similar while at UIUC for math, but I passed the comprehensive exams solidly (my first attempt at two of them were thwarted by abnormally difficult exams where almost no one passed). I ultimately left, but largely…

For what it's worth, when I was still in college trying to decide between pursuing a math Ph.D. or going into the tech industry as a programmer, I remember being advised to think very hard about Berkeley as a graduate school due to the reasons cited above.

So, while this is just anecdata and I ultimately chose the second option, my experience researching graduate math departments is that Berkeley is specifically known for this practice and very few other departments are.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#206

Post by fluidcruft » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:45 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #167

TruePath wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that the most important thing is convincing the 1 person out of 1,000 to be a math major (or physics or whatever) I'm afraid the university isn't ok with handing everyone else As without mastering a certain minimum skill set. Besides, the math department isn't a free agent in this. Other departments expect students who have passed math 1A to have certain skills. If the math department was free to teach…

This would make sense as a counter argument if his students who took Math 1A from him didn't also do better on other math courses than students who took Math 1A from other professors.

There are often very big challenges in the freshman courses. The case I'm most familiar with is the calculus courses (in undergrad I was an engineering and mathematics dual major so I had to figure out how to splice in the coursework and petition to get some courses substituted for others etc).

There is a lot of pressure on the non-majors course to deemphasize the mechanics of calculation and move toward theory and reliance on Mathematica for mechanics (I think this battle has been lost, it was raging in the mid-to-late 90's)--this suits the sciences well and students are happy because they don't have to grind hard. The majors course is more rigorous but needs to be focused on the Mathematics curriculum arc and emphasizes more abstract applications and theorems. This is great except it's challenging and honestly distracting to many freshman engineers who need calculus as a tool quickly for their other courses.

Anyway, the college of engineering was always trying to figure out how to get their freshmen through a rigorous enough calculus so that they weren't having to shadow teach calculus in their other courses. One big option that was always in the air was for engineering to give up and teach it's own mathematics. Of course, the mathematics department fights like crazy to prevent (obviously because mathematics revenue is very teaching dependent, whereas engineering is well funded by grants and industry). Anyway, it's not easy to get the balance correct (nobody was ever happy with the results).

I very much doubt any single professor has enough experience to understand all the compromises these freshman courses must satisfy. It's great to make students happy, but it really puts a drag in upper level teaching if the foundations aren't right.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#207

Post by nilkn » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:45 PM UTC

berkmathstudent wrote: post #97

I took his Math 1A class (1st semester of calculus) in Fall 2013, which was his first semester here. Pros: 1)He made calculus engaging, exciting, and worth going to for an 8AM class. I never felt like it wasn't worth it. 2)Convinced me to be a math major by inciting my passion for math. 3)He genuinely cares and spend an enormous amount of time working 1-on-1 with students to help everyone. He freely gives out his cel…

My favorite math classes were actually structured like that. I don't regard it as a bad structure, just an unconventional one by US standards.

For what it's worth, memorizing proofs is a lot more than I was expected to do when I took Calculus I. You have to remember that in the modern age Calculus I is a very basic class. I'd expect it to be considered borderline remedial at a place like Berkeley. It wasn't even offered at all at the college I went to from what I remember.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#208

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 2:55 PM UTC

archmikhail wrote: post #109

hendzen wrote: post #69

Not the only skeleton in the UC Berkeley Mathematics closet - see the story of Jenny Harrison [0] for another example. [0] - http://articles.latimes.com/1993-05-02/magazine/tm-30007_1_j...

I had her for a class a few years ago, and like Coward, she was an excellent teacher who didn't care for the norms of the department. She was actually working on a new textbook at the time which was all about teaching the fundamentals of mathematics in a completely different way to give a better foundation for higher level mathematics. At the time, she had just taken a small group of non-STEM majors, and using her bo…

[deleted]

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#209

Post by crimsonalucard » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 3:00 PM UTC

crimsonalucard wrote: post #103

squirrel wrote: post #90

I was a grad student and teaching assistant in Berkeley maths 1998-99. I observed that the department intentionally admitted many more grad students than it could possibly put through the full PhD, and had a well-tuned system for weeding them out after a year or two - chiefly a "preliminary exam" that was notoriously tough and (in my view and that of many others) unfair. A charitable view would be that the department…

If hard working students fail a test, the failure is on the teacher, not the students. I highly doubt the majority of students at berkeley would be anything other than hard working.

Just to get into berkeley you have to be the cream of the crop or the best of the best. These students, in general, work hard and study effectively.

When a test fails a majority of these types of students, you can't blame ineffective learning on students that represent the best of the best.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#210

Post by sitkack » Mon, Oct 12, 2015, 3:00 PM UTC

    Having a Lecturer teach twice the number of students for 
    half the money and do a fabulous job demolishes that 
    argument, and that is why so many people conspired to make 
    it not so, to mischaracterize my teaching, and do 
    everything in their power to remove me.