[BUG] starting slow

[Tevian Dray]

I had an interesting conversation today with a student from my honors class
last term.  This student had always been good at math, and had developed the
habit of skipping class, not doing homework, but studying hard for, and
doing well on, exams.  Wound up with an A- in my class, quite respectable
under the circumstances, but not the desired, or expected, grade.

I explained that vector calculus was not easy to learn through last-minute
memorization of formulas, especially the way I teach it.  The response was to
point out that I had warned the class at the beginning that we would start out
slowly, spending lots of time on the basics (vector differentials, "review" of
dot product and gradient), then using the same tools over and over again.
Yes, the student said, that was exactly true -- having been in class for the
first couple of weeks, the later material made sense, even trying to learn it
on one's own.

While I am not pleased to think of this argument being used as an excuse to
miss class, I do think it is a strong statement in favor of spending the extra
time at the beginning to develop those basic ideas.

I mentioned this story to the current TA, who has been with the course all
year long, with 3 different instructors.  Yes, he said, with one instructor in
particular, who didn't spend as much time on the vector differential at the
beginning, the entire term was full of discussions which boiled down to how to
compute dr.  In other terms, where this was emphasized from the start, such
computations were much less of a problem.

Tevian