New to College?
Here is some advice for those who are new to the college experience.
- You are not in high school anymore! It is absolutely necessary that you discard high school notions of teaching, learning and working, and replace them with college level notions. Our goal is not simply to coach you to reproduce what was said in the classroom. You are expected to understand the material. Approach each concept with the thought that you may be asked to explain it to me in your own words without notes.
- Expect the material to be routinely covered at a pace that is two to three times as fast as in high school, and expect to be required to demonstrate greater mastery of it.
- The instructor's job is not to explain everything in excruciating detail, but to provide a framework with which to guide you in learning the concepts and methods of the course.
- As mentioned previously, read the textbook before the lectures. In fact, you should probably reread the textbook after the lectures just to make sure you are understanding the concepts. Read and study the examples, and work them out, along with some other exercises, as you read the text.
- Ask questions, and work problems.
- The purpose of a college course is not to program each of you on how to respond to specific examples, but instead on how to think critically and how to learn within a certain mathematical context. Focus less on "algorthmic learning" ("if it looks like this, I do that") and more on understanding why you would tackle a problem a certain way.
- Finally, your professor is there to help you! Ask for help as soon as you need it.