Current Office Hours

Here's a list of our current office hours. Anybody in lecture 30 can come to my office hours. If you're in sections 31 or 33, you should also go to Jason's office hours; sections 32 and 34 should go to Eric's.

Note: Jason will have a special office hour on Tuesday, 11/19, at 1:25.

Help me, Please!

Occasionally somebody will ask me how to do well in a math class. After twenty some years of math classes, I can tell you that there is only one surefire method: do lots of math problems. This is why we assign homework; the only way to learn math is by doing math! If it makes you feel any better, I realize this isn't the most welcome advice in the world. Sometimes I don't follow it myself in my graduate courses. But it really is true. You can read something in a book and think you understand it, but you'll only know for sure if you work out some of the exercises.

If you need specific help with the course, you have many options!

Gradelines for the exams are really just rough guidelines of how we think you're doing. In other words, we set the guidelines according to how we feel an A-student (or B, or C, etc.) would do on a given exam. Your midterm letter grades are not part of your final grade -- only the raw scores are used, together with the gradelines on the final exam. However, if you are in the A range on all three midterms and do similar work on the final, you should get an A in the course.

Note for Exam 3: Because of how grading assignments are made, one person graded #3 for sections 31 and 33, and a different grader did sections 32 and 34. Partial credit was generous for 32 and 34 and rather strict for 31 and 33. Hence the separate gradelines for these sections.

If you're interested, I think you have a right to know my general outlook on teaching. So here goes. Before I taught my first class at the University, I asked the professor if he had any advice for a brand new teaching assistant. He said, "If you let students know that you actually care about them and about how they're doing in the class, everything else will fall into place." That has been my goal since I started teaching, and it has served me pretty well. If you're in my class, I promise to respect you and put a lot of effort into helping you learn the material. All I ask is that you return the respect and put some effort into the class yourself!

In short: I want you to do well, and I put a lot of work into my teaching. I can't guarantee that if I'm your teacher, you'll get a good grade. My goal, however, is to make sure that nobody can ever say, "I would have done much better, except for my teacher."