Heh, I still feel like I'm not getting something across, because I'm not nearly as smart as you are inferring from my post :)
Because we had been taught all the relevant material, but it took a while to figure out which bits applied and to connect the dots.
Yeah, this is me too. ...I think some of this may be that physics problems generally taught a skill, so the problems were generally speaking to make sure you figured out the skill and the problems were often a little more straightforward, plus maybe I just knew a lot more people who procrastinated a lot so we did problem sets the night before?? But now that we're talking about this I'm remembering my senior year class, a graduate class, where there were three undergrads and we all worked together -- and second semester two of us were totally lost, and the third always seemed to know what was going on and spent our problem set sessions trying patiently to explain to us other two what was going on. (I wonder what happened to Third Guy -- besides going on to grad school, which I know he did. I just googled him but it's a reasonably common name and nothing obvious came up.)
And now that I think about it, my college math classes tended to be poorly taught, for various reasons. Now that you mention it, my abstract algebra class did have problems where I couldn't sit down and do the problems and had to think about them during the course of the week. My other classes did too, but it was hard for me to separate the "this isn't challenging in a pedagogically interesting way" from "I have no idea what's going on here because the professor hasn't taught us anything."
(I think I've given you partial and therefore misleading information about how good my teaching was, and so it looks like I keep contradicting myself. Let me give a more complete picture: High school math: in general quite good, had a very reasonable foundation High school physics: best teacher I ever had; strong classes for two years; I had an extremely strong foundation going in to college College physics: Freshman year: quite good teaching for college level, reinforced the strong foundation Post-freshman physics: wide variety, some very poor teaching, some perfectly adequate, but the strong foundation from high school and freshman year was enough to make up for the poor teaching College math: algebra, good; complex analysis, good but focused strongly on using it as a tool; everything else pretty terrible actually, for reasons ranging from "can't speak English as a second language very well" to "have clearly never thought about pedagogy in my life" to "am currently having an undiagnosed brain tumor," which I told you about
So when you mentioned me having poor teaching, you were right on the college level, but I was thinking about the high school part, where I had sufficiently strong teaching that it made up for a lot.)
Re: Grad school
Because we had been taught all the relevant material, but it took a while to figure out which bits applied and to connect the dots.
Yeah, this is me too.
...I think some of this may be that physics problems generally taught a skill, so the problems were generally speaking to make sure you figured out the skill and the problems were often a little more straightforward, plus maybe I just knew a lot more people who procrastinated a lot so we did problem sets the night before?? But now that we're talking about this I'm remembering my senior year class, a graduate class, where there were three undergrads and we all worked together -- and second semester two of us were totally lost, and the third always seemed to know what was going on and spent our problem set sessions trying patiently to explain to us other two what was going on. (I wonder what happened to Third Guy -- besides going on to grad school, which I know he did. I just googled him but it's a reasonably common name and nothing obvious came up.)
And now that I think about it, my college math classes tended to be poorly taught, for various reasons. Now that you mention it, my abstract algebra class did have problems where I couldn't sit down and do the problems and had to think about them during the course of the week. My other classes did too, but it was hard for me to separate the "this isn't challenging in a pedagogically interesting way" from "I have no idea what's going on here because the professor hasn't taught us anything."
(I think I've given you partial and therefore misleading information about how good my teaching was, and so it looks like I keep contradicting myself. Let me give a more complete picture:
High school math: in general quite good, had a very reasonable foundation
High school physics: best teacher I ever had; strong classes for two years; I had an extremely strong foundation going in to college
College physics: Freshman year: quite good teaching for college level, reinforced the strong foundation
Post-freshman physics: wide variety, some very poor teaching, some perfectly adequate, but the strong foundation from high school and freshman year was enough to make up for the poor teaching
College math: algebra, good; complex analysis, good but focused strongly on using it as a tool; everything else pretty terrible actually, for reasons ranging from "can't speak English as a second language very well" to "have clearly never thought about pedagogy in my life" to "am currently having an undiagnosed brain tumor," which I told you about
So when you mentioned me having poor teaching, you were right on the college level, but I was thinking about the high school part, where I had sufficiently strong teaching that it made up for a lot.)