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kiana

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kiana last won the day on February 19 2015

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About kiana

  • Birthday 10/08/1980

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    Female

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  • Location
    East Coast
  • Interests
    Aikido, fitness, math, generalized nerdiness
  • Occupation
    Math Professor

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  1. If she is looking at an Art major, what about some kind of math for liberal arts class? Ideally DE (because then she would have 0 math classes to take in college) but at home would work too. Statistics would be a good choice as well -- again if DE is available it might mean she has no math classes at all in college, which could be a huge bonus for someone who just wants to be done.
  2. I think that one thing that would help him start to get ready for college is having him input those daily study sessions for himself. He'll still need prompting at this age, I am sure, but just the idea of breaking that up and adding it to your own calendar would be a huge step-up.
  3. It will be your college's intro to proofs. Sometimes it is taught more as a discrete math course, sometimes it is taught to briefly introduce concepts that will be covered in more depth in abstract algebra/analysis. Either way, though, given the posts I've seen you make over the years, I expect you to enjoy it.
  4. Interestingly, discrete math/intro to proofs was when I changed my major TO math. Before that, it was just computation, and it wasn't hard and it was fun to solve problems, but it was kind of a snoozefest. Yes, I love exercises where they need to find wrong steps in proofs. I also love the exercises Fraleigh uses in his algebra textbook where students are to write a one-sentence or two-sentence summary of the proof.
  5. I've seen people memorize every step for abstract algebra proofs, and be able to duplicate them, but completely unable to explain a step or recognize a similar problem that required the same technique. They could write it out, but they didn't understand why we might make a specific statement. I'm not sure what the relative proportion was, compared to the general population; these, unfortunately, were math majors who had made it almost all of the way through by being excellent at memorizing. It didn't help that the person who taught intro to proofs (the prerequisite) that year really wasn't good at it.
  6. I would agree that college algebra is probably not a good placement here.
  7. For self-teaching, quite honestly any college beginning algebra would be fine. I think Martin-Gay would be a good fit (developmental math, algebra foundations, beginning algebra would all work). Lial is fine too, I like beginning algebra slightly more than introductory algebra. Sullivan's developmental math text is a little more rigorous but may be more so than needed. We use it for our STEM prep courses but not for our people who just need to take college algebra. If possible I'd try to get one with a matching student solutions manual so that she can have the detailed answers to the odd/even questions. I'd also recommend a Schaum's outline for a large collection of worked examples in a very affordable text.
  8. What about Lynn Osen's "Women in Mathematics" book from 1975? I felt it was pretty similar to "Men of Mathematics"; it's a little dated on the "where we are today" section but good short biographies.
  9. Does your local community college have a math for liberal arts type course? This is generally a much less algebraically intense course than any other math course (I would say algebra 1a would be enough, or a strong prealgebra), and if he could DE, he would be able to transfer the credit and it would count for GE for most non-STEM and non-business majors.
  10. I'm not sure about other states, but I know at least one that does college algebra, trig, precalc algebra as 3 3cr courses. There is also a 4cr precalculus algebra/trig for people who get an A/B in college algebra. It's very common to have a two-semester sequence that is college algebra and then precalc, the 3-semester is a little bit more uncommon. My guess is that they found that people with a C in college algebra were failing precalc in droves but couldn't really tighten up on standards in college algebra any more and so put this on as a sequence intended to help the C students review + consolidate. But that's just speculation. The college algebra scope + sequence does look pretty standard.
  11. I agree that I'd avoid a math break of a semester if he's going to look at a business degree. They usually require stats and very, very often a "calculus for business" course. The good news is that the calculus for business course usually doesn't cover trig, but the bad news is that it does usually expect solid college algebra skills. I've taught this course several times, although only once recently, and weak algebra skills are what tank a lot of the students. I agree with going for a solid precalculus course, and then if you have time doing some calc-lite with MUS. If you just want to dip your toes into statistics, David Lippman's Math in Society is free and has a nice trio of chapters on statistics, describing data, and probability. They're pretty standalone.
  12. Don't give up, a lot of times finishing strong and especially putting in consistent effort will cause a borderline grade to get pushed over the edge.
  13. It's incredibly depressing right now especially with the total inability to be sure that someone's actually heard something. I can't tell you how much I hate this. I spend more time emailing, nagging, and dealing with people who didn't read the directions that were literally IN THE NAME OF THE ASSIGNMENT, or people who are just getting started on a course that started a month ago. I'm pretty much in "fine, whatever" mode. The homework's open. Knock yourself out. Yes the late penalty applies. If you get up to any of the assignments that don't autograde I'll grade it. Since I have only rarely seen someone who missed the first week of class pass the class I'm not really worried about consistency in grading on those extremely late assignments. I'm just a grading nagging robot right now and the way-behind people are turning in so little and so late that trying to explain to them why it's not a good use of their time would take more time than just saying "ok, the assignments are over there, let me know when you're ready for the first test." I do agree with open cc education but what I'd really like to see more of is mandatory time off for people who are just goofing around. I think that if someone has a 0.0 gpa from 5 years ago and has been working a job since, I'm totally okay with funding them for another shot. Lord knows my freshman gpa was terrible enough.
  14. We are online for spring for sure, other than some health sciences + fine arts + lab classes.
  15. Pearson mylab has gotten a lot better. I am using it now. One of the nice things is that if you want to ask a question and they don't have questions like that you can import questions from any textbook on the topic. You can search by learning objective or by title of text. You can also write your own questions and/or modify/edit questions. There are a lot of guided visualizations and animations that can be very helpful if they are enabled. Depending on the textbook the accompanying videos range from "meh" to "very good".
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