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University of Pittsburgh, Spring 2003

This page contains evaluation data from recitations I did at Pitt in Spring term 2003.  I did recitations for Differential Equations.  No numerical results are available.  As I was the TA, no additional course documents are available.

Spring 2003 2 recitations for Differential Equations
(MATH 0250)

One class did not have evaluations done, since the day I had them scheduled, the prof decided to cancel the recitation/and it was immediately after an exam (rescheduling was impossible).  The other class had only 6 people come, which was not enough to do a bubble-sheet survey.  You will have to trust my self-reporting at this point, that most found me acceptable.  Several people felt that I made difficult concepts easier than the prof had, but that they wanted me to do problems from beginning to end, and in excruciating detail.  I will just comment at this point that the reason I did things the way I did was to save time. When we were actually learning a particular subject, I did do things in more detail, but that after we had moved on to another topic, I assumed--rightly or wrongly--that it would be better to do more problems on the new material than spend an entire class doing one problem, when half of the concepts that were needed to complete it had already been tested on.  I generally do believe in going into detail when doing basic concept problems, but some differential equation problems can take two pages to do by hand, and this did not seem to be the best use of class time.  This is a situation in which I suspect that I can't win... some students will be bored, and some will like more detail.  I will ask my next class which they would prefer.  To my former students, thanks for the input.
 

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