September 12, 2000: On Monday we started a group work assignment on the homework. The homework handed in by the students was fair to poor for the most part. This was not totally unexpected. At this point, I think the students have a weaker background at MSU than at BGSU. I believe the reason for this may be that they do not have as set a curriculum. The advantage of the less set curriculum, is that it allows for students to see more mathematics that they are interested in. Unfortunately, I am not sure that most of them find anything that they are so interested in. I must say that certain ideas that I take for granted at BGSU (the Pigeonhole Principle, modular arithmetic) I clearly cannot take for granted here.
The group work seemed to go well. In retrospect, I might have cut the steps
a little smaller for them on the last part of the first problem. I also need
to make clear the order of the problems so that students start in the right
places. One group started with the last part of the last problem, and then didn't
understand why they didn't see how it fit in with the rest of the problem.