Comment by captain_clam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by captain_clam | Hacker News Reader

In my two semesters of college math, I've gathered that the faculty has something of a phobia to, if not wolfram in particular, students' access to help outside of the department.

Homework problems were oftentimes deliberately difficult, and attending tutoring/office hours was almost certainly necessary for most students to master the material.

I got my hands on an instructor's manual of the textbook, and it was a tremendous boon for my mastery of the topics. By having immediate access to the solutions of difficult problems, I was able to comprehend how to approach problems of that type, and therefore could solve more difficult but similar examples in the future. The cycle of attempt/fail/check-solution/repeat was really effective. Waiting for the instructor's office hours or the availability of tutors would have made this process, if not impossible, incredibly inefficient.

Do any math educators have any insight to this? Is this math department clinging to an antiquated curriculum in which faculty is something of a gate-keeper to knowledge? Is there a good reason for their distaste for 'going around' them?

> the faculty has something of a phobia to ... students' access to help outside of the department.

Math professor here. I am most certainly happy if my students get help outside the department, and I think my attitude is quite typical.

We can be a little bit wary of some kinds of help. Too much math teaching consists of "If you see a problem that looks exactly like X, here are the steps you should memorize to solve it."

But we don't care per se if you can solve problems of the shape X, Y, or Z. We want you to develop your skills to the point that all of these lie naturally within your skill set, that you could do them even if you've never seen one exactly like that before. As such, some kinds of tutoring can be counterproductive.

But most aren't. In my opinion your professors' attitude was quite foolish. Kudos to you for seizing the initiative and figuring out for yourself how to best learn the material.

> Too much math teaching consists of "If you see a problem that looks exactly like X, here are the steps you should memorize to solve it."

A significant amount of math testing is basically checking if you've memorized some theorem (and then can solve it), so is that surprising?

> is that surprising?

No. It's a difficult problem to mitigate.

There are always going to be some students who want to learn the minimum possible to pass the exam, and who will never work with the material again. Although I do my best to be respectful of such students (indeed, in some circumstances this can be a perfectly rational point of view), my pedagogy is aimed at the student who sees my class as something more than a meaningless hoop.

I'm with my sibling commenter impendia (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14719497), and am also a math professor.

My way of saying it is that it's great if you get help from any source you can, but it's way too easy to get something that seems helpful (because it makes short-term goals easier to achieve) while being damaging in the long run. It's fantastic if you had the personal discipline to use a solution manual to deepen your understanding, but there are lots of students who will use the solution manual as a copybook—the material in it going, as the saying goes, from page to pen without passing through brain on the way. Since I, as a teacher, don't have a ready way at the beginning of the semester to distinguish the students with your discipline from those without, I'm just going to discourage everyone from using solution manuals—but, as long as your homework solutions aren't copied from it, I don't care much if you go against that advice.

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