Excellent, excellent. Could this be applied on a wider scale, or would the loss of novelty dull the effect on students?
As I've mentioned in another discussion, I once had a math professor who would sneak in impossible problems into the homework (e.g. prove the continuum hypothesis). It worked very well to get us to spend countless hours just trying things out, and eventually to spur us to prove decidability of the problems, all of which made us much better. But I imagine it would get old fast if every class I took did something similar.
How so? 20 min with a bilingual dictionary(which is more than likely in the back of the textbook) would be enough to verify definitions. Though I don't think it would have the desired effect since it doesn't really promote learning just rote fact checking.
Learning a foreign language is all about internalization. It takes time and is hard to correct. The last thing you want is to inadvertently internalize the wrong thing. Root vocabulary would be relatively easy to fix, but pronunciation and grammar would be very hard.
Come to find out, he was a math prof, and very much not an algorithms guy. There are two versions of big-oh notation: one for algorithmic complexity, and one for accuracy of approximations. They are exact opposites of each other: higher numbers are "better" for approximation accuracy, at least in the sense they were used in the course. He was unaware of the former, but both of us were unaware of the latter.
Not such a great teacher, no. Still, the last mistake was an entirely reasonable one. It's a great example of how even math students need to be on their toes.
1) Didn't have a solid understanding of algebra. and 2) Didn't even learn all of the algebraic concepts.
I was fine (because I could recognize the concepts even though he made a TON of mistakes) and skipped (precalc/) trig (which I learned during..) and went right on to AP calc . But the point is that the fact that the teacher made so many mistakes led to the students not being able to comprehend slightly higher level math. (and him being fired)
I got rid of the book. Tough to learn from a book that lies.
However, in our case, this is happening, because this is the third time in a row we organized and talked a professor to give us a lecture around 6 people (which, at the moment, is 1/3 of all students in this term and study course). The conclusion is that the professor is not that prepared, and because the entire course is pretty math-heavy, errors in proofs and lemmas just slip in. Pretty often, they are just little typos, but it still is fun to hunt and spot them.
Of course, if you aren't +showdead, you would never know.
I think the "do not notify" policy is evil in most cases.
Humans should not be treated like spam bots. Look how much time/effort he wasted writing perfectly legit comments afterwards.