Then there were all the students who blamed my grade on their losing their Hope scholarship (another way for students to feel entitled).

You have persuasiveness practice in here, unfortunately.

The thing that I have never understood about the whole "if the professor doesn't arrive in [x] minutes, class is canceled" is that the students who say these things seem to be suggesting that they need permission to leave.

ted: there might be varying interpretations of "do all the standard calculus material correctly." i remember having a depressing exchange with a student whose argument was, "i got the same grade i would have received had i not done any homework. but i did do homework. therefore, __"

You're adults, guys. If you don't want to come to class, then don't.

You are even free to comment in the evaluations about how unprofessional I am.

my wife made the mistake of letting me read her evaluations once and i said "they're right about you. you totally do this."

@leslietownes I agree that this is as annoying situation for the student to find himself in.

Since homework counted 25-40 percent in my class, no student could make that argument, unless the grade was an F.

yeah, i got where he was coming from. he could have spent the whole semester partying instead of occasionally engaging with the material. i just didn't know what i had to do with that.

the grade was in fact an F. how did you guess?

So the homework grade raised it to F+? Imagine how bad an F it would have been if he hadn't done the homework.

Sometimes I should know better than to engage.

yeah, it was a disaster.

Someone who wants to insist that it takes Zorn's lemma to define a map on a maximal interval.

the argument was, in essence, the F is exclusively reserved for people who don't show up at all but somehow enrolled in the class, and i did enroll in the class and was sometimes here, so i shouldn't get one.

i wonder if there's some ultrafinitist way of looking at things in which that is true.

If I had my druthers, I would not give any points to homework at all. But students don't do work if they don't get a biscuit for it. So I write really hard exams, and then give them "free" points for homework.

I'm really furious. I pay for the Tennis Channel (but not for their extra streaming). Now the French Open ends up on NBC's Peacock, for which one must pay. Screw that.

in law school there was no homework, just one 3 hour exam at the end of the semester. it felt like what going to college in the UK must have been like.

the french open seems like a significant event in tennis. one perhaps within the jurisdiction of the 'tennis channel,' without extras.

@leslietownes I am sympathetic to that argument. However, I have the option of giving a "W" to students who never show up.

@Xander In the courses I tended to teach, that approach is not going to work. I want exams to test basics and a little bit more. I want homework to teach basics and then push the better students hard.

Decades ago, tennis used to be only on PBS, then on NBC and CBS. But cable has just revolutionized everything so that we have to pay extra.

I gave WF to students who never showed up. I think the distinction between W and WF eventually went away, because the WF was too punitive to students.

@TedShifrin That would be my approach in upper division classes, but I don't get to teach those. In calculus and precalculus, I use homework from the book to drill-and-kill, but also give them more involved written assignments.

I assign more weight to the written assignments, but I don't really regard those as "homework" in the traditional sense.

Yes, agreed. But we have to force them to do homework or there's no way they'll learn the material. Sigh.

Well, many of my courses were first and second year courses, by the way, but not the lowest-level ones.

@TedShifrin Right, which is why I give them points for doing it, and more points for coming to office hours to ask about it.

in law school some people definitely did not learn the material and i think a lack of homework was the reason.

Yeah, I don't know how all the European students are magically so disciplined that they work so hard on their own. Maybe I'm judging just from the ones we see here.

What is different for European students?

thankfully, in US law, none of it matters. you can still get a job representing just about anybody with terrible law grades. maybe even the president of the united states.

@TedShifrin I think that European schools tend to start "tracking" students earlier. So students on the college-prep track finish high school with something like the equivalent of an associates degree (or thereabouts, at least in terms of "academic maturity").

yai: a lot of european systems don't have homework, or have far less homework. i suspect that this structure works for a small number of motivated students (which may be the ones we see) but fails large numbers of students who do not spend their time in subject specific chat rooms.

Exams typically at the end of their careers, not regularly. No graded homeworks, although I think there are optional sessions for them to meet with TAs to discuss exercises if they so wish. I think feedback is essential.

xander: that's true, although i think even then, a good portion of tracked/concentrated students are maybe not at the level that we see, because those who bother to communicate internationally about stuff in their field are going to be among the best.

I see deadlines of assignments of some course pages at ETHZ and in Regensburg (but not freshman/sophomore mathematics). I am not sure whether they are typical.

@leslietownes Sure. There is definitely a survivor bias to the European students we see in the US.

We used to have many students from France and Germany in here regularly. These days, fewer and less often.

and vice versa. the people who skated through my various degree programs are not still talking about math 15-20 years later.

Freshman calculus in Europe is a rigorous analysis course. Totally different from the US.

@TedShifrin Right, but high school math is also taught at a higher level (at least, to those students who are going on to take college calculus).

in at least some european systems tracking does not have the awful connotations that it has in the US, and begins earlier.

and there are realistic vocational alternatives. particularly in germany.

Yes. Largely because they track students at a very young age. Very hard to do humanities/social science and math/science together.

I prefer the US system for me, personally. I did lots of languages and literature along with my math/science.

@TedShifrin Exactly. I was just about to comment on a Catalonian student in my phd cohort, who had not taken a single non-math/physics course since graduating high school.

Rigorous analysis course for all?

@Yai0Phah For anyone who needs to take college calculus, yes.

What is the outcome? I encountered some French engineering students, and they forgot even $\epsilon$-$\delta$ definition that was taught in the first year. I am not sure whether this is a biased sample.

at work i'm dealing with a technology that has a strong manufacturing component. the people we talk to in europe tend not to have gone to college at all, or only in some limited capacity, when their counterparts are people with masters degrees on in the US.

it's not a level of knowledge thing. it's just a question of expectations about where you learn.

and yeah, someone who went to college in the US did probably have to read some literature.

@leslietownes As the son of a PhD anthropologist (with a JD), who was himself the son of a PhD psychologist, who what himself the son of a doctor of divinity, I place a lot of value in a liberal education. Everyone should read some literature and speak at least two languages. :D

My one Ph.D. student came from Poland. She trained there to be an elementary school teacher. Even for that she had to take a Rudin analysis course!!!!

Good for Poland!

Can you imagine anything like that here? Our elementary school teachers can barely do arithmetic and don't understand fractions well.

gets down from soapbox

xander: i would agree as to languages. if people had to pick 1 or 2 random subjects by spinning a wheel during every semester of their education, that would probably do as much good as exposure to literature. maybe better.

I did two languages in high school, three in college (well, 7 literature courses in French, plus 5 semesters German and 2 semesters Russian).

there's all kinds of empirical literature showing that the people who do K-12 math in the US are disproportionately untrained in, and anxious about, math.

But this is highly, highly unusual for the US.

i did two in high school and took a GPA hit for it. there was no honors german, so i lowered by GPA by taking it, on top of the classes my fellow folks were also taking.

@Leslie some of our math ed (high school level) majors were really good at UGA, but some were horridly weak.

that's what i remember at berkeley. a mix of the best, true believers, people who would probably do it for free, and the worst.

@TedShifrin I did Russian all through high school, then a year of German during my first year of college.

at iowa, the ed people were pretty good.

iowa had, on average, really good public high schools. teaching calculus there was easier than at berkeley.

@leslietownes Yes, well, the Iowa State Normal College (now University of Northern Iowa) was once a very good institution for the training of teachers.

I don't know if it still is. :/

some of it was better fundamentals, and maybe some of it was not coming in with the attitude of 'i know this already because i took 10 AP classes' or whatever.

@leslietownes Ugh... I hate the APs.

They give students such an unproductive and unearned sense of knowledge and accomplishment.

i took all the ones available to me in high school, but it was only three classes. now i think schools have it where you can do AP everything, and kids do it.

i dunno what i'll do with my daughter. if we don't move, her high school will be OK but not great.

@leslietownes My high school didn't offer AP classes. If you maxed out the high school curriculum, you just enrolled in college classes at the university.

but by state metrics it's better than the high school i went to.

my wife did a ton of that. lots of community college because her tiny catholic school wasn't super into AP.

Yeah. My little sister, too (who did not go to high school in Iowa). She earned her associates degree six days before her high school diploma.

coyote visit. crows went nuts.

@leslie Any word on your tests?

slow ones. results maybe tomorrow. i guess we aren't going to the aquarium after all.

Ah. Well, I wouldn't go to the aquarium these days even if completely healthy, just because so many other people aren't.

they have a new exhibit with baby animals, including baby otters and baby sharks (doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo)

but you're quite right.

and we do have enough stuff to do around the house.

daughter to wife just now: "mom, i'm never going to be your friend if you give me cucumber." she is attempting to negotiate the contents of her lunch. very aggressive opening move.

@TedShifrin I have seen the notation before.

engineers have seen everything.

@CalvinKhor No, i work in what is referred to high performance computing. fancy term form managing lots of hardware.

it also isn't high performance after he's worked on it. if it were, there's no need for him. so he's the contractor who can be back in a week or two to finish the job.

job creation on a local level

@copper.hat Fascinating. Any recollection where?

@Leslie: The problem is that aquaria are enclosed spaces with mobs of breathing humans therein.

many of them not only unvaccinated but presently incapable of being vaccinated

I gave someone on main a few references for something I used to know how to do in my sleep 35 years ago. Now they want me to show examples, so I have to get slightly unrusty.

hoo boy. my daughter's request for saltines was declined, and my daughter responded by cursing out her mother in spanish. thanks, day care.

@TedShifrin Been a while, I think it was in a control systems context.

So some engineer "invented" a convenient notation :P

my dad's worked at voting centers the last two elections as a volunteer and is doing so today for a primary. a lot of the (minimal) training they get is about managing angry people. which he thought was ridiculous, until he was subject to antisemitic slurs, at the last one.

the people who nut up seem to be reading from some kind of script. i wonder where it's coming from, or maybe i don't.

Hey @Ted just dropping by on my phone :)

@leslietownes i do not understand people.

"People" are now feeling entitled and empowered to murder and hate anyone not like themselves. By which I mean a certain subclass of people.

Please anyone?

I don't happen to remember the shopping list of facts in terms of the cubic resolvent. I can, however, solve the quartic explicitly. Can you?

@TedShifrin yes that is easy

im trying to implement the results taught in class

Well, maybe it's not so easy. To get $\Bbb Z_2\times\Bbb Z_2$ I was expecting the splitting field to be given by adjoining $\pm\sqrt a\pm\sqrt b$, and that is not working over $\Bbb Q(i)$.

But that's exactly how it should work out. I must have made an error.

As far as resolvent cubic is concerned, you need to double-check carefully, but I don't walk around knowing that stuff.

All we were told in class is if $P$ is degree $4$ polynomials over $E$ and $CR$ is cubic resolvent with all roots in $E$ then galois group of $P$ is either $\mathbb{Z}_2\times \mathbb{Z}_2$ or $\mathbb{Z}_4$. Under what circumstances is it equal to $\mathbb{Z}_2\times \mathbb{Z}_2$?

Doesn't sound like a statement like that will solve your homework problem.

Thats the result the solution cites

Go ask your prof.

As a sanity check, if $P$ is a polynomial over $E$ with splitting field $L$ then for any intermediary field $ E\subseteq K \subseteq L$ , L is a splitting field for $P$ over $K$ right?

Yes.

Cómo anda

@AkivaWeinberger aqui tranquilo loco estoy atendiendo una conferencia de estadisticas y acabe mirar la final de la champions. Y vos como va?

Je suis bien fâché de ne pas pouvoir voir Rolland Garros sans payer ...

por quoi? ne'est pas sur la television?

ah.... payer....je comprend

e n'est pas libre pour regarde?

@D.C.theIII Do you mean gratuit?

I was thinking gratuit because I recall it was that, but google translate said libre which I found odd

NBC is putting a lot of it behind a paywall — aside from the stuff that's on Tennis Channel (for which I already pay handsomely).

they were doing the same with their soccer coverage. spraying it across their different sport platforms and peacock and USA

and then charging for all of them....

Yes, and Tennis Channel wants me to pay $100 a year to stream coverage on top of the extra I pay my cable company to get their main coverage on TV. Capitalism has run amuck. I'm sure Elon Musk and Tromp will fix it all soon.

At least you can get your math abuse for free! :D

@TedShifrin That's ***^$*&#^ beyond ridiculous...... $100 for one channel. That's not how you discourage people from "sailing the seven seas"....

I remember when all we had was PBS and the main networks. Yes, I'm antique.

And mail delivery twice a day. And party lines on phones. Answering machines and cell phones were generations yet to come.