TMA4145 Linear Methods, Fall 2015

Summary of reference group discussions Second meeting, 07.10.2015

Problem sets and exercise session: Mainly good, sometimes hard to understand what are expected of the answers It was suggested a clearer connection between the problem sets and the lectures The exercise sessions are working well There will be exam problems on the upcoming exercises

Course material and web page:

If a subject is covered by any of the recommended books, this will be written on the web page, along with relevant page numbers. The messages on the web page currently disappear after some time. This will be changed so that one can find old messages.

Lectures:

Some students would like to see more examples and motivation for what we are doing. In this course, this is hard to do because the course is about concepts, definitions and proofs, and not so much concrete examples. However, it will be made an attempt to do more examples. Sometimes the last subject of the lecture is rushed, meaning for example that a theorem is written down very fast. If this happens, know that this particular subject is not as relevant as other subjects. Some students feel that the notes are followed to specifically and suggest more explanation in words. When a question is asked in class, the question will be repeated. After stating a definition, there will be more recaps of the definition when it is used later on.

Students are welcome to start a lecture by asking questions from the last lecture. Also, if something is not clear, Franz is available for questions by email, in the office hour or by appointment.

Regarding lectures:

Improve handwriting on the blackboard. Hard to understand, and creates an unnecessary amount of questions.

- It will be improved.

Create some sort of intuition on the subjects, draw links from previous classes.

- Things will make more sense after a while. It will be hard in the beginning, but intuition will come..

Difficult when the exercise lessons are on Mondays

- There are exercise lessons also on Thursdays, all students can attend these. Also there are office hours (moved from Tuesday to Wednesday) where students may show with any question/difficulty.

Be more clear when there is a new topic / proof / theorem on the blackboard (and when it is finished), and also have a verbal repetition on previous definitions.

- Will try and use more headlines, and are already using squares in profs.

Have a clearer week-by-week plan on topics on the webpage

- Luef will put a weekly plan on the web page, where this weeks topics will be listed.

Requests more examples in lectures

-There are few examples, difficult not to use equations to show something. This is something we have to get used to, as there will be problems with proofs on the exam.

The exercise sessions are good, and the student assistents find there to be a lot of good answers in the hand-ins.

Give it time, things will get easier!

Take advantage of Office Hours.