Nice approach. And wow, that makes me realize that I was doing it right after all as a student.
I used to take the following approach, which maps surprisingly well to the author's teaching method:
- Pay attention, but don't really take notes during class
- Do the homework, but don't sweat getting stuck.
Skip stuff that I hadn't picked up in class.
- Take notes the next day when they went over the homework.
Pay extra attention to the stuff I didn't get the night before.
- The night before a test, redo (or actually do) all the homework.
- Ace all the tests
- Don't really study for the final
- Ace the final
I feel like I learned pretty much everything from every Engineering class I took in school. When it came time to do the EIT exams at the end of undergrad, I took them cold, walked out with half the time remaining (and nearly everybody else still in their seats) and passed by a comfortable margin.
Naturally, grades suffered a bit. You can map my grades to how a given prof weighed homework in his grading process. Usually you can drop one test score, and occasionally they'd let you count homework as one of those droppable scores. Those were my A's.
The rest were B's and C's, but that doesn't matter even one bit now, 20 years later. I could still pass that Professional Engineering test again, deriving pretty much all of Mechanical Engineering from F=MA using differential equaitions today. And that's the whole point, right?
- Show up. Pay Attention. Sit in the front of the class
- Take notes. 1 page is slacking, 4 sides is about right.
- Do the problem sets.
- Studying? What's that?
- Rock the tests.
If I sat in the first couple rows, my grade would be an A. Back row, I'd be lucky with a B. Back row in a large lecture at lunchtime was a C. Then again, I was known to be able to answer questions when obviously snoozing in the front row of an 8am class. (Steel design, IIRC. "What's wrong with all you? He can answer the questions and he's asleep")
I needed the notes, and specifically the ear - brain - hand - eye loop to make sure that the info got in my head and processed. If I slacked on notes, then the slippery slope started and I'd end up losing the thread of the class for minutes at a time. I didn't really need the notes later, I might go over them before a test, but not often. Mostly when it was an open note or 'one sheet of notes' test. Though, one time my one sheet of notes was "Don't Panic" written in letters large enough to be be seen by anyone glancing at the sheet.
Problem sets were key. As were the bigger design projects and the labs. You could fake getting the problem sets done, but you couldn't fake understanding them.
I used to take the following approach, which maps surprisingly well to the author's teaching method:
I feel like I learned pretty much everything from every Engineering class I took in school. When it came time to do the EIT exams at the end of undergrad, I took them cold, walked out with half the time remaining (and nearly everybody else still in their seats) and passed by a comfortable margin.Naturally, grades suffered a bit. You can map my grades to how a given prof weighed homework in his grading process. Usually you can drop one test score, and occasionally they'd let you count homework as one of those droppable scores. Those were my A's.
The rest were B's and C's, but that doesn't matter even one bit now, 20 years later. I could still pass that Professional Engineering test again, deriving pretty much all of Mechanical Engineering from F=MA using differential equaitions today. And that's the whole point, right?
Glad to see a professor who gets it.