To: milnikel,orlandi,harelb,gargova
To: rishel,cliff
BCC: bailey
Subject: part II

Followup to earlier comments by Bob Milnikel, I posted the results of
the meeting Bob, Lisa, and I had a few weeks ago for the SURVEY;
here's more of what came out of that meeting (I was ill for a while,
hence the delay; also my memory, even with the notes I took, is
imperfect and Lisa/Bob can add further clarifications/corrections.)

First, to make sure that past misunderstandings don't recur, let me
emphasize that my comment about eliminating the dichotomy between
"routine HWs" and projects is NOT a statement that students "don't
need to do ANY routine problems"

Rather, a conjecture and hope that *all* "routine skills" (or most, if
we really try hard) that the students need to learn in the course,
could be EMBEDDED into projects or mini-projects, or "micro-projects"
which are one single weekly HW assigment or part of one, in several
related parts/sub-problems;

I.e., since calculations and "dexterity" excersices CANNOT, I agree,
be eliminated, a corollary is that we should try to embed all such
into larger problems that MOTIVATE them; if the perhaps
dry-and-otherwise-boring calculation Janet Student is being asked to
make, is "step (3)" in a 5-step HW ("micro-project") in order to get
an INTERESTING, SOUGHT-AFTER SOLUTION (by the end of the 5-part HW
assignment) to a (reasonably) natural or (reasonably) real-world
problem, she's going to be intersted even in that "dry" step of the
problem. Of course when we're "out of steam" and don't have a full
semester's HWs, we can try to steal some interesting HWs (again, such
problems do NOT necessarily not have "routine" sub-parts!) from good
calc books (e.g. the one David Henderson has loaned to us).

------------------------------------------------------------------
We modified the grading slightly to:
------------------------------------------------------------------

Project 1	: 15%
Midterm         : 15%
Project 2       : 25%
Final           : 25%
smaller projects: 15%
HW		: 5-10%
Class Presentations: included in project grades
Individual Class Participation: "judgment"
------------------------------------------------------------------

In regards to lets-try-past-Semesters'-standard-Prelims sessions, I
was NOT suggesting these be TIMED "group" exams, so Bob and I are in
agreement; Bob was also concerned that work might be "delegated and
copied" as the groups of students tried to work on the sample
(standard) finals; we agreed that we could and should monitor them,
and indeed that our graders could provide, for these (as well as
other) sessions, a much-needed second person in the class to go from
group to group as helpful "coach" -- graders will usually have several
extra hours each week for non-grading, this semester's 112 grader (and
student in class I TA) Felix Rusli suggests.

We all agreed that while the idea of passing project-drafts back and
forth between instructors and students would be helpful, that we might
not have time for more than 2 or so back-and-forths. It was suggeted
that we "play it by ear" and I think we agreed that, as the semester
"unfolds", we will see how much time, at any given period of the
semester and on a given project or miniproject, how much time we can
allow ourselvs for "deeper interactions" with students, for example
the case of back-and-forth comment/re-submission of papers/projects.

I haven't mentioned much about Lisa but she was very helpful
particularly in regards the re-drafting of the "questionnaire" I
posted last time..

Harel