Nine easy today.
In my Math 334 class, we were discussing a particularly difficult homework problem that had taken me something like 2 hours to solve with some help from my Dad and was stumping the rest of the class. Then Doctor Smith walked in and one student asked if we could go over the homework problem in class. I said something about the problem, and Doctor Smith, seeing that I had solved it, asked me to present my solution in front of class on the whiteboard. I did so, and the problem took about 10 minutes to write out. At first, I was reading off my homework paper, then caught what I thought was a fatal mistake in my solution. It turned out that the mistake was not fatal. I still got the correct answer on my paper. The mistake was just a misplacement of parentheses.
In any case, when I saw the mistake I stopped reading off my paper and started solving the problem real-time, fearing that my approach to a solution was wrong and that I would be embarassed in front of class. My fears were not realized. My solution worked out and was approved by Doctor Smith. This is the first time I've written anything on the board in Math 334. At the start of the semester, it seemed like Doctor Smith was trying to scare people away. Now that the class has dwindled to 8 from 25, he seems more lax, more nice. At the start of the semester, I go tthe feeling that he was out to make people drop his class. Now, he lets people make up lost points on the midterm if they can come to his office and solve the problems they missed, lets a hard homework problem be actually solved in class and still gives credit for copycat solutions, and allows homework to be turned in whenever as long as it is before the end of the semeser.
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