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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

By far the best math teacher I ever had, Fred Irani, taught math in a way no teacher I'd had before or since did. We didn't use the textbook, and we didn't have homework. We just worked through the problems in class, the way the people who originally figured them out did: by working from what we already knew and making logical inferences.

Learning calculus from him was as much history as it was math, but the math stuck. I really wish more math teachers taught that way.

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My favorite math professor would ensure he taught to and beyond the homework. He always had the toughest homework - but he managed to keep it accessible. Then the tests were based on the same sort of questions and material - but easier. Somehow most of my professors at that college got that mixture wrong. They would seemingly get bored with the topics and decide to throw out curveballs everywhere.

I've had profs like that. What really struck me about Irani is that even without the homework, even with only weekly quizzes, it still stuck. It wasn't an AP class, but he encouraged us to write the AP exam at the end of the year and nearly everyone got a 4 or a 5.

I do agree with the notion that profs are more effective when the homework is harder than the exam, however. I had the exact opposite for a fourth-year crypto class. For homework, we'd work through some basic cryptanalysis with lots of hints. Then the test would come around, and two or three of the ten questions would involve breaking a cypher, from scratch. I got about 25% on the first test, which ended up being 65% after he scaled it. Brutal class.

It's a huge disservice to just destroy people's academic careers like that.

>working from what we already knew and making logical inferences.

The hardest & most valid exam I ever wrote used the same technique. Every single question on the exam was novel. I flipped through each page looking for something familiar, got to the end.

The class required about 30 hours of homework per week, but we were told we could do it while walking, showering, etc.

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