Office: 126 Hayes-Healy
Office Hours: Tuesdays 4-6:30Current
Courses
Some older courses
Some general policies and advice
I will not take late homework. Regardless of how much you have left to do or how good your reason is, I will only grade the work that you give me at the beginning of class the day it's due. If you think you've got a good reason (e.g. medical emergency or something equally dire) for not finishing some assignment, we can talk about discounting it, but there will be no late grading. My policy for quizzes is similar. You must take them at the regular time or not at all.
Under extreme circumstances, I will consider giving a makeup exam, but you'll need an excuse from whoever it is at ND that officially doles these things out. Also, I reserve the right to shift weights in the final grade so that a makeup exam is less heavily weighted than its regularly scheduled counterpart.
Do not cheat. This is the only warning you will get from me. When your name is the only one on a piece of work, I expect that you are the sole author of that work. This has a couple of specific implications.
On things like exams, where I expect you to work alone, you must direct all questions and comments concerning the exam directly to me. Any reliance on other students or other exams is out of bounds.
On things like homework, where I (usually) encourage you to collaborate, I still expect your assignments to be completed and written by you in your own words, not containing pieces taken verbatim from elsewhere.
Please ask me questions. Answering questions is one of my favorite things to do. It makes me feel important.
Tutorials give you an additional chance to clear up any confusion you might feel about lectures and homework. What you get out of them will be directly related to what you bring into them. So try hard to pinpoint not just which lecture topics and homework problems you're having trouble with but also what it is precisely that's bothering you about them. The more specific you are, the more efficient (and, probably, grateful) the TA will be in answering your question. If you only seek to verify your answer (or reconcile it with the one in the back of the book), then it's probably much better to check with another student or talk with the TA individually before or after tutorial than it is to watch for 10 minutes while the TA works the problem out in front of the entire class.
Keep up with the reading in my class. Reading math is a skill that takes time to learn, but the payoff is very high. By learning to read you free yourself to learn on your own terms, independent of professors and courses and schedules (and high tuition!).
(For those who took the last item seriously.) The main thing about reading math books is that you must read slowly and actively. In order to make sense of even well-written mathematics, you must often stop to think about what a particular phrase or sentence means, go back to remind yourself of a previous definition or theorem, consider how a statement could and could not be rewritten, or do a pencil and paper computation to convince yourself that some equation is true. And sometimes, despite your best persistent effort, you'll just get plain stuck. That's OK. Everybody does. After all, you do still have your professor, your TA (or roommate, etc) to help you out.