MATH 497: PROBABILITY
WINTER, 1995
SYLLABUS

Instructor:

Ginger Warfield (aka Dr. Virginia M. Warfield)

Office:

Padelford C-437

Phone:

543-7445 (office)
329-0376 (home--call anytime between 9 AM and 11 PM)

Office Hours:

To be arranged after I find out when they will do anybody any good.

Text:

Mathematics, a Practical Odyssey (second edition), by Johnson and Mowry

Course Format:

Very little lecturing. Lots of work in groups--either the largish group consisting of the whole class, or several smallish groups. This produces a kind of learning very little of which can be gleaned from somebody else's notes. It follows that short of double pneumonia or a personal crisis of pretty spectacular dimensions, you should NOT miss class.

There will be homework every week. If you can get together with others to work on it, that's great. If getting together is not possible, phone conferring can be helpful.

There will be Something Summative on February 3 and March 16 (exam week). It could take the form of a relatively conventional exam, or a group exam, or some variation thereof. The general idea is to motivate some reviewing and tying together of material without producing an inordinate amount of stress on anyone's nervous system.

There will be a Project due March 3. You will have the choice of doing a relatively small individual report or experiment or banding together with one or more classmates and producing something more major. If you have an idea of something you'd like to do, tell me about it and we will discuss how to make it work as a project. On this one I'm highly flexible--I simply want you to do something probability-related that you enjoy and learn from.

Grades:

They strike me as a bit extraneous, but we're stuck with them. I propose the following scheme: The basic grade for the course is a 3.0 . That means that if you attend class regularly, participate reasonably, turn in all the homework and do a workmanlike job on the project and the two exams (or exam-surrogates), your grade will be a 3.0. On the other hand, in any of these categories, if you do something beyond the basic and workmanlike you will chalk up something between a smidgeon and a blob of additional credit. With a sufficient accumulation of smidgeons and blobs, you can boost yourself up to a 4.0 . And likewise, things that are below par will drop your credit by smidgeons or even blobs. Note in this context that for all my ferocious words above, I am aware that is can upon occasion be simply impossible to get to class. If this happens, please get in touch with me, and we will figure out what to do about it--how to fill you in on what you have missed, etc. Note also that that 3.0 is simply a baseline--not a proposed median. I would dearly love to have you all accumulating so much credit that I had to give only 4.0's!

Comment:

This is by its nature an experimental course. I may well make some changes as we go along--and I am definitely open to suggestions and requests from you.