Watch out, folks, this entry will contain a lot of bitching and moaning.

I got my linear algebra test back this morning and was disgruntled and surprised to find I’d made a B on it. I well expected an A because I can totally do row operations and matrix algebra. On most sections I did well, and I got full points on several sections. I did lose a few points here and there, mostly on definitions because, in my view, so long as I can apply the definition to solve problems, I don’t care so much about remembering the exact lettering of theorems from the textbook. I can work with linear transformations, I can find images, I can get an augmented matrix into reduced echelon form, I can make a matrix linearly independent based on some variable, but by God, if I give a geometric description of a span of vectors and leave off saying whether they’re scalar multiples of each other or not, heaven forbid I get more than 2 points out of 10 on the section. Hence, I got a damn B on the test, and I have a B as a midterm grade.

It doesn’t help that on the homeworks, she cares just as much that we write down the question as she does if we solve the problem and solve it correctly. That reeks of busywork to me, though she says it’s for our benefit in studying. Thank you, lady, but I know how to study without having the textbook’s lengthy instructions on my homework. So for the first few homeworks when I wasn’t explicit enough in writing out directions, I lost half a point on nearly every problem. That hurt my overall homework grade, adding to the problem of getting a B at midterm.

I’m pretty incensed about this and think it’s a bitchy, anal way of teaching. I miss my old numerical methods teacher, who was a darn good lecturer and a fair grader. I ended up with an A in that class even though I found the material much more difficult than linear algebra has been so far. Personally, I think a class should be difficult because its subject is more challenging, not because the teacher makes needless demands upon the students. If she had just given us a practical examination asking for us to apply what we’ve learned to solving systems of equations, working with matrices, and performing linear transformations, I would have been much more satisfied, but because I didn’t regurgitate facts from the textbook, my grade suffered.