Problems I'm Facing in the Maths Course

Just sorting out and listing down exactly what I am finding tough about this course, and figuring out loud what I can do to improve the situation...

I think the main problem I'm facing is that there is a lack of an intermediate between the lectures, where we are first introduced to very new concepts, and which is held in groups of 100 to 200 people; and the supervisions, where we are expected to be familiar with all the concepts we have been introduced to, and is held in groups of 1 or 2, which makes it very taxing on the resources as well.

And because of that, I feel like I am recieving very little guidiance in this course.

Many times, I find myself seating in front of my example sheets, staring blankly at the questions. Most times, I find that there are many questions that seem to appear quite frequently in the topic, and it seems like it's quite a standard problem in the topic, but I simply do not know the way to handle these questions, because I just haven't seen it done enough times before. During these times, I just wished for someone to give me a hint and point me in the right direction, so that I wont have to waste so much time and effort trying to reinvent the mechanism to solve the problem.

Spending time figuring out how to solve a problem from scratch is good, and I've managed to do that with all the problems during the first part of this term. But in such a demanding course, where so many concepts are introduced to us in such short time, an average person cannot really afford to do that for every concept.

I think it would be good for there to be a classroom like lesson, or discussion which follows closely with what we are doing in the lectures, where we can be further exposed to the concepts first introduced to us during lectures, so that our understanding can be broadened and reinforced in such an atmosphere. And perhaps during these sessions, we could look at the existing methods of dealing with standard questions in the topics, so that we will not need to be blindly trying to find our way around...


I am wondering how many people in the course will agree with what I've just written. Think I'll first try to set up a support group, and publically seek out people in the same situation, like in forums, and maybe at the beginning of lectures. And we'll just try to work with each other first... And if there's sufficient people feeling the same way (something like twenty or so people), we could try to set up a society to provide such classroom like sessions on a regular basis to complement the lectures.

Just jotting these ideas down, so that if it works out, it could lay the foundations to the aims of the society.

Cambridge is full of geniuses who probably wouldn't need these sort of supplimentary programs. But for the rest of us who are less than geniuses, the aims of this society would be to provide a program that would complement the existing lecture-supervision system, and provide us commoners an effective means to handle the Cambridge Maths Syllabus.