You will be given a journal assignment every week.
Usually, the assignments will be due every other Friday. The
assignments will have several questions; please make a separate entry
for each question.
Please buy a notebook to use as a journal; Mead composition books work especially well. Please do NOT use a spiral notebook or a thick 3-ring binder. Your journal should be separate from the notes you take in class.
The journals are informal writing, but the entries must be legible and the meaning intelligible. Focus on communicating your ideas! Read over your entry to see whether what you wrote is understandable. If not, you need to edit or to add more.
Since the journal entries are exploratory, it is not expected that the mathematics will always be completely correct; however, your writing should show some significant thought on the question. You will probably want to do some preliminary work on scratch paper or with geometrical models before you begin writing.
Your journals last spring were read by your instructors three times throughout the semester. We wrote comments ranging from ``excellent" to ``redo" in the margins, and in some cases the comments went into considerable detail.
In all, five qualitative impressions were recorded and assigned a nominal score for the purpose of averaging. You can read your score in the grade book on the web. The points and their verbal equivalents are: 12 excellent, 10 very good, 8 good, 6 OK=satisfactory, 4 fair, 2 poor, 0 poor=redo. These will be averaged into the semester score with a weight of 15 pc. Thus the journal is equivalent to a hourly exam.
The distribution
for the journal scores was
J avg 7.14, sd 2.61, quartiles 5.2--7.1--9.1.
For comparison, the two hourlies had this distribution:
H1 avg 63, sd 14, quartiles 54--63--73
H2 avg 54, sd 21, quartiles 40--54--68