WRITE UPS

Your homework due for Monday is a write-up of the Unique Sums lab. What is a write-up? Well, I will start by telling you what it's not. You do not need to go through every problem on the worksheet and give me an answer for it. Rather, use the write-up to give me a window into your thought process. It often works well to concentrate on one or two problems from the activity--pick something that you found especially challenging or interesting. Some of the best write-ups come from a problem that completely flummoxed you! You can describe very literally how you thought about it: "At first I tried such and such, but then I realized that didn't make sense because…" I don't care if you ended up with a satisfactory solution or not. Just tell me what your thinking is.

I use homework not only for assessment, but also as a way to have a dialogue with you. There might be some questions that occur to you as you're doing your write-up. Or, there might have been something that you wanted to ask during class, but you were too shy. Go ahead and include the questions in your write up and I'll answer you when I comment on your work.

In the write-up, try to draw some generalizations from the work. For instance, in the Unique Sums lab, you looked at single portions and double portions of ingredients. Can your system be extended to accommodate any number of portions? What about any number of pizza ingredients? Be as general as you can--that demonstrates mathematical sophistication. It's also good to find a way to make connections. Maybe the unique sums exercise is really a different problem in disguise. Maybe it reminds you of something you learned in another class, or you see an analogy to something.

I also encourage you to use your creativity. Today in class, Sophie and Natalie came up with an alternate method of ordering the pizza over the phone while maintaining the accuracy of the information. I had never even thought of that method before. (That's why teaching is fun.) So, for their write-up they might compare their system to the one I proposed. I'm fairly open about interpretations of assignments, so feel free to take an intellectual risk. The worse that can happen is that you'll need to resubmit it, with no penalty to your grade.

Write-ups should consist of complete sentences, in paragraph form. You may type your write-ups on the computer, or write them by hand. An advantage of doing them on the computer is that you may be able to turn the write-up into a portfolio piece, and then you'll have the beginnings of your first draft already typed.

In this course, I've seen a wide variety in the quality of write-ups. Some people do the bare minimum; others do less than that and need to resubmit the work. And many people do consistently strong work. What happens is that people with strong write-ups end up with a strong portfolio--they've already done so much thinking about a problem that they can easily extend it into a paper. People with weak write-ups often have a hard time thinking of portfolio topics, and they get a later start on the work, so that it's not very well-developed by the time they write their portfolio papers. Just an observation!