I have had a slight sense of humour failure over M208 over the last week but I think I am past it now. Instead of working on the books at the end of the course I have been working through the TMAs and I have completed TMA01 and I have nearly finished TMA02.
The sense of humour failure occurred because I was getting frustrated with the language of the questions. The OU marks are very formalised and you have to tick all the boxes to get all of the marks but often it is a guessing game to decide how much to put in and how much to leave out of an answer. I want to be concise but on the other hand I don't want to miss marks for not showing enough working or not supporting an argument. It was doing my head in a bit.
In the end I have decided to say "stuff it"; I am going to answer the questions in a way which I think is best and most natural to me and I don't care if I don't tick all the boxes. Enough of this agonising!
Actually, I think the TMAs are very straight forward (unless I am missing something). I suppose that's because I have already worked to near the end of the course and I have a lot of familiarity with it, so some of the early stuff seems a doddle. Perhaps I am going to be in for a shock when I get my first TMA back! TMAs are also addictive. I like solving the puzzles and I will probably end up doing most of them before I knuckle down to the last four books of the course (I have just one more section in GTB3 to finish before I get onto the last four analysis books).
I think its fair to say that the TMA's for M208 are fairly straightforward but remember not every one doing an OU maths degree wants to specialise in Pure maths. So some will see it as a necessary evil to get through.
ReplyDeleteIf you want more of a challenge there are always the Cambridge Maths problems (remember them) but one has to realise that the OU at least at level two has to cater for those doing M208 who aren't necessarily going onto specialise in Pure Maths and having said that despite the straightforward nature of both the TMAs and the exams I still didn't get a distinction. So not as easy as might have been thought of at first.
There is plenty of stuff in M208 to get your teeth into the counting theorem, the relationship between Kernels. Homomorphisms and Quotient groups and as far as analysis is concerned showing that pathological functions such as the Blancmange function is continuous everywhere but nowhere differentiable. Ok this isn't formally assessed but is still there.
M208 is a reflection of what you put into it not just what the TMAs and the exam questions ask of you.
Sorry if that seems a bit preachy but I wouldn't want anyone to think that M208 is a doddle.
Best wishes Chris
I do know exactly what you mean by frustrations. But I think you have to regard M208 as, in part, a course in how to express yourself properly in mathematical terms.
ReplyDeleteThat is a very worthwhile challenge in its own right. At some point, mathematical ideas need to be committed to paper and if that cannot be done accurately they are of little use.
Perhaps you have to be patient with the OU for the time being and do your best to continue to jump through their hoops. Not correcting what might seem to be only minor errors at this level could very well leave gaping holes in your reasoning at a higher one.
This way you can eventually walk away from M208 in complete command of the material. You will know that the things you believed to be true really are true, because you can prove it!
Hi Chris, I did qualify my statement about the first TMA's seeming to be a doddle. I agree with you that M208 as a whole is not a doddle! You have to remember that I have put a lot of work into this course since February last year and I suspect that I am now reaping the dividends. That is what I meant.
ReplyDeleteIn fact I would say that I would have struggled to complete this course if I had been doing it within the allotted time. You are right, you can get as much out of this course as you want. I think that some of the further exercises are more challenging than what I have so far come across in the TMAs and given time I will be trying to get through these as well. I can see that I will be using all of the time available to tackle all this.
I also agree with you, Anon, that this course is about expressing yourself well in maths, something I don't think I appreciated when I started. The frustrations I have felt are not that I want to cut corners - just the opposite; I want to put more in than the questions are looking for. My problem was that I was agonising over this detail too much. I had to let it go, so to speak, so that I didn't waste too much time fighting myself over every detail.