The legend of Jason Filippou

If this course is so far giving you a hard time, you must discover the reason. You owe it to yourselves to understand how you learn and what's frustrating you. Through this past semester, I've only had a single student come to me during my office hours and tell me that they were doing very well in other courses' discussion session quizzes, but in this course they've been having trouble, and they asked me if I could adjust them in a certain way, which I found logically sound and fair, so I ended up adjusting them. I want more students to have this sort of introspection!

Let's look at some sample reasons that might come up after you jave this discussion with yourself about why this course has been frustrating you:

"I hate Jason, I don't understand lectures, he speaks like an immigrant, he's smug/ugly/smelly/brutish." So what? What do your feelings about me have to do with your own capacity to pass a course? You are a UMD student, and you have the power to pummel through undesirable academic situations. You didn't let an undesirable teacher get between you and your learning in highschool, otherwise you wouldn't be here! Develop your proactive muscles: form study groups of your own. Consult the tutoring resources that we have posted on the syllabus for many weeks now. Visit EPSL or McKedlin and check out Epp, Rosen or Koshy and start solving exercises. Do not expect everything from us: we are humans, and our capacity to help you is limited by this fact; we are imperfect.

"I don't like the course content, it bores the hell out of me." Cause for concern. You always perform better at
 things you like, and if you don't like this stuff, consider my short analysis of some of the many topics you'll have to encounter in 351. Also, I haven't even delved into the content of 400-level electives, such as Theory of Computation or Quantum Information Processing. Is Computer Science right for you? Did you perhaps think that it's easier than a Math major? Is a 6-figure salary worth going through 4 years that you will never get back as well as at least 40 hours a week for the next 40 years or so where you hate everything about your work?

I don't get proofs & induction. Again, cause for concern. Developing the know-how for scanning and parsing your givens, understanding why the inductive principle works the way it does, and when implications and biconditionals are appropriate are indispensable tools for the major.

I don't do well in exams. This is cause for concern not just for 250, but for your entire academic and professional careers as well. This life is full of people who don't give a rat's ass about who you are inside, and whether you're a "good guy" or if you "try hard enough" (we do, hence the idea of partial credit on assignments). Maybe one day you will be working for a company in Human Resource Management and you will have to scan 100 CVs of engineers and administer 30 phone interviews to meet your weekly quota. Or you will depend on a module being debugged properly before you use it, and the developer behind it did not author a single unit test before pushing it to Git. You simply will not have the time to find out peoples' personal stories. You expect a result, and it needs to be delivered in a certain way, on paper, on a whiteboard, on a computer screen, orally, whatever. This will also be expected of you, and of me, and of my TAs! As I told you guys in a lecture two weeks ago, when I was sitting for the Greek version of the SATs, I had to solve a problem which was essentially a non-constructive proof of existence of a value within the image of a function. This was worth 5-10% credit (I don't recall the exact percentage), I had 5 minutes to solve it, and I did. Had I not solved it, I would not have been admitted to the school that I was admitted to, and I would not have made it to Maryland to be able to teach you all Discrete Math. You think my grader cared about the fact that I came from a broken home, with parents hating each other and themselves and taking it out on me? Or perhaps the fact that teachers in my school were tenured public sector employees and sometimes didn't even bother to show up at school? You think that my grade on the exam would be adjusted, taking into consideration these things? No. Should they? Irrelevant. They weren't, and they weren't gonna. So, if you're having exam anxiety, this is cause for introspection! Who are you hunting this A+ for? Is it yourself? Are you dependent on a certain GPA for a scholarship / loan? Where is the anxiety coming from? What can you do about it? What kinds of practice can you seek? Hint: that's why for quiz #8, you all had 15 minutes to solve an induction problem which simply stated the sequence, the problem  and then pretty much left you on your way, and that's also among the reasons for which you did so well in the midterm! :)

"I don't like the way this offering of 250 is run in particular." A logical man would then infer that you have prior experience with 250. Then, we want to hear from you in course evaluations, and during the surveys that we post! (About 65% of you responded in the first survey). We also want to hear from you if you were happy with the course, something that never happens, but this is a discussion with implications on Social Network Analysis / Machine Learning research that I won't delve into right now. Also, next semester I'm offering 250 alongside Bill Gasarch, so if you feel like dropping, maybe you have the opportunity to take it with Bill, who is awesome.