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My profs in my social science-like undergrad also held office hours.

However, I had no idea “how” to ask for help or about what. In my perspective, most of the stuff could be learned or memorized if you sat your butt down.




Or they totally lack foundational skills.

I tutored a group in an MBA program who were really struggling especially in more quantitative core courses. Which was not at all uncommon but this was extreme.

And it was pretty much a case of: Teach me all the basic high school math I never learned.


For me, day one used to be handing out the syllabus and getting right into whatever the first topic of the course was. I taught a lot of calculus 1, so usually I'd open with a motivating example for the concept of a limit.

After a couple of years, I decided to instead spend day one on the most common egregious gaps in knowledge, so day one was how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions, and then a little practice solving simple rational equations of a single variable.




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