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> I learned calculus, and even had to memorize a bunch of proofs for the course.

I'm curious about this. Did your class require students to find many of their own proofs of key results, or was it more about regurgitating proofs from the textbook?




Short answer is it was the latter.

This was Calc 1 in a Computer Science program.

Basically, the final exam had something like 6 questions, most of them standard calculation or new proof questions.

But 2 questions were "prove this theorem that you learned", e.g. prove the intermediate value theorem or Weierstrauss' theorem or L'Hopital's rule or something. And answering at least one of these was mandatory.

The proofs were from a list of about 40 proofs that would be on the test. The effect was that you basically had to memorize 40 proofs before the test, or at least a good chunk of them.

I hated this at the time and though it was a total waste of time, but in retrospect, I think this was great way to force students to actually grapple with proofs. It was my first serious proof-based course (though I did proof stuff before in Linear Algebra and Set Theory courses).

And in retrospect, this is (part of) how I actually study today, so I guess I liked the idea.




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