Derrick Ha's weekly tuition, Worth it?

[Shenz0r]

A lot of the revision lecture solidified the conceptual detail that he taught us over in the weekly classes. The two are very similar but in a weekly class he can give you a lot more examples and he can afford to take his time to explain the topics, whereas in the revision lecture, we kinda went through everything quickly. Right now, we're just going through validating our answers during writing time through alternative methods or the CAS. And he hasn't really told us how to make our own logbooks for example in his weekly classes yet, but it was covered in the lecture.

The questions he gives in weekly classes range from medium to really hard. He gauges the level of the class and sets the difficulty level accordingly. Every week he'll give you some questions to do, the first few consolidate your basic skills and at the end there's always some "Understanding questions" which require some more thought

[Jenny_2108]

^ which topic are you up to in his weekly classes? Does he go over prac exam questions as well?

[Shenz0r]

We're dwelling on exam technique at the moment, doing some exam sort of questions in class and after every question he'll ask us about the alternative methods that we can come up with, what the check, and so on. Basically, training our ability to check over our answers.

[duhherro]

So how did everyone think of his lectures today?

[Jenny_2108]

So how did everyone think of his lectures today?

It was very good but I attended the spesh one before and there are some parts overlapping so feel a bit bored lol
I slept in the lecture after the lunch break so dunno what was going on later though 

[abeybaby]

You still apply the transformation as normal, nothing is different from the basic skills you learn at school

Exactly, I was surprised that so many students (even in a strong cohort like MHS) didn't have the basic skills to apply the transformations. But yeah, point is, Derrick does help you break down seemingly harder problems into smaller and more manageable type of questions. Especially in probability. His fall back technique is for obtaining a probability is to write all the possible cases down first, then multiply the total number of favourable arrangements (found by combinations) by the probability of one of the arrangements. Which again, makes seemingly hard questions very manageable.

And then in another example, in related rates, he'll tell you to keep splitting up your derivatives with the chain rule if you can't find a proper expression for it the first time round. A lot of people get stuck if they can't find say and don't realise that you can split it further with the chain rule.

so many people have this problem with transformations, but i dont think it was surprising.. theyre just taught so badly at most schools. even at scotch, no one taught me what was really happening, i had to figure it out myself. but im very impressed that he teaches this way, hes the only other person ive heard of to teach like that