Months ago in March, I visited University of California: Davis, and attended a MATH 17C lecture with a friend. This course parallels (partially) the Purdue course MA 16020; both are essentially “calculus with random advanced topics, targeted at non-stem majors.” The lesson was on the dot product and its applications to vectors and geometry in ; this was after the course had their one week crash course in linear algebra. Curricula aside, I found the lecture quite hard to follow. Having already learned the material, this difficulty was not from the topics, but the structure of the lecture. The lesson featured all the important (at least, what I consider important) parts of a lecture: motivation, derivation, explanation and examples, but the order made it impenetrable. There are undoubtedly many ways to poorly structure a lesson. Does there exist a correct way? I think so.

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