Original post by wanderlust.xxRoyal Holloway. Yes, the lecturer does have office hours; but again, if I were to go, I'd have to know what questions to ask. For that, I'd need a basic level of understanding of the content, which I seem to have.
The questions, however, seem to be drawing from intuition far more than the other courses - ie, there's no "groups" to the questions (where you can understand the proof for one question and then adapt it to other, similar questions), mostly because we haven't seen enough questions to become familiar with them.
I admit that I don't read around this module in particular, because I've lost all passion for it. I read around Calculus topics or Mechanics modules because they interest me and I genuinely enjoy doing them, but the lecturer hasn't made the topic interesting, and I have another 40 people who would completely agree with me.
To be fair, I try not to rote learn. I understand what I'm doing so I can at the very least know why I can create a solution in one way, whereas I cannot in another. I know plenty of peers who rote learn and can in no way remember, for example, what a vector space is from last year, which I agree, is pathetic and depressing. There are, however, the individuals with some level of understanding and enjoyment of mathematics who want to enjoy a topic but aren't inspired.
That, in my opinion, is a real shame. I actually learnt last year's course on Matrix Algebra from videos of a series of MIT lectures, since I had the same problem with a lecturer last year. The MIT lecturer made the subject interesting and taught it well, and I understood the concepts far more clearly than I ever did sitting in the lectures listening to the monotonous voice of my bored teacher. I got my highest mark in that module.
If my Group/Graph theory lecturer was a little more adept at teaching/inspiring, perhaps I'd be more inclined to learn the subject rather than complain about it.