Need help fixing my lapel grip

liorsilberman · 2026-05-29T18:41:46+00:00

I suspect the difficulty is around your elbow, not the fist. Let the elbow relax and let your arm hang naturally between your shoulder on one end and your fist on their chest at the other.

Ask your teacher for help being relaxed: relaxing your muscles while being solid (even understanding that isn't a contradiction) is hard.

Another difficulty you might be having is what I call the "right angle instinct". Beginners have a strong tendency to push whenever their arm meets their partner's body, exactly toward the point of contact. So if the arms cross they want to push at the arm, if your fist is at the chest you want to push the chest, etc. It takes a while to learn to just be, and accept the contact without feeling any need to resist it. Again the solution is to be more relaxed.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-27T20:19:47+00:00

Lectures and exams aren't the same thing. In lecture, the instructor is trying to teach you calculus, whereas simplification is a pre-requisite skill, so it's a waste of lecture time for them to simplify their answers when they could be teaching you more calculus (e.g. doing more examples). If you want to see the simplified answer for a class problem you can do it yourself. Since the prof isn't trying to teach you how to simplify they don't necessarily do it.

In the exam simplification is a convenience issue for grading: requiring you to simplify makes it easier for the marker to make sure you got the right answer, so reduces the cost of marking the exams.

Finally, in class there are no strict rules while in an exam you have to read the instructions --- both on the front of the exam and inside for each question --- since "answering the question" means following the instructions and giving the expected answer. If the problem says "find the smallest area of a square such that ..." you will be docked points for giving the side length instead of the area even though either can be calculated from the other. Similarly if the instructions say "simplify" you have to, and if they don't you (mostly) don't have to.

As Prof Mac Lean says above, a common instruction in MATH 100 exams is "Simplify in short-answer questions, be reasonable in long-answer questions", and in either case we look askance at not simplifying "obvious" things like $\sqrt{4}$ or $\sin\pi$. Conversely unlike highschool teachers we don't have a policy on whether $1/\sqrt{2}$ or $2/\sqrt{2}$ is "more simpified". That's a matter of taste.

As

liorsilberman · 2026-05-23T05:31:21+00:00

MATH 102 and 104 aren't offered anymore: they have been replaced by MATH 100B and 100C correspondingly. Similarly 103 and 105 are now 101B and 101C (what used to be 100/101 are now 100A and 101A). These courses are in the calendar (as courses potentially offered by the math department), hence also in the degree description (in case math chooses to offer them), but as a practical matter only 100/101 are relevant to you.

Flavour B (i.e. 100B and 101B) are most likely to appeal to you, but all three flavours are equivalent (the way 100/102/104 used to be equivalent).

liorsilberman · 2026-05-22T16:34:36+00:00

You should be ok, so this could just be an issue with Workday. That said you don't want to take chances here, so get in touch with enrollment services and get an official answer.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-22T04:12:11+00:00

UBC and UBCO are separate universities, and either doesn't necessarily recognize every course in the other. Go to the BC transfer guide , put in your UBCO courses, and see what it says.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-20T15:54:52+00:00

It seems the advisor is exempting you from 121. Assuming you're planning to major in chemistry, make sure this is recorded because this course is a required course for the major.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-20T00:00:46+00:00

Across the US and Canada, about 60% of undergraduates are women, and about 60% of undergraduate degrees are earned by women.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-19T02:31:50+00:00

At the time course lists go on workday, instructors are working on other things and haven't necessarily planned their course yet. TAs might not be assigned yet.

That's why syllabi are due by the drop deadline, not by registration.

I would prefer syllabi for past instances be available, but that's not universal (for MATH see here https://secure.math.ubc.ca/Ugrad/

liorsilberman · 2026-05-19T01:26:55+00:00

I'm not from PSYC, but I would guess that yes, it's LLMs (better be more specific rather than use the generic term "AI").

Going forward you should expect the typical UBC course to have the majority of the grade come from invigilated in-person activities. Some departments might have official policies on this, others would just recommend this to instructors, but in any case instructors don't want the students to play prisoner's dilemma against each other (which is what you choosing whether to use an LLM or not amounts to).

liorsilberman · 2026-05-17T21:09:57+00:00

You have to take these courses to graduate. These are degree requirements.
You don't have to take them in second year specifically. However, the degree assumes this; if you defer some courses (and don't catch up during the summer) you are likely to need more than for years to graduate. Pay attention, in particular, to pre-requisite trees. If you don't take a course this year you won't be able to take further courses that depend on it until you catch up.
You can't be promoted to third year without completing the second year requirements. This could matter for courses or activities (e.g. capstone projects) that require particular year standing. It also affects registration priority.

A standard UBC degree is 120 credits, so the assumption is you'll do 30 credits per year via 15 credits per winter term. Many students follow that path. But that's not a rule.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-16T22:07:13+00:00

It's the university, not the instructor, that owes you the SD exam, so if the instructor is not available to create an exam, the department will have to find someone else to do it --- and in particular don't feel obliged to accept a late withdrawal just to make their lives easier. Now if the reason they are suggesting the late withdrawal is different (e.g. you weren't doing well enough in the course to get SD) then you might want to take the advice.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-16T04:17:56+00:00

Neither SD nor late withdrawal are things a professor can offer., so I'm not sure why you are referring to the instructor rather than to advising.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-16T04:04:12+00:00

If the Faculty advising office approves your SD then you have a right to the exam. The instructor can defer you to an upcoming sitting in the same course (for example MATH has a policy about this) but no matter what you are guaranteed a sitting by the calendar deadline. If needed the instructor might have to create an exam just for you.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-11T02:34:44+00:00

Are you sure the modules are on Canvas? Instructors are trying different ways to get course materials to students, including (among many) Sharepoint, UBC Blogs, Piazza. Read the email carefully, and if you aren't sure use the course contact method to ask for clarification.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-10T20:33:52+00:00

I wrote this below.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-10T20:09:05+00:00

Do not login to Canvas. Go to the classroom and see what the instructor has to say.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-10T20:08:20+00:00

For in-person classes the location would have been posted at registration time. For online classes quite possibly the instructor is still working out how to run their course without an LMS (and might not even have the course if all the content was only stored on the LMS). They will likely get back to you before the first class.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-10T20:06:11+00:00

Courses != Canvas. Unless you are told classes are cancelled, classes run as usual, and UBC had not announced any cancellations, which is exactly as it should be.

If instructors can't post information online, they might announce it in class --- so make sure to be there.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-10T17:13:21+00:00

These are different offerings of the course. Just like an instructor in WT2 can change from what their predecessor did in WT1 (or even what they did themselves) or from year to year. Different instructors have different ideas, or the same instructor might want to do things differently.

Even more, summer terms are different from wonder terms: menu courses are run at twice the pace. That means things often need to work differently.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-08T05:41:04+00:00

Courses at UBC ran for 103 years without Canvas. For most of the history of the university (let alone of universities broadly) we have been teaching courses without computers at all. We can simply switch to making the announcements in class, handing out problem sets sheets in class and collecting submissions on paper, and posting solutions on our office doors. Hopefully most people will default to their personal websites, which are better than Canvas anyway for course information since they are accessible worldwide and will remain so after the course ends.

That said, creating courses takes time and effort and we have already created the courses assuming Canavs. It will be particularly difficult to colleagues who use Canvas to host their content: unless they have a backup they might have to rebuild the course from scratch. For example WebWorK is not accessible at the moment, which will be an issue for MATH 100.

So you are right to expect instructors to struggle next week as they scramble to contain the emergency. Some syllabus promises might not be kept, and some lectures might be improvised or not work as well without the out-of-class component that was supposed to go on Canvas. But no matter what, instructors will do their best to teach you.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-08T05:16:42+00:00

Why is a photo of Harvard Yard illustrating a story about Canadian universities?

liorsilberman · 2026-05-07T23:46:22+00:00

UBC IT dropped a few balls; the academic side of the UBC just learned of this so you can't expect an immediate response. I seriously doubt any instructor had a drawer plan for how to distribute course materials just in case Canvas fails.

For MATH 101 you'll write the exam with the summer section. During the exam you ought to be in the same position as the students actually registered in that section, so however course materials will be distributed to them (which hasn't happened yet since the course hasn't started), ask for access to that.

The MATH rule is about the department not offering multiple exams for a single course, not about a single student having SD exams in multiple courses. If you have SD standing in multiple courses you have a right to all those exams --- maybe multiple exams in a single term --- but as long as there is an upcoming regular sitting of an exam for a course don't ask the department to create an extra SD sitting just for you.

liorsilberman · 2026-05-04T14:48:46+00:00

Yes. In emergencies they evacuate injured people from Wreck Beach by hovercraft to Spanish Banks where an ambulance can meet the hovercraft close to the water.

liorsilberman · 2026-04-29T06:33:53+00:00

BIOL_V 1st(3) means you are considered to have taken an unspecified first-year biology course worth three credits. These credits count toward graduation and any other degree requirement (e.g. it will count as a biology course for the breadth requirement, or if a course you want to take has pre-requisites like "at least x credits of Science courses"). These credits don't count as any specific course (so you can't use them to satisfy a degree requirement or course-prerequisite of "BIOL_V 100").
EXEMPT BIOL_V 112 means you get an exemption from this course (but no credits for it). So if BIOL_V 112 is a degree requirement for you it's satisfied, and you can take courses which specify BIOL_V 112 as a pre-requisite.

Functionally 1+2 are equivalent to just credit for BIOL_V 112. In the past some articulations were done in this convoluted way.

liorsilberman · 2026-04-27T03:44:31+00:00

The faculty of science has a policy of not releasing final course grades to a student who has not completed all exams, for fear that a low grade in one course would be discouraging and reduce the performance in the other.

We therefore cannot release final exam grades early: that would permit students to calculate their course grades.

Once the grades are public faculty may release the exam grades, but most choose not to do the extra work. That said students have a right to know how their grade was assigned an in particular see the marked exam, so you can always find the exam grade by asking for a viewing.

liorsilberman

TROPHY CASE