“The course and the material taught was excellent, I know this is your first year with UTSA, and I want to say that I truly appreciate your formal note taking for the class. It’s an amazingly neat summarization of what we need to learn, that I have never seen before.
The material was difficult at times, but the structure of the class was excellent. I greatly appreciate your effort put on this class, and I hope that you continue to do so for your future classes.
Thank you for educating me on a difficult course!”
“I really liked that Dr Morales would shift modes during lecture to comment on real world advice, eg how the content connects to what students might do further on. His insights on the connections to physics made the course more interesting for me as well. I found his lecture style to be engaging, moreso than many more established lecturers at Mac. This was particularly true near the end of the year, once he had more experience.”
“Its absolutely amazing whenever a math teacher is able to give examples of real world problems and this is exactly what the teacher was able to do. Especially with calculus, this teacher is super nice and wants to make sure you know what you are
doing!”
“One of the most beneficial aspects of the class was that the instructor specified and clarified assumptions, limitations, and regimes of and in the different topics we were covering. This is what I was hoping to get out of the class: clear boundaries on when, for example, to treat a problem in research as microscopic or macroscopic, assume high or low temperatures, and how to identify what ensemble regimes a problem is in. This is the core of what I wanted to get out of the class since it is one of the most important parts of building physical models. The only change I would make would be to reduce the number of topics covered so that we could slow the class down. I would have preferred the syllabus to be cut in half, but I understand that it’s a core class for a wide variety of focuses for students (ex. space science, engineering, mathematics, etc.). So, if that can’t be helped, maybe a time at the start of the semester for each student to write or say they’re research focus. It might narrow down the list of topics covered.
Some notes about the instructor that stood out to me are that: They never missed a single day of class or wasted a single minute of class, and again, they clarified important nuances in when the topics we studied applied and to what situations.
The latter actually shed light on misconceptions I had carried with me and cleared up some of my background knowledge coming into the class. This was very important to me. Lastly, I’ll say there was a survey at the start of the semester for the instructor to understand the range of background knowledge for people. I think this helped guide the course quite a bit and resulted in no time being wasted on concepts all of the class had been exposed to before and any math or derivations that only some of the class had seen, it was a good chance to review for the rest of us.”