Very chill professor
I am selling my textbook Differential Equations by Polking in a binder in excellent condition. No notes or highlights, and in mint condition. Text me at ********** I can meet on or around campus. Selling for $65 with price negotiable. I used it for Math 33B

Sarcastic asshole who is only concerned with making each exam more difficult than the previous one.

I slept through all of Dave's lectures. He makes an effort to get to know people who come to office hours/talk to him after class. he lets you use a cheat sheet which is pretty cool. he is the only professor who promised to make the final more approachable after we failed both midterms, and actually carried through with his promise. A shame I don't need to take more math classes.

Final Grade: A

I took Math 3C with Penneys in Fall 2014 and I got an A.

I think he is an extremely effective lecturer. His lectures are organized and he does a good job at making the concepts understandable. Pay attention and take good notes. His first two midterms were pretty hard and only the students who really really understood the concepts did well. He realized that and fixed it. He made the final much more approachable and similar to homework problems.

I really like how he grades the class. There are quizzes every week to make you accountable and if you want to do well on them, you HAVE to go to office hours. The quizzes have homework problems word for word but only for even problems. His office hours are also really good. He may come off as cold and impersonal, but don't let that dissuade you from asking a question. What is the worst that can happen?

Do not take Kim if possible. I have heard bad things about him from my roommate and friend.

To start off, Math 3B involves Calculus BC concepts as well as multivariable calculus and a little bit of linear algebra. As such, this course requires you to learn a lot in only one quarter and therefore, requires you to put in some effort in order to understand the concepts.

Professor Penneys is an amazing professor who really cares about his students. Everyday during lecture, he always has a lot to go over, so he doesn't waste time. It is easy to get lost in class because he goes through the material fast, so be sure to raise your hand and ask questions. He likes to give hints on what he likes to test on during lecture so pay close attention in class.

Whenever I had questions with the lesson or homework, I would go to his office hours and get help from him. Professor Penneys may seem intimidating during his office hours but he's there to help you learn. Also, be prepared to go up to the board and work out problems. He says it's a great way to understand math, and I completely agree. I learned so much whenever I had him guide me towards the answer, rather than him just working it out himself.

As for grading, he offers two different grading scales. One that is 20% quizzes 20% midterms x2 and 40% final or 20% quizzes 20% higher midterm and 60% final. He will automatically choose the higher of the two. Also, Professor Penneys stressed at the beginning of the quarter that he has generous curves, meaning that an A is not necessarily a 90% and up but lower. With that said, he said he will never curve up (i.e. an A is a 92 and up).

Overall, I recommend Professor Penneys for Math 3B. His class challenged me to think more analytically when approaching problems, which is a useful skill for other classes later, namely physics.

Overall Grade: A

I had Penneys for 33A (not H) this past quarter. He was an expert in linear algebra and it was part of his own research, so he definitely took the course to another level in terms of his expectations (heavily focused on proofs and deeper understanding rather than easy computations). It was very difficult to keep up with him in lecture but we got used to it and the key was reviewing the notes after class and trying to understand everything he talked about. His exams were pretty fair in my opinion, and I got in A in the class, which I'm pretty proud of considering the level that he expected from us. Overall a good prof.

Took 33B with him

Compared to the vast majority of professors in the math department, Penneys is the most supercalifragilisticexpialidocious guy there is.

Too bad the math department here sucks at teaching (apart from the one true God: Conley).

In all seriousness though, I do think Penneys is a pretty good professor. His dry humor keeps the subject interesting and he is usually pretty good at explaining any concepts you might have some trouble with. If you go to his office hours, he makes you struggle through figuring out a problem you don't know, which on the surface appears cruel, but I personally think is a very rewarding and memorable experience when you do actually figure out the problem you were having.

That being said, this guy has some flaws. First off, he covers WAY too much in lecture to possibly keep up with. If you are quick at taking notes (which I am), you can keep up with what he is writing on the board, but I earnestly believe you need to be some next level kind of smart in order to actually comprehend what he is trying to convey. It took me forever to understand some of the gibberish I wrote in my notebook when I looked at it after class (which was often times made more difficult since he made quite a few mistakes that nobody could catch because he was going too quickly).

I also don't think Penneys benefited from the fact that our class was smarter than he expected (the average on the first midterm was 32/40 and on the second was 31/40 with many people getting raw As or 100s). As a result, he made the final pretty hard to meet the math departments needs of always having 30% of the class max getting A's. While this is not Penney's fault, it just frustrates me that what appeared to be a particularly smart class of people had to struggle with the math department's bs to combat grade inflation.

Furthermore, Penneys was not that available. He cancelled his office hours A LOT and, while I cannot really directly blame him for that since he had a lot of important conferences to go to, I still felt as though I was getting gypped (no offence to anyone of gypsy decent). Again, that's another complaint that should be directed to the math department, but hey, what can ya do?

Overall, I think Penneys is definitely WAY better than pretty much any of the other professors in the math department (he was my favorite of the 4 professors I had), so I would definitely recommend him!

Final Note: If by some cruel bit of fate you have a choice between Penneys and Chayes, please be smart and pick Penneys. If his class is full, do NOT feel sorry for yourself, get on class scanner and get into his class no matter what. Trust me, you will thank me later.

Penneys was a humorous guy who knew Linear Algebra like the back of his hand. He knew the subject and knew how to teach it.

But, there were a few problems that you should watch out for. He went overboard on a lot of lectures-- his pace towards the end of the class was pretty ridiculous. Nothing made sense until after lecture-- if you are a normal student, this is a class where you need to sit down after each lecture and go back through examples and write down questions you have. His office hours usually had him walking through problems with students, which resulted in that one or two students learning a lot about that particular problem. But, not a lot of questions got answered in office hours so if you have a question speak up first.

I thought his tests were difficult. Our class had a lot of genius which resulted in him making the midterms and final increasingly difficult. The final was crazy hard. Do the practices and if there are very specific or particular problems/methods on the practices, chances are he is going to put it on the test.

Penneys is a good math teacher, he makes nerdy jokes and the lectures were not boring. Although he could be rushing through the material sometimes, and there were times when he had to get subs because he had to go to meetings. Overall not bad math class. The midterms are like practice exams, they are appropriately formatted and reasonably approachable.

Professor Penneys is a mediocre professor. He teaches exactly out of the textbook which is not effective considering tests use problems that vary significantly with the formatting of the textbook problems. Because his lectures was mostly out of the textbook, his teaching style was mostly one-dimensional. The examples used were textbook examples and because of this, it gave little incentive to show up to lecture. His grading policy made up for this. Having the 20% quizzes,20% midterm 1, 20% midterm 2, 40% final breakdown of our grades or the second option of dropping the lowest midterm was very helpful and needed. His tests were mostly straightforward and doable. Nothing extraordinarily surprising. What I think would make me more successful in his class would be more examples in lecture that I could not find in the textbook. Overall, Penneys is a great person and all I wish out of him as an instructor is to put more effort in ensuring students' understanding of the material instead of just writing stuff down I can look up in a textbook.