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.

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.

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