Let's begin with what I expect of you. This will not be a competitive course. Your grade will be determined by how well you know the material. There are no fixed percentages of A, B, C, D, or F that I will give. I would be extremely pleased to give all of you A's. ALL of you here, and I emphasize all, are easily intelligent enough to get an A in this course. There are only two things you need:
As for 2., there is a good analogy with athletics here. Your brain is like a muscle. You have to get it into shape by exercising it. Suppose, by hook or crook or bribery, you were given the chance to play middle linebacker for the Huskies at the Rose Bowl. Think of how preposterous it would be if you listened to descriptions of how to play but didn't train or attend practice. Then the night before the Rose Bowl, you decided to spend 10 hours lifting weights to get into shape. Sounds silly, yet every year there are a lot of students who don't do the homework or don't attend class, then try to study for an exam by staying up late the night before. I know because I tried it as a student.
The majority of the learning that takes place in a math course takes place at home when you have the time to carefully consider the meaning of the material. This course is a 5 credit course. According to the catalogue, one credit equals three hours of work per week for the typical student. That's 15 hours per week for this course, or 3 hours per day. It does not mean 10 hours on Wednesday night before a Thursday quiz. You can't get into shape by exercising one day a week. Find a quiet place to study each day and put in the required work. If you have not mastered the prerequisites (as the Latin words mean: "required before") you'll have to spend additional time filling in the gaps whenever you find them. Leave yourself time to do so. If you are a conscientious builder and see a beam or joist missing, don't just cover it up with flooring, put the beam in. Now most of you are Freshmen and many are in a new living environment. You will have a big transition from a very structured High School environment with lots of hours in class to an unstructured one with few class hours. When I first went to college, I fooled around for a year and a half, then dropped out. It took me quite a while to figure out what the problem was. A good deal of it is that you have to organize your life yourself. If your social life this quarter will preclude you from spending the required daily time in this course, that's O.K. with me, but you should wait to take this course another time.
Many of you have heard that our grade school education in the US is lagging behind Europe and Japan. Students from those countries at your age are far better prepared in math than you are. What is usually not mentioned is that by the time you get out of college you will not only catch up, you'll be ahead. This is also a source of confusion for students coming here. You'll be expected to understand the material more thoroughly than before. Now is the time in your life to put in the effort. What happens in the next four years will determine what you do for the next 50 years of your life.
Now I may have made it sound to hard or impossible. It's not. First, during the next week make sure this is the right course for you...that you know the prerequisites thoroughly. If not, there is nothing wrong with stepping back and starting at a course that covers those prerequisites. Second, put in the quality hours consistently and daily in this course. Make sure you understand all the material given in lecture and that you do all the homework problems.
Here are some details on the mechanics of the course:
Grades:
The quizzes, midterm and final exam are closed book exams, but on the midterm and final you will be allowed one 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper on which you can put (only) handwritten notes (both sides). Please bring a picture ID to both the midterm and final exams.
I want you to work together on homework. Helping your fellow student will not hurt your chances because the grading is not competitive. In fact, you will learn the material better by trying to explain it to someone. They also may think of questions that don't occur to you and force you to reevaluate what you know. I want you, by quiz section tomorrow, to form a study group of 4. You can form them with anyone in the course you like; it might be better to find three friends in the same quiz section, though that is not necessary. Your TA will give you some time at the beginning of quiz section Tuesday for this purpose. Your TA will then randomly group all those who have not found a group and keep a record of the groups. You can change the composition of your study group at any time during the quarter, but please inform your TA of your new group. I will leave it up to you and your TA as to how to run the groups and how often to meet. One way is to arrange your daily study time, working on your own, but having the others nearby so that you can ask questions. Another is to meet once a week to go over problems you can't do. Don't just rely on one of your group to explain everything. Be sure you do a lot of the work on your own. I do require though that you turn in homework in your own handwriting.
The university does not have the resources to pay someone to grade all of your homework solutions. Homework will be collected and we will have as much of it graded as possible. Typically that may mean only one or two problems on each assignment will be graded. The purpose of having it graded is to at least give you some feedback and to force you to do the homework. I have tried several times assigning homework, but not grading it and it always results in few students actually doing the homework. Reread your solutions before turning them in, so that you are sure they make sense. One of the most important things you will learn in college math classes is this ability to judge the correctness of your own work. In the outside world, there is rarely an "answer sheet". You will have to be sure that what you do is correct and properly presented, so you might as well learn now how to do it. Your quiz section will be run by a TA who is there to help you. Don't view him or her as a threat. Ask questions in quiz section. Go to their office hours and ask more questions. Use the math study center: you can do your homework there, and get help when you need it.
There will be no makeup quizzes. The mechanics of writing a comparable quiz that no one objects to, scheduling the time and classroom for an expected 30-40 people to simultaneously make up a quiz is too difficult. However there are legitimate reasons why you might miss a quiz, so to compensate, I will base the total quiz grade on the 7 best quiz scores. Do not view this as a way to overcome a poor grade on one quiz. The purpose is to avoid penalizing you for a valid absence. If for some reason you must miss more than one quiz, see me about it. Likewise, the two worst homework scores will be dropped, and no late homeworks will be accepted. Late homeworks would take a disproportionate amount of the grader's time because of the mechanics grading with partial credit and recording the scores. Again, if there is a legitimate reason why you must miss several homework assignments, please see me.
Let me reemphasize that the homework is required. Reading the book and doing the homework problems is the "exercise" you must put your brain through on a daily basis to get it into shape. In my opinion, the utility of the quiz ends the moment that you start to take the quiz, since you have stopped studying. I've tried skipping them and everyone just falls behind. The quizzes will be short, about 15 minutes once a week (Thursdays). They will consist of just one or two questions, always on the material since the previous quiz. They are too short to be comprehensive on that material. Anything covered on the homework or in lecture is fair game for the quiz. Remember that their purpose is to force you to keep up. They will not necessarily be on the most important problem since the last quiz, for then students tend to try to study only what they consider the most important. You can display your mastery of the material in the course during the midterm and final.
The midterm will cover the first half of the course. The final will be comprehensive, to ensure that you remember all of the needed material for calculus. The midterm and final will be made up of problems close to the harder homework and lecture problems. Note that the time of the final exam is Saturday March 9, 1:30- 4:20. This time was set by the Undergraduate Director and officially approved by the Administration.
One of the big difficulties students have in our calculus sequence is doing word (or "story") problems that have more than one "step" to them. We will emphasize such word problems in this class.
In some sense, this course is really about how to use the buttons on a scientific calculator. So please buy one. You can get one for under $15 and you will use it in other courses. It should have buttons called
sin, cos, tan, exp, ln, inv, y^x
Some may have slightly different names such as sin(x) or e^x or 2nd instead of inv (inverse) . This course will tell you what these mean and how to use them. You can push the exp button all day long and still have no idea what it does. The calculator alone is not enough. We'll tell you not only what it is about, but how to use it. Our emphasis, though, will be on what's needed for calculus. If you can afford to invest another $50, then it would be a good idea to get a calculator that can draw graphs. This can be useful for visualizing functions, in both precalculus and calculus.
In some large classes, students have complained about the noise at the back of lecture hall or a general din of conversation. So I'll ask you to please socialize outside of class. There have also been complaints about people coming in late and leaving early, disrupting the class. So I promise to end the class on time: Yell at me if I go over. But I will also request that once you are here, you stay until the hour is over. If that doesn't eliminate the distractions, let me know and I will take further steps to ensure that those of you who want to listen can do so.
I can adjust the course better if I get feedback from you. For example, if you have questions from the reading, come to class early and ask. I can answer your question before class. Moreover, since it is likely other people will have the same difficulty, I can adjust the lecture to address the question. Likewise if something I say in the lecture is confusing, let me know and I'll try to state it another way.
Each of the 5 TA's will have office hours in the Math Study Center.
They will be happy to help you, whether or not you are in their
quiz section.
I will announce the times as soon as they are available.
But please feel free to come to the Center any time it is open.
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