About the H
This is a section of
Math 152 for students who have had excellent preparation and have
indicated an interest in a richer (and possibly more demanding!)
instructional environment. I intend to follow approximately the
standard Math 152 syllabus (a two-page version is here).
The course will meet three times each week with the instructor. Two of those meetings will mostly be standard lectures. The Thursday meeting will mostly be devoted to small group workshops. There somewhat non-standard problems will be distributed. Students will be required to form small groups and discuss these problems. They then will be asked to write complete solutions as specified by the lecturer. I hope to take advantage of the relatively small size of the class by asking for oral presentation of some problems by students.
Homework problems from the text will be given, and will be due at the Thursday workshop meetings. Students should be able to do all of the textbook problems suggested on the standard syllabus. The class will take the standard Math 152 final exam, and I hope that the performance of students will be excellent.
Who they are | What they do |
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Office: Hill 542; (732) 445-2390 x3074; greenfie@math.rutgers.edu Office hours: Tuesday from 12 to 1 and Wednesday from 2:30 to 4 and by appointment (e-mail is best for arranging appointments). I will try to answer e-mail promptly and that might be the simplest way to get a rapid response to questions. | The duties of the lecturer include lecturing (not too surprising!), maintaining the web pages, selecting and writing additional instructional material such as workshops, and writing the two in-class exams and any quizzes. He will grade the exams, quizzes, and workshops. The lecturer has overall responsibility for reporting course grades based on student work. |
econti@eden.rutgers.edu | The peer mentor will help facilitate workshops and will grade textbook homework problems and possibly some quizzes. Peer mentors have no other responsibilities outside of class (so they have no office hours). |
Possible cheating Suspected violations of academic integrity (cheating) will definitely be reported. Students should be familiar with Rutgers policies on academic integrity. The penalties for infractions (breaking the rules) can be quite severe. Students who are not sure should discuss this with any of their course instructors, please! | |||||||||||||||||||||
The progress of this section (compared with ...) It's my intention that we move at about the same pace as indicated in the standard course syllabus. Any serious difference with pace and content will be noted in the course diary. There are recommended problems in the syllabus, and students should be able to do most of them. Students will be requested to hand in solutions to a few of these problems every week at recitation meetings, but the problems to be handed in are intended to be minimal homework assignments and successful students will do much more work. | |||||||||||||||||||||
Due dates for textbook homework and workshop problems Late textbook homework and late workshop writeups will generally not be accepted. | |||||||||||||||||||||
Exam procedures
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Grading
Although this is subject to change, students should expect that grades
will be determined using the following point distribution:
However, students whose exam grades are all near bare passing or are failing may fail the course in spite of numerical averages: students must show that they can do adequate work connected with this course independently and verifiably. It is my intent to write and grade the exams so that approximately the following percentage cut-offs for letter grades can be used: 85 for an A, 70 for a B, 55 for a C, and 50 for a D. So there are "absolute standards" for letter grades rather than "a curve". I will be happy if every student gets a high grade. |
Some special mention should be made about the use of technology in
Math 152. Many of the computations may be elaborate, and, in practice,
almost everyone (including the lecturer!) uses calculators and
computers to help. I hope that graphing calculators and computers will
be available to everyone in their working environments. The
Math Department has decided that such technology generally should
not be available to students taking final exams. I am a strong
supporter of technology, but feel that this decision is reasonable. To
help students prepare for the final exam in Math 152, no
electronic devices may be used during exams.
Students should know how to use the devices that they own. Many of them can be very helpful in checking intermediate computations on homework problems. Many handheld devices can be fooled quite easily, however. Some common difficulties are described here and also here. There is more discussion on pages 2 and 3 of the local matter in the text. More elaborate environments for computation exist, such as Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab. In particular, Maple is available on eden and most other Rutgers computer systems. Basic introductory material on Maple is here. The material can likely be used by many students in Math 152. It was created for students in Math 251, but I have used it in several sections of second semester calculus. I almost always have a Maple window open when I'm at the computer, and almost surely I will prepare lectures and exams for this class using Maple to check what I'm doing. All engineering students and many other students will become familiar with Matlab. Here's a question which students may ask at times during the semester: "Why do I need to learn this stuff since a computer can do it?" Certainly a computer can tell you that 25.46 multiplied by 38.04 is 968.4984, but if I type PLUS instead of TIMES, I'll read 63.50. I should have enough "feeling" to look at the answer and know that something is fouled up, somewhere. Similarly, if I ask a computer to find an antiderivative of (x2+2)/(x2+1), the answer will be x+arctan(x) (yes, yes, "+C"). But if I omit one or another pair of parentheses (or both) I get these answers: 2x-2/x, (x3/3)+2arctan(x), (x3/3)-(2/x)+x. This is a rather simple indefinite integral, and things get much more complicated with more complicated questions. Students should know the "shape" of the answer (so 25.46 multiplied by 38.04 is hundreds, not 63.50!). And that, to me, is an important aim of the course. Further, the methods introduced in Math 152 help students become more familiar with many properties of the standard functions (exponential, logarithmic, trig, inverse trig, etc.) These properties are used everywhere in mathematical modeling and applications. Such familiarity is useful and necessary. |
Maintained by greenfie@math.rutgers.edu and last modified 8/31/2009.