Spring 2007 MATH 163A Introduction to Calculus Section A06

Section A06 meets Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri 10:10am-11:00am in Morton 237.

My office hours for the current quarter are posted on my web page. Students from all sections of Math 163A, not just section A06, are welcome to come to my office hours.

At the start of each class, I project daily announcements on the movie screen.

In classroom examples, when a calculation will be long and involves only skills from earlier chapters or prerequisite courses, I will not show all the steps of the calculation in class. Instead, the steps will be posted here, on a web page of details of class examples.

Web Resources:

• Web page of the instructor of Section A06, Mark Barsamian.
• There is a main Math 163 web page with information pertaining to all sections of the course.
• Section A06 has a Blackboard site.
• Section A06 is using the MathXL website for online homework submission.
• There is a page of instructions for getting started with MathXL.

Learning Resources:

• The Academic Advancement Center's Math Center has drop-in help, tutors, online help, and a telephone hotline.
• Supplemental Instruction: SI "provides free, out-of-class study sessions led by an Ohio University undergraduate student who has already taken the course. Used throughout the U.S. and the world, the SI program has proven highly successful in increasing student achievement and retention." Check with the Academic Advancement Center for more information and the SI schedule.

The textbook for the course will be Calculus with Applications (Brief Version), 8th Edition, by Lial, Greenwell, and Ritchey, published by Addison Wesley, 2005; ISBN: 0-321-22829-4

Course Information Sheet for Section A06, including general information and syllabus. (pdf)

Some remarks on the large lecture format of Section A06 As of March 26, our class has 210 registered students. We meet in Morton Hall Room 237, which has ... 210 seats. No student, teacher, or college administrator thinks that such large classes are great. The decision to run such a large class is forced by budget constraints. But there are things that can be done to improve large lecture courses. Here are some of the things that we are doing to make the Spring 2006 large lecture a success.

• We are using an online system called MathXL for submission and grading of some of the homework. With this system, students have access to extensive online help, and they get immediate feedback about their performance. Use of this system will enable us to insure that students have a regular diet of homework drill exercises, and that every one of those exercises is graded.
• Students will also submit one longer exercise on paper each week, as a writing assignment. These exercises will be graded by people, and will be returned with comments.
• We are among the first classes on campus to implement an automated system that records attendance using student ID card readers. Attendance will be required and will count in the course grade. We hope that this will help us avoid the attendance problems that often plague large lectures.
• The course grading scheme is simple and clearly presented, and students will have access to their current grade throughout the quarter.
• We have regular communication with the Supplemental Instruction (SI) leader, in order to help keep the SI sessions aligned with the course content.
• The Professor and the staff of Teaching Assistants have regular office hours, during which students can get one-on-one help.

Course Diary

Later that week, we discussed transformations of graphs by shifting and stretching, both horizontal and vertical. On Friday, March 30, I introduced the small Handout 2: Transformations of Graphs.

''Sign chart'' was the name we gave to a tool for determining when a function is positive, negative, or zero. It used concepts from algebra and precalculus. Students who took those courses only in high school might not have learned about sign charts. Students who took those courses at the college level would have encountered the sign chart there, although it may have had a different name or no name at all. Furthermore, in many books, the approach taken to sign charts involves plugging "sample numbers" into the function and seeing whether the result is positive or negative. In class on Tuesday, April 3, we discussed why this approach is both too hard and not hard enough. The method is too hard because one is often called upon to plug a fraction into a high degree polynomial. Computing the function value in such a case is a nuisance, especially without a calculator. The method is not hard enough because it does not make one think about why the function had the sign that it did. The document Handout 3: Sign Charts is meant to be complete enough to give a student who had never seen sign charts an understanding sufficient for the needs of Math 163A. The approach taken is to not use sample numbers, using instead only the symbols +, -, and 0. The handout ends with a list of six exercises. One of these was the first written homework assignment for the course.

The textbook's approach to graphing rational functions is rather ad-hoc. In class, I stressed the importance of establishing a plan and and sticking to it, both to keep one's own thoughts organized when solving a problem, and to help give a clear structure to the written solution. Later in the second week, I introduced the Handout 4: Six Step Method for Graphing Rational Functions without Calculus. We did not discuss it very much this first time around, but it will make frequent appearances throughout the rest of the course.

Also at the end of the second week, we discussed the "end behavior" of polynomials graphs on either. From then on, we frequently referred to the small Handout 5: End behavior of polynomial graphs.

Our first Exam was on Monday, April 9, the beginning of the third week. See the list of exams at the bottom of this page.

Later in the third week, we discussed limits. On Monday, April 16, we discussed continuity and did our first in-class drill of the quarter, entitled Class Drill 0: Limits and Continuity.

Exams

Exam #1 was given in class on Monday, April 9, 2007. It Chapters 1 and 2 of the textbook.

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