Course Syllabus
The course syllabus contains the policies and important dates for Math 115 this term. If you are confused about anything in the syllabus, please don't hesitate to let the instructor know.
Course Details
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My name is Andy Schultz, and my preference is that you address me by my first name (no title necessary). My office is on the fourth floor of the Science Center, room W408.
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The instructor's office hours will be held at the following times
- Mondays from 2-3;
- Wednesdays from 10:30-11:20;
- Thursdays from 8:45-9:45;
- Fridays from 11:45-1:30.
You are highly encouraged to attend office hours, and you never need an appointment to do so. If these office hours don't fit with your schedule, we can set up an appointment to help you outside of regularly schedule office hours. Please come to my office or send me an email if you ever want to discuss material from the class or ask about homework problems!
You can contact me at . Though I'm always happy to receive emails from you with questions or concerns about the course, I can't guarantee that I'll be able to promptly reply to emails late at night or over the weekend. If you do contact me by email, please be sure to follow standard email etiquette. In particular, please make sure you include a greeting and signature and avoid abbreviations. If you're contacting me to ask about a problem, please be sure to specify what the problem asks (as opposed to asking something like "I can't get problem 2 and need your help").
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The course is centered around Stewart's Calculus: Concepts & Contexts, 4th edition. The ISBN for the text is 978-0-495-55972-6. You are not required to purchase the text, but many students find it useful to have a copy as they learn the material. I've chosen this older edition because it can be purchased online for an affordable price. The text can be used as a supplemental reference for the material we cover or as a bank of practice problems; for this reason you do not have to purchase the suggested edition of the text. If you do chose to use a different version of the text, it will be your responsibility to track down any differences between the posted optional problems and the problems that appear in your edition of the text.
If you don't find Stewart to your liking, another excellent resource that covers almost all the same material is Calculus Simplified by Wellesley's own Oscar Fernandez. This book gives a more concise and "friendly" treatment of the material.
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You'll be able to access homework assignments, lecture summaries and copies of quizzes online through the course webpage at http://palmer.wellesley.edu/~aschultz/f24/math115.
- Limits and Derivatives (limits, continuity, intermediate value theorem, limits involving infinity, the tangent problem, rates of change and velocity, the derivative, relationship between $f$ and $f'$), differentiation rules (power rule, exponent rule, product and quotient rules, derivatives of trigonometric functions, the chain rule, implicit differentiation and derivatives of the logorithm, linear approximation), applications of differentiation (related rates, optimization, derivatives and the shape of a curve, indeterminate limit forms via l'Hopital), and basic integration theory (the area problem, the definite integral and Riemann sums, the fundamental theorem of calculus, $u$-substitution)
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While learning the content of the course, you will strengthen your ability to
- recognize patterns and extrapolate from observations
- determine how to attack new problems based on successful approaches to old problems
- understand and apply abstract ideas to solve concrete problems
- evaluate the suitability of differing approaches for solving problems
- persist in the face of mathematical challenges
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If you have a disability or condition, either long-term or temporary, and need reasonable academic adjustments in this course, please contact Accessibility and Disability Resources (ADR) to get a letter outlining your accommodation needs, and submit that letter to me. You should request accommodations as early as possible in the semester, or before the semester begins, since some situations can require significant time for review and accommodation design. If you need immediate accommodations, please arrange to meet with me as soon as possible. If you are unsure but suspect you may have an undocumented need for accommodations, you are encouraged to contact (ADR). They can provide assistance including screening and referral for assessments. Disability Services can be reached at accessibility@wellesley.edu, at 781-283-2434, by scheduling an appointment online at their website, https://www.wellesley.edu/adr or by visiting their offices on the 3rd floor of Clapp Library, rooms 316 and 315.
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We will practice a mask optional policy this semester. Masks are not required but respected.
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Students are expected to have a working understanding of standard, high school-level algebra and trigonometry. If you find that you are struggling with any of the prerequisite topics, that's completely fine and not at all unusual. Contact the instructor as soon as you can so he can help you get caught up to speed.
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Your engaged presence is expected in classroom lectures. While the professor is in charge of determining what content is covered during a class period, students share the responsibility of directing lectures and discussion sections so each is as clear as possible. In particular, students should feel comfortable stopping the instructor to ask him to repeat a particular exposition, to present a concrete example of an abstract concept, or to explain a confusing concept in a new way. Classroom time is there for the benefit of students, so should be treated as an interactive resource.
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Mathematics requires that a student understand one concept before moving on to the next, and since our course moves at a fast pace it is critical that you attend each and every class. If a student misses a lecture, they should solicit notes from someone who was in attendance. (If needed, the instructor can help facilitate this process; if this is the case, it is the student's responsibility to notify the instructor that they will need help securing a copy of the notes.)
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Sometimes students have the impression that "understanding the material" means instantly knowing how to do problems assigned in the class. On the contrary, most students find they don't truly understand the course material until they have struggled through several attempts at solving problems or understanding concepts. You are expected to exert a good amount of effort in working through the course material, and you shouldn't be discouraged if a certain topic remains elusive when you first encounter it: try some suggested problems, go to office hours, and ask your instructor or friends for help when you need it. The typical student will need to put in between 8 and 10 hours per week on the assigned problem sets. If you find you are consistently spending more than 12 hours on problem sets, please discuss this with the professor so he can help you manage the time you spend on this class more effectively.
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You are expected to read and understand the college's Honor Code. Incidents where academic integrity have been compromised will be dealt with severely. Although most students have a good feel for what constitutes a violation of the Honor Code, for this class you will also need to be familiar with the instructor's policy on homework collaboration. Please be sure to thoroughly read and understand the section on homework below to avoid an inadvertent violation of the Honor Code.
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Students are expected to submit their work according to the deadlines posted with assessments. It is the instructor's responsibility to ensure that assessments are made available to students in a timely fashion so that they have an opportunity to engage with those assessments under an appropriate time frame. In general, this means the instructor should post homeworks approximately 7 days before they are due so that students have an extended period of time to work on problems. (As a corollary: students should begin their homework problem sets well in advance of the deadline.)
Students can submit one homework set late during the term. If you intend to submit an assignment late, you must let the instructor know at least 24 hours in advance of the regular deadline; your work will then be due 72 hours after the original deadline. In addition to this late homework part submission, there is also one dropped homework grade per term. For most students, these two contingencies should absorb most issues that come up during the term that interfere with the completion of homework assignments. If a student has further issues that require more than these two measures, they should contact the instructor as soon as possible (but not later than the day before the next homework assignment they can't complete on time) so that a meeting can be set up to discuss the issue.
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Homework problems will be completed through the MAA's WebWork online homework system; a link to our courses WebWork site can be found on the homework page of our course's website. Homework accounts for a significant portion of your grade, so it's critically important that you complete all homework assignments and submit them on time. Homework is also critical in developing your understanding of the course material. For this reason, it's important that you make homework an exercise that promotes understanding.
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Students are more than welcome to work with the instructor or classmates when solving homework problems. If you have consulted with someone in preparing your homework, please include a reference to your collaborators when you submit your assignment. You should always write your solutions up in isolation of others or notes about discussions taken with others; give yourself time (at least 20 minutes) after talking with someone about a solution (or reviewing notes you took during such a discussion) before writing up your own answers. Using notes from a collaboration while writing your homework assignment will be considered a violation of the Honor Code. In addition, you may NOT consult a written solution to a problem you're working on (whether it be online or in a book). If you have any confusion about this policy, please talk to the instructor.
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There will be weekly quizzes in this course. With the exception of exam weeks and the first week of class, we will have a quiz every Wednesday. Quizzes will be distributed electronically at the end of each Wednesday class periods, and students will submit a hard copy of their answers at the start of class the next day. Barring extreme circumstances, make-up quizzes will not be given. In general, the material covered on quizzes will be the content covered in the homework you've submitted the preceding Saturday. For those weeks when there was not a homework assignment due the preceding Saturday, the quiz will instead be on the topics covered during class in the previous week.
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There will be 3 midterm examinations and 1 final. Midterms are given during the regularly scheduled lecture period in the regularly scheduled classroom, so there should be no conflicts which prevent you from taking a midterm as scheduled. The first exam will be held on Thursday, October 3, the second will be held on Thursday, November 7, and the third will be held on Thursday, December 5. Your final will be self-scheduled and cumulative.
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Our classroom will succeed only if everyone is invested in the learning process. For this reason, a significant portion of your grade is determined by your participation in the course. Your participation grade is determined by your attendance and participation in class as well as your contributions to class-generated content for the course, as follows:
- You can earn up to 85 points for class attendance. You get all 85 points if you miss 3 or fewer class periods (including exam days) during the semester. If you miss 4 or more class periods, you receive a deduction of 5 points (from the 85 possible points) per absence. So if you miss five class periods, you would receive 60 points for attendance.
- You can earn up to 15 additional points for contributing to class-generated content. This includes being selected to write responses to challenge questions from class, being selected to write up exam review sheets, presenting a solution during group work in class, answering or asking a question during class, and others. There are lots and lots of opportunities to make these contributions, but you should work to be regularly engaged with these activities.
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Your grade is computed as follows: Participation (10%), Quizzes (10%), Homework average (20%), Final (20%), Lowest Midterm (10% each), Other midterms (15%).
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Regular attendance makes a big difference in student performance, and it's worth a substantial part of your overall grade. You should attend every class that you can.
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Office hours are your chance to spend time with the instructor and some subset of your classmates outside of lecture. If you have issues that are confusing you, it's a great place to ask those questions. Even if you don't have questions you want to ask, sometimes it's useful to come hear what other people are thinking about.
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Homework is where you get a chance to sit behind the wheel and see if you can operate the machine. For many people, it will take some time to tackle the problems that have been assigned. If you don't start the problem set until 48 (or 24!) hours before it is due, it's far more likely that you'll not have time to really grapple with the problems sufficiently. Problem sets will generally be posted late on Friday or by Saturday at noon, so you should get in the habit of at least reading over the problems as soon as they are assigned, and trying to tackle a few problems a day.
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Lectures will likely move quickly, and the process of taking notes is significantly taxing and requires a lot of attention and focus. To the degree you're able, also try to find time during class to ask yourself whether you have a general sense of what we're doing and how we're approaching issues. If you're confused during class, ask questions!
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Spend some time meeting people in the class. If it works for your schedule, see if you can set up a time to work on problem sets together. It's truly amazing how beneficial it is to have people working together as they are digesting new material.
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As you study for exams, you'll want to think about what we've covered that is relevant for each exam. In doing so, you should be able to see our topics broader perspective: what are the basic questions we're interested in asking, and what are the general techniques we bring to bear? At the same time, you should have a strong enough understanding of the particulars that you don't have to reinvent the wheel when the exam itself comes: do you know relevant theorems? have you practiced executing --- from start to finish --- the strategies we've developed?
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Don't be discouraged if this course is challenging. You are learning new mathematics, and for most people that process naturally involves plenty of struggle. If you embrace the challenge and are bold enough to talk to someone when you are confused, there is opportunity for significant growth...and even enjoyment along the way.