Calculus III

Fall 2005

Course Overview


Instructor: Dave Feldman
Email: dave@hornacek.coa.edu
Office: Second floor, Turrets Annex
Phone: x249, 276-5284
Mailing List: calc 3 at hornacek dot coa dot edu
Office Hours: By appointment
Help Sessions: Wednesdays, 6:30 -- 8:00 pm


I have several main goals for this course:

  1. I want to help you improve your quantitative literacy, problem solving skills, and mathematical confidence.
  2. I want you to learn several important and widely used mathematical ideas and tools: series, sums, vector functions, and partial derivatives and their applications.
  3. I want you to gain experience using a computer algebra system to do mathematics.
  4. I want to have fun while working hard and learning a lot.


I hope to cover chapters 8-11 of our textbook. This is similar to the material covered in most other Calc III courses at colleges and universities with trimesters or quarters. It does not complete the typical calculus sequence. In particular, we will not cover multiple integrals and vector calculus. If students are interested, I would strongly consider teaching a calculus IV section as a tutorial this spring to complete the calculus sequence.

Evaluation

Your evaluation will be based roughly on the following: I recommend against grades; I believe they are more likely than not to interfere with genuine, reflective learning. However, I will assign grades (for those who so opt) by following the guidelines in the COA Course Catalog. I do not have any quota of A's, B's, etc.


Policies, Advice, and Stuff:

  1. Homework will be due Fridays at the end of the day. More than one unexcused late homework assignment will result in me mentioning this in your narrative evaluation and may result in a lowering of your grade.
  2. You are strongly encouraged to work together on homework. You can also consult me, class tutors, other faculty, friends, and family. However, the homework you hand in should represent your own understanding. This means that if your friends get a homework problem and you don't understand how they did it, you shouldn't photocopy their solution and turn it in.
  3. Unless students prefer otherwise, I do not plan on giving any exams in this class.
  4. More than two missing homework assignments will result in a grade no higher than a C.
  5. You'll want a calculator that can handle scientific notation, trigonometry, and logarithms. There's no need to buy an expensive graphing calculator.
  6. We will be making use of Maple for this class. Maple is an extremely powerful mathematics package that can do graphical, numerical, and symbolic computations.
  7. I will be sending out class info via email. Thus, it's important that you check your email.
  8. Academic misconduct -- cheating, plagarizing, etc. -- is bad. Any cases of academic misconduct will result in a judicial hearing, as per pp. 14-15 of the COA handbook. Possible consequences range from failure of the assignment to expulsion. For more, see the revised statement on academic integrity passed by the faculty winter term, 1999.


[ Dave ] [ Calc III ] [ COA ]

Web page maintained by dave@hornacek.coa.edu.