Math 152, Fall 2010

Welcome to Math 152, Sections 01-03 / 07-09!

  • Instructor: Po Lam Yung
    Office: Hill 224
    Office hours: Thursdays 10:00am-11:20am, Fridays 9:00am-10:20am
  • Teaching Assistant for Sections 01-03: Linh Tran
    Office Hours: Fridays 11:00am-1:00pm in Hill 618

  • Teaching Assistant for Sections 07-09: Taylor Burmeister
    Office Hours: Wednesdays 12:00-1:30 in Hill 605

Textbook:

  • Jon Rogawski, Calculus (Early Transcendentals), W. H. Freeman and Co., customized for Rutgers © 2008
  • You are not required to purchase any textbook, as long as you learn the material and get a way to figure out the homework problems.

Some useful links:

  • Notes for power series: click here
  • List of Homework specific to our sections: click here
  • Course Webpage, where you find announcements that apply to all Sections, as well as a rough syllabus. There will also be some formula sheets and review problems in the future. (Caution: Our sections use our own list of homework, different from those maintained there!)
  • Description of Math 151-152 on the Departmental website
  • A quicker link to the rough Syllabus (Some materials may be covered in a different order, and the homework will be slightly different from what is stated there. This is only intended to give you a brief idea what the course will be like.)

Grading Scheme:

  • Final Exam: 200 points, centrally held on December 16, 2010 (Thursday) 4pm-7pm.
  • Two mid-term Exams: 100 points each, held in class on October 4, 2010 (Monday) and on November 18, 2010 (Thursday).
  • Workshop Write-ups: 75 points
  • Homework: 50 points
  • Quizzes: 50 points

Workshops:

  • You will find in the following link the format of the workshops you will attend. The TA will decide which problem you should write up for submission.
  • The workshop write-ups are worth 6 points each. 3 points will be given based on CORRECTNESS, i.e. whether your solution or argument is mathematically and logically sound; another 3 will be based on EXPOSITION, i.e. whether your explanation is clear, precise and succinct. The two are of course intimately related. Therefore the points you get for the exposition will NOT exceed the points you get for the correctness by more than 1. Your experienced TA will grade the workshops and help you improve on that over time.
  • The idea here is that in real life, it is not only important to be able to solve a problem, but also necessary for you to be able to communicate your solution to others. (This does not say that solving the problem itself is not important.)
  • Your final score for the workshop component will be the sum of the scores you get for the individual write-ups, scaled so that the highest possible score one can get is 75 points.

Homework:

  • Homework will be assigned each Monday in class. They should be turned in at the BEGINNING of the recitation in the following week. Any submission after the BEGINNING of the recitation is considered late, and will NOT be graded.
  • The homework are worth 5 points each. 1 point will be on whether all problems have been attempted, and 4 will be on 4 problems that the peer mentor chooses to grade (one point each). You will not be told in advance which problems the peer mentor will grade.
  • The homework is intended to help you understand the material covered. So please think them through; it does not help to just get the correct answer from the back of the book or from some other sources if you don't understand them.
  • Your final score for the homework component will be the sum of the scores you get for the individual homeworks, scaled so that the highest possible score one can get is 50 points.
  • List of Homework specific to our sections: click here

Quizzes:

  • The quizzes will be held at the end of the recitation sessions. They last 10 minutes each. Each is worth 5 points. They are similar (if not identical) to the homework problems that were assigned up to the previous Monday.
  • The point is that it is not enough to be able to solve the homework problems alone - we want you to really master the material and be able to solve the homework problems (or similar ones) without needing help from your textbook.
  • The quizzes should be a fairly good indicator of how well you understand the material. If you consistently get low scores on the quizzes, it is good indication that you should probably seek help.
  • Your final score for the quiz component will be the sum of the scores you get for the individual quizzes, scaled so that the highest possible score one can get is 50 points.

How to do well in this course:

  • Understand the material taught; this means to be able to state the theorems we learned in class clearly and rigorously (in the sense that you can state the hypothesis and the conclusions without ambiguity), to know when a certain theorem would be of help (are there hints that would indicate something might be helpful?), to know what theorem you'll use in specific circumstances, and to be able to apply the theorems correctly. All these take practice. It may feel like you don't know where to start at the beginning, but after a while you get to know better. And then you should do all these without the help of your textbook!
  • Make sure you know the difference between the conditions and the conclusions of a theorem! For your reference, a condition in a theorem is something that must be fulfilled if you want to apply the theorem; a conclusion of a theorem is what you can conclude once you know all the hypothesis of a theorem is satisfied.
  • Do NOT rely on memorizing. It is not only less effective, but less fun. Try to really understand and comprehend.
  • Do the homework, and not only so: ask yourself what data you used in solving a problem, why that data is necessary, whether the desired data could be given in other ways, what else could be asked given the data, whether the question could be modified and how you would tackle it then.
  • It is a very good exercise to come up with homework/quizzes problems of your own.
  • Begin work as early as possible, so that you have ample time to think about it and seek help if you need to. The best way to do it is to review the book after every lecture. The previous remarks should be a good hint of how you could make your review more efficient.
  • All in all, do spend time in this course, but do make sure that the time is well spent - make your study effective!