Partially Ordered Thoughts

(This is Part IV in an ongoing series. Part III has links to the previous parts as well.)

Shortly after my visit from our friendly neighborhood Wiley representative, the books started pouring in. My Wiley representative sent me the Axler text, and boy did she ever send me the Axler text. In an effort to show me the various bindings in which it’s available, I got the paperback version, the binder-ready version (with a binder that I find a bit oversized in one dimension), and the hardcover version (times two). I really don’t know why any one of them alone wouldn’t have been enough to help me make my decision, but I guess that’s the way things work. Shortly after the first copies of Axler arrived, I got a rather heavy box from our local Pearson representative. The box contained five physical books, but even though they all were nominally different, I’d say it’s more accurate to describe it as containing three different texts. Read more »

(This is Part III of an ongoing series. I suggest reading Part I and Part II first.)

As I previously mentioned, a Pearson representative had set me up with an account on Course Compass so that I could check out some of their texts as well as their online homework system, MyMathLab. Before I got too far along in convincing myself that this was something that I wanted to use, I talked to a few people familiar with the system. I spoke with a fellow graduate student who’d used MyMathLab as a recitation TA for one of our math for management majors classes, and he reported that it seemed like it had been beneficial for the students. A friend from NDSU who’s now finishing graduate school in the northeast has experience using it with students, albeit on an extra credit basis, but most of them really liked it. One of our instructors is currently using MyMathLab with her finite math class and reported that it’s working well, more or less, although she’s had some issues with answers that require a decimal answer, as the system doesn’t allow her to specify a tolerance for correct answers. (Apparently the questions are supposed to be designed to specify how many digits are required, etc., but if students have the potential to round at an intermediate step, their answer might be right for five or six places and wrong in the seventh, which shouldn’t matter, but does to the software.)

By and large, I was impressed with CourseCompass/MyMathLab, and the price point is great. Read more »

(This is the second installment in my series on updating precalculus at Georgia Tech. Part I is a good starting point.)

Knowing that timely adoption would be the key to getting used texts for my students for the fall, I jumped right into the process of finding a new precalculus text. The Larson/Hostetler text from Cengage stayed on the list, since if the only way to cut price was to cut quality by an unacceptable amount, I’d stay with L/H. I asked our textbook contact to look into the possibility of a custom edition that doesn’t contain the massive amount of the text that we don’t use, as that usually manages to provide some cost savings.
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Pretty much the entire time I’ve been teaching at Georgia Tech, I’ve been arguing that we allow too many students to start their mathematical studies in Calculus I. We’ve been allowing students to start in Calculus I with a math SAT score of 550. This leads to about 25 percent of Calculus I students receiving a grade of D or F or dropping the course during a fall term. Yes, this is below the national average, but the typical school out there doesn’t have a freshman class whose SAT math + verbal exceeds 1300 (1600 maximum). The students who I’ve seen struggle in Calculus I aren’t dumb; they’re just not prepared to be there. They aren’t adept at working with rational functions, exponential functions, logarithms, and especially trigonometric functions. The fast pace of our Calculus I course, which covers only slightly less than what most institutions will spend two semesters on, completes their doom.
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