<p>^Well if YOU are paying for the course, then perhaps kid would ask you how you felt about them withdrawing. At S’s school summer courses cost a pretty penny. I’m hoping ShrinkSon hangs in there and manages to tough it out!</p>
<p>Yes, I can see that. </p>
<p>There will be no refunds for housing or tuition no matter WHAT at this point. We want him to follow through, with or without credit.</p>
<p>At most schools Calculus II starts with integration of single valued function using various techniques such as Substitution, Integration by Parts, Trigonometric Substitution and Integration by Partial Fractions. The bad news is that as formidable as this sounds, it is the easiest part of the course. Improper Integrals and Infinite Series which will include Taylor Series and McClaurin Series are much more difficult than the integration techniques that make up the first half of the course. If Shrinkson received a D on his first midterm and he has not been spending at least eight hours a day outside of class time studying Calculus his chances of avoiding an F in this course, which is a notorious weeder that has pre-maturely ended the careers of many aspiring engineers, will be very difficult,</p>
<p>Prior to this test, he had been spending 4, not 8 hours a day outside of class time studying. So is racheting up to 8 too late at this point? And if you need to spend 8 hours a day during summer school studying, what does that say about you 1, 2 and 4 year prognosis?</p>
<p>I have said this before and I’ll say it again, a course that requires 8 hours a day of studying per day makes one wonder about the **practical **use of the material down the road…</p>
<p>Math classes of that caliber are also notorious for being test-only based, meaning that one would likely have 2 midterms and a final, each 30% of the grade, and you mess up one, and you’re toast. With the availability of computer based homework systems this could be improved, as it is hard to focus on reams of homework every day when it counts for 10% of the final grade, if that.</p>
<p>DD1 took a Calc class with 25% homework, 25% quizzes (both online), 25% midterm, 25% final, and it worked out a bit better. 30/30/30/10, or as in Elbonia, 50/50, is a recipe for disaster in my view.</p>
<p>Also, I would question the prof’s pass rate (and borderline question his/her attitude from the email above) a bit. Calc is hard enough as it is without making it the default weedout class.</p>
<p>Calc. II is hard because it is the basis for Calc III and IV, right? The prof can’t let kids through without knowing the material. That wouldn’t be doing anyone a favor.</p>
<p>OTOH if you don’t find it difficult, you must be in the right field. I don’t think anyone should have to spend 8 hours a day doing the work. Maybe needs a different approach…back off and try again later or with a different textbood.</p>
<p>Shrinkrap,</p>
<p>A couple of suggestions that might be useful:</p>
<p>Your idea that your son should continue to attend the class and do the work for it, even if he has dropped it, is excellent. Most schools will permit this. This will give him a head start on the material for the fall.</p>
<p>A really good book for practice in evaluating integrals, setting up Taylor series, summing series, figuring out the radius of convergence, and in short, practical techniques for integral evaluation is the calculus text by Stewart. (I think QMP’s copy had an enlarged violin or something on the cover.) This has lots and lots of problems, so that a student usually won’t run out of problems to try before he understands how to do them.</p>
<p>A really good book for understanding why things work as they do in calculus is the sequence, Calculus I, Calculus II, Calculus III by Jerrold Marsden and Alan Weinstein. This sequence of texts has been used at Berkeley. Important results are generally given in bold and in a box, and there is a good use of computer graphics to illustrate points. This is probably my all-time favorite introductory calculus text. If your son finds himself asking, “But why?” this is the book to go to (my opinion, anyway–I’m no relation to Marsden or Weinstein).</p>
<p>8 hours a day is a bit excessive, but 16 or so hours a week is not at all excessive to learn calculus at this level. One of the advantages of taking the class during the regular year is that there is longer for the concepts to “sink in.” It seems to me that a lot of learning consolidation occurs during sleep. The larger the number of days, the greater the opportunity for ideas to take hold. In fact, I often find even now that I wake up knowing the answer to a research problem that I was struggling with the night before.</p>
<p>Going to office hours is a great idea, and I am glad that your son has been doing that! Something I would suggest is that your son should not be afraid to show the professor his train of thought. A family friend who was a physics teacher used to exhort his students, “Show your ignorance!” This was said and meant in a kindly fashion. Although this is perhaps not the best “career move” when one is out of school, it is still very effective for learning things fast, and identifying the crucial flaws in one’s thinking. </p>
<p>I can’t say about this particular prof, but in many cases, if your son has a different prof in the fall, and would prefer not to “show his ignorance” to the new prof, then he could probably still go to office hours or make appointments with the prof that he has this summer, to ask questions. Most faculty would welcome this. A few would not.</p>
<p>Something I should have asked at the first: How does your son know where he stood on the first test? Is the scale printed in the syllabus? Often calculus classes are graded on a curve that is unrelated to high school grading scales.</p>
<p>I agree with the poster who said that the prof would be doing your son no favors to pass him on, if he doesn’t have a mastery of the material in Calc II. It’s not that it’s set up as a weeder class, it’s that the skills (including the approach to learning unfamiliar material that’s not so intuitive) are genuinely needed later on. Still, some of the math-like courses that he would need to take later will not draw too heavily on this material.</p>
<p>Finally, this discussion reminded me of a college catalog parody that I saw about 25 years ago. In it, the academic calendar was listed. Final exams were followed by “Contention Period,” which was followed by “Last day to drop classes.” It’s somewhat akin to the Stanford practice, at least for many years: failed classes simply did not appear on the transcript. (Motto: I count none but sunny hours.)</p>
<p>Thanks! I will pass that on.</p>
<p>This summer he is using " Briggs Cochran".</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321570561/ref=oh_details_o06_s00_i00[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321570561/ref=oh_details_o06_s00_i00</a></p>
<p>He used a book by Stewart last semester</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0538498676/ref=oh_o00_s00_i00_details#[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0538498676/ref=oh_o00_s00_i00_details#</a></p>
<p>Too bad both of the books got fairly poor reviews on Amazon.</p>
<p>I wonder how well the reviews on Amazon of college textbooks correlate to the grade that the reviewer got in the course.</p>
<p>There are some free calculus texts available on-line, such as Strang’s book on MIT OCW, if he would like to have available alternative explanations of particular concepts that may be hard to understand in the book used in the course.</p>
<p>As far as the amount of studying goes, one typical (4 credit unit) course during a summer session at a semester system school (where the summer session is half the length of a typical semester) should nominally be a half course load, or about 24 hours per week including both class time and out of class time.</p>
<p>Well, students should look around to find a book they like. Those are my favorites. For a quick assessment, look at the discussion of the chain rule, change of variable in integration, and Lagrange multipliers for constrained optimization. That will give a feel for the fit.</p>
<p>This whole discussion has me convinced the best place to get a good foundation in Calculus is in HS, where they spend an hour a day for a whole year on it. (In addition to copious HW.)</p>
<p>Stewart is commonly used in university courses and high-school AP courses and I thought that it was decent. I have over a dozen calculus textbooks at home going back to my fathers WW2-vintage book. It is nice to have more than one available as students can look at different approaches to covering a topic. Normally students go to the library where there are bunch of calculus books if they’re having trouble with something.</p>
<p>How many books about “Early Transendentals” does one NEED?</p>
<p>I just noticed both books have that in the title, and that they cost a lot of money!</p>
<p>^In the newfound spirit of making old books more “appealing” by adding erotica to them ([The</a> 50 Shades Of Grey Effect: Jane Eyre, Pride And Prejudice And Sherlock Holmes To Be Republished With ‘Explosive Sex Scenes’](<a href=“The 50 Shades Of Grey Effect: Jane Eyre, Pride And Prejudice And Sherlock Holmes To Be Republished With 'Explosive Sex Scenes' | HuffPost UK News”>The 50 Shades Of Grey Effect: Jane Eyre, Pride And Prejudice And Sherlock Holmes To Be Republished With 'Explosive Sex Scenes' | HuffPost UK News)) perhaps we could get to work on “50 Shades of Transcendentals” ;)</p>
<p>Early transcendentals and zombies!</p>
<p>This is a popular calculus book, 2nd edition, published in 1967. It’s $180. I found a copy in our company library back in the mid-1990s and asked the owner if I could have it (for my son). He said sure. I then went out and got the second volume at a used online bookstore for about $15. Then a few years later, this book became very, very popular and the cheapest used copy on Amazon is now $106.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Vol-One-Variable-Introduction-Algebra/dp/0471000051[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Vol-One-Variable-Introduction-Algebra/dp/0471000051</a></p>
<p>The book market can be nuts when it comes to math textbooks. Why does a 40+ year-old book cost so much?</p>
<p>Shrinkrap, I don’t envy you. Your son has had trouble in previous classes, yet decided to tackle Calc ii as a summer class, yet continues to play tennis and ball, and asks, after getting bad enough grades to warrant that prof email, whether he should boost study time beyond four hours?? By now he should understand that he is going to have to work harder than others just to keep his head above water. Fun stuff can wait until he has these classes in hand, if he really wants the ME degree.</p>
<p>But if his goal is the automotive industry, then a CS degree is a good way to get into it. CS programs vary quite a bit in math requirements. The best require the most math, but good programs are out there that have less demanding reqs. But they are hard work for many, even without the Calc III req.</p>
<p>My CS major d, who had to work hard for her Calc II C+, thought Discrete Math was a breeze.</p>
<p>
</a></p>
<p>Is the Apostol Calculus book really that popular or high volume? Seems like the kind of book that would be used in an honors course. But that may limit its use, since the top math students, ready for calculus in 11th grade or earlier, probably don’t want to wait two years to take calculus in college, and high schools and community colleges may not have the critical mass of students to offer an honors (in a college math context) calculus course to those students. So these top math students complete regular lower division math in high school or community college. But then they learn all of the theory behind calculus in real analysis as freshmen (if they major in math), using books like this:</p>
<p>[Amazon.com:</a> Principles of Mathematical Analysis, Third Edition (9780070542358): Walter Rudin: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Mathematical-Analysis-Third-Edition/dp/007054235X]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Mathematical-Analysis-Third-Edition/dp/007054235X)</p>
<p>or perhaps this less expensive one:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Analysis-Dover-Books-Mathematics/dp/0486650383[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Analysis-Dover-Books-Mathematics/dp/0486650383</a></p>
<p>or perhaps this free one:</p>
<p>[Basic</a> Analysis: Introduction to Real Analysis](<a href=“http://www.jirka.org/ra/]Basic”>Basic Analysis: Introduction to Real Analysis)</p>
<p>My trading tools are price and volume. I don’t know the volume here but do know the price. The higher price implies higher demand.</p>
<p>Some schools may use Spivak too. Another expensive old book.</p>