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Teaching Assistants
(Above are recitation times. Office Hours will be established later.)
Required Materials and Equipment
Textbook
Note that this course uses an older edition (3d edition) of this textbook. This is helpful because it's cheaper: you can get it used from several places for ~$20 (check out amazon or ebay, but be carefull to look for the used<\it> books. The version sold by the Lehigh bookstore is the current one, the 5th edition)
You should also be able to get access to a digital copy of this textbook for an additional fee when you sign up for Mastering Physics, which you need to do in any case (see below).
Only the chapters you need for this course:
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Randall D. Knight, Physics for Scientists and Engineers: A Strategic Approach, Vol. 3 (Chs 20-24), 3rd Ed
ISBN-10: 0-321-75317-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-75317-5
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Randall D. Knight, Physics for Scientists and Engineers: A Strategic Approach, Vol. 4 (Chs 25-36), 3rd Ed
ISBN-10: 0-321-75316-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-75316-8
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The full textbook:
Randall D. Knight, "Physics for Scientists and Engineers: A Strategic Approach, 3rd Ed" ,
ISBN-10: 0321740904
ISBN-13: 9780321740908
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Mastering Physics
All students must use Mastering Physics. Go to https://mlm.pearson.com/enrollment/biaggio35979 to sign up. Alternatively, you can go here and enter the course ID, which is "biaggio35979". After entering the usual data and various standard information, you will be asked for your Lehigh email address (without the "@lehigh.edu"). Make sure that you enter it correctly because if you don't, then the record for your homework will not go to the right place! Also, when the system asks for a textbook, look for "Knight, Physics for Scientists & Engineers, 3/e". This is the OLD (cheaper) edition of the textbook. Select this version when you sign up for mastering physics even if you have bought the 5th edition, otherwise it won't work. Pearson allows you to pay for this service using credit card or PayPal, and you can also get temporary access for 14 days before you pay for it. If you have already signed up, you can also follow the "Go to my course" link, and find PHY 021, Introductory Physics 2
Official Pearson Enrollment Instructions
Checklist:
Sign up for Mastering Physics For homework
Go to coursesite For class materials
Get access to the textbook For reading assignments, homework, and studying
Note that Pearsons (the company behind masteringphysics and the textbook) unfortunately may require you to purchase a new access code for MasteringPhysics even if you already have on old one, because they bind access codes to the textbook that each course uses. In any case, the cheapest option if you already got the used 3d edition book is to simply purchase the registration to masteringphysics on-line.
Coursesite
Many materials used in this class will be posted on coursesite.
Activities
Lectures
Lectures are held twice a week, on Tuesday and on Thursday. The lectures introduce new materials and discuss the most important facts and techniques. The ability to use these facts and techniques is then developed via individual work on various types of problems (weekly homework assignments), and exercised and discussed again in recitation. Facts and techniques are also summarized in the detailed lecture summaries that will be made available on coursesite. In addition, you should read additional explanations on the textbook. The lectures are important because they serves as a guide to navigate the material and because they highlight the most important facts. But reading and re-reading all the written materials is necessary, and the combined activities of doing the homework assignments, struggling with them, and then asking questions are ESSENTIAL.
Materials
Class materials and current announcements are published on coursesite. These will be a PDF of the weekly "learning homework", PDFs of lecture Summaries, homework solutions, and additional handouts such as lecture plans, and more.
Quizzes: once a week
Quizzes are short questions to be answered on paper in recitation. Quizzes take place in every Friday recitation.
Mastering Physics Homework: twice a week
These are the many different weekly on-line homework assignments to exercise the concepts and techniques learned in class and through reading assignments. You must look at each weekly homework assignemnt BEFORE going to recitation. Then you do them on paper in your notebook, and then transfer the results into the on-line forms in your masteringphysics account. You do this twice a week, and go over any difficulties during discussions at your recitation meetings. As a rule, TWO new homework assignments become available every week. One assignment becomes available on Tuesdays, to be completed by the midnight of Thursdays; the other assignment becomes available on Thursdays, to be completed by the Tuesday of following week. Note that the Tuesday homework needs to be done over the next two days, while the Thursday homework needs to be done over the next 5 days, including weekend. Therefore, you will be more likely to find longer problems or more problems in the homework set that is due on Tuesday. But the aim of this online system is also to provide a bunch of different homework for you to use for independent study. Because of this, there will be many more problems that you can look at in addition to those strictly required to collect "homework points".
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Which assignment |
When to get it
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Submit your work
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MPa
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on Tuesday, each week
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by Thursday midnight, the same week
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MPb
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on Thursday, each week
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by Tuesday midnight, the next week
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Learning Homework: one problem, once a week
The Learning Homework (LHW) is a longer form homework assignment done on paper and handed in to your TA in recitation. The LHW is designed to promote communication and discussions (between students and between students and instructors) and it will help towards a deeper understanding of a technique or a topic. It is made available as a PDF file on coursesite each Tuesday.
Also to promote discussions, the LHW must be done in two steps.
First, on the next Friday recitation after the new LHW was published, you must hand in a narrative. This is an English text that describes with complete sentences how you plan to solve the problem (this is the part where you think about the ideas and general concepts).
Second, on the Friday one week later, you hand in your final solution (this is the part where you develop those ideas and concepts using mathematical tools).
The narrative does not need to be a very long essay: you should just write down what you think are the main ideas behind the homework and the steps that you plan to follow to reach a solution, or any other comments or guesses. You an also add questions for your TA.
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Which assignment |
When to get it
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Submit your work
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LHW for the current week |
on Monday, each week
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Narrative on Friday
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LHW from the previous week
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Final solution on Friday.
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Important: The greatest difficulty in solving problems in physics, in particular at the beginning, is not in the math that we use, it is in knowing how to set up a plan to reach a solution, it is in knowning what intermediate steps one needs to take to arrive at a certain conclusion, or which equations correspond to these steps. For the Learning Homework Assignments, we make this development of the route towards a solution an explicite requirement, in the form of a narrative that must be handed in a week before the final solution is due. In general, avoid seeking out the help of somebody who would tell you how to solve a problem, leaving only the math for you to do. You need to exercise how to arrive at a plan for solving the problem, not just exercise the math once you are told what to do.
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