website.
I create a variety of handouts for my students. When I show these to friends and colleagues, I frequently get the respond "Ooo. That's cool. Can I have a copy?" This happens sufficiently often that I figure I should just put them up and point everyone to this website. All these documents are copyrighted by me, but may be reused fairly freely under a slightly modified Creative Commons license detailed below. Without any further ado, here are my handouts:
A short and pithy step-by-step process for solving problems using Newton's laws. Such things are quite common these days, as there is a recognition many students have weak or no problem solving skills. My students seemed to like my version, and it was sufficiently successful that I required that on exams they go through all the steps in order to receive full credit. This reduced the number of blank problems I saw on tests. Unfortunately, just because students could follow the steps to solve a problem correctly did not mean they actually understood the content of Newton's laws ☻, but I think this is a general defect of pretty much any teaching scheme. I'm just glad they learned something, even if it was not as much as they could.
Last updated: 27 May 2007.
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This is a more recent follow-up to Newton's Ten Commandments. It contains a discussion of various common pitfalls and tips in applying the first few commandments. Those student who took the time to read it found it very helpful; those who didn't, didn't.
Last updated: 27 May 2007.
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My guide to conservation law problems. I'm still not entirely happy with it, and students found it only moderately helpful. One obvious deficiency is that step 2 is waaaaay to long. However, I don't see any way to make shorter (except for dropping the work-energy theorem, which I've considered doing). If you have any suggestions, be sure to let me know. I originally wanted to make the first rule of conservation: "Once you have their energy, you never give it back!" ☻ but this turned out to be not very tenable.
Last updated: 27 May 2007.
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My guide to kinematics problems. While definitely entertaining, the version used in class was of questionable efficacy. This version adds short names to each step (as well as fixing some Buddhist idioms). I hope that these changes, together with integrating the handout more fully into my teaching next time, will acheive better results.
Last updated: 31 May 2007.
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Without a doubt, my most successful guide, perhaps because it covers the simplest topic. It guides student through problems where they are only given relationships but no definite numbers, so they must first solve algebraically for the desired ratio. This may seem elementary, but unfortunately many (most?) students enter college unable to solve this type of problem.
Last updated: 27 May 2007.
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This is an abbreviated (1 page) form of my manifesto (see next entry) on what a good problem set should look like. While the extended form was reasonably successful with physics majors, introductory students just wouldn't read it. Not all students would read this, either, but those who cared about their grade did, and turned in better homeworks because of it.
Last updated: 27 May 2007.
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This is my complete manifesto on what a good problem set should look like. It's been reasonably successful with physics majors, but fell flat on its face with pre-meds taking college physics. In those courses I now use a short, one page form (see the previous entry).
Last updated: 27 May 2007.
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This document started out as a review sheet for the undergraduate mathematical physics course I have taught at the University of Mississippi. Since I could not find a textbook which covered the material I considered most important, it just kept growing as a partial textbook substitute. While it has no original results, it does have some results in the Fourier section which require quite a bit of digging and thought to suss out of most other sources. All theorems are stated carefully and correctly, although some technical details (e.g., that an inner product space be Hilbert) appear in parentheses as they were not discussed in the course.
In revising this document for the web, I have added some material not covered, or given only the briefest of mentions, in the course. A good portion of the materials on distributions (especially the discussion of tempered distributions), falls into this category. However, students were responsible for understanding and applying the overwhelming majority of the material. (The proofs of some of the theorems require graduate coursework in functional analysis; these results were motivated, but certainly not proven in an undergraduate course for physics majors!) Most of them did; I believe this material could be successfully taught at any institution which has a physics major.
Warning! Although at around 16 pages, this document is now more than just an outline, it has not yet grown into a textbook, or even a real set of lecture notes. I hope to continue expanding it and that it will eventually reach that point, but it is not yet there. If you are a professor, I hope it gives you some ideas on what to teach. If you are a student, I hope it teaches you something, and perhaps gives you some ideas on what you need to learn. I can make no guarantees as to when, or even if, it will be finished, but I hope you find some value in it nonetheless.
Last updated: 27 May 2007.
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All documents on this page are copyrighted © by Itai Seggev (see each document for the exact copyright years). They may, however, be freely redistributed or used in derivative works for noncommercial purposes and with proper attribution under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License, Version 3.0. This license should be held to apply equally to all forms of this document, whether print or electronic, including but not limited to any current or future file format. However, the requirements (i) that the full copyright notice be included; (ii) that the disclaimer of warranty be included; and (iii) that the license text or its URI be included; as detailed in sections 4(a) and 4(d) of the license, are waived by the author provided all of the following conditions are met:
Although every effort has been made to ensure that there are no errors in any of these documents, and at the present time the author believes that there are no major errors in them, these documents are provided "as-is". The author provides no warranty of any kind as to their correctness, merchantability for a particular purpose, or any other defect.
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