Prof. Steve Manly e-mail: manly@nsrl.rochester.edu

Phone: 275-8374

Office: B+L 203E

Office hours – Tuesday and Thursday 1400-1600 and by appointment. Adjustments in office hour times will be announced in lecture, as necessary.

Extensive use will be made of the web for distributing course materials, making announcements, etc. The class web site is http://maxwell.nsrl.rochester.edu/class/P113/ . This address will change soon due to a moving web server. You will be notified of the new address in lecture and via e-mail. If you have problems reaching this site (and you've verified it is not your problem), please contact me.

I will set up a course e-mail distribution list. Time-critical announcements, hints for problem sets, etc. will be sent to you via e-mail.

An integral part of this course will be "physics workshop". You will meet once a week, for two hours, with a group of up to nine other students and a leader. During this time, you will work on a "workshop module" that I prepare. The module will contain simple questions, conceptual exercises, and quantitative problems relevant to the material covered the week before in class. Much of this will be review and practice. Some of it will be new and relevant material.

The basic idea of the workshop concept is to institutionalize the study group with some leadership and supervision from the professor. The students in the workshop are expected to work through the module. The workshop leader will act as a facilitator, not a lecturer. I KNOW my workshop leaders can do the problems. Our job is to help you find it within yourself to do them! To a large extent, it is up to YOU to make your workshop section work.

No attempt will be made to sort out students in the workshop sections according to mathematical ability, gender, birth date, tattoo color, etc. Students who are rather challenged by this course will find the support available in workshop very helpful. Those of you who find this material easier may be surprised to hear that research on workshops tells us that you will benefit even more. It turns out you learn a great deal when you try to teach something. I urge you all, regardless of capability, to participate in, and enjoy, the workshops.

We will try to sort out the workshop times and assignments during the week of Sept. 7.

The laboratory must be passed in order to pass this course. The laboratory grade will be averaged in as 15% of the lecture grade. All questions regarding the laboratory should be sent to the laboratory e-mail address (TBA) or addressed to Professor Bigelow.

I will ask you to do a set of problems each week that illustrate and/or enhance what we've discussed in the lecture. P113 is a quantitative, problem-driven course. I will work mostly on concepts in lecture … but the exams will consist of quantitative problems. It is absolutely critical to your survival in this course that you work on these problems each week! For the vast majority of the class, it is not possible to pass the course without struggling with most of the homework problems throughout the semester.

A week or so after each problem set is assigned, I will release a solution set. Your job is to study these solutions, understand your mistakes, and correct any misperceptions or holes in your understanding. You are encouraged to discuss the problems with others. However, I urge you to struggle with each problem on your own first. After all, you will not be allowed to discuss the problems on the exam until after you have turned it in!

Your solutions to the assigned problems will not be graded (unless I think the current system is not working for many of you). However, you will be

>>>>>>>>>>> DEAD, DEAD, DEAD MEAT <<<<<<<<<<<<<<

in this course if you do not do them regularly (in a quiet setting where you can concentrate)! Your consistent hard work on the problem sets will pay off through higher exam grades.

I will ask the workshop leaders to keep track of workshop attendance and to evaluate whether or not you made a valid attempt at the problem set for the week. This will be my gauge (or one of them) as to the level of effort you put into the course. This will be taken into account during the final letter grade assignment and will be the deciding factor for hairline grades.