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

Phone: 275-8473

Office: B+L 314 and 203E

Office hours – Monday 1300-1500 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 URL is

http://hertz.pas.rochester.edu/class/P1142000/

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, problems with solution sets (not that it ever happens!) 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.

We will try to sort out the workshop times and assignments during the week of January 17.

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 (physlabs@pas.rochester.edu) or addressed to Professor Bigelow. Bear in mind that it is absolutely necessary to normalize lab grades between lab sections at the end of the semester due to inequities in lab TA grading. Typically, this is done by roughly scaling all grades in a give section so that the section mean is equal to that for the class mean. This is standard procedure for large university general physics laboratories. However, it is not perfect. Discussions are underway to see if we can figure out a better way to do this. If we come up with a good scheme we may implement it this semester.

I will ask you to do a set of problems each week that illustrate and/or enhance what we've discussed in the lecture. P114 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!

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.

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.