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Re: Physics/Math "Tutoring" Suggestions?



Look at the "book" at my website:
www.hep.anl.gov/jlu/index.html



On Wed, 28 May 2003, Bob Millen wrote:

I have been asked to "tutor" upper level high
school students in calculus and physics this
summer (starting in June). The location will be a nearby
Buddhist temple, where I frequently eat lunch at their
vegetarian buffet. During the school year there is also
an elementary school associated with this temple.

I tutored a high school boy from our church in physics
many years ago. In that case he was taking a class
at his high school and I was just helping him with
his questions and homework assignments. The "curriculum"
for my tutoring in that case was pretty much "prescribed".

In this case the students are going to be on summer break.
It seems to me that this time my efforts will be more like
teaching my own class. It won't really be like the tutoring
I did before.

I have managed to exchange email with a calculus teacher
and a physics teacher at a nearby school where many of "my"
students probably attend during the school year. The calculus
teacher let me have an old calculus textbook that should be
helpful. [ "Calculus" by Larson and Hosteetler, 2nd Ed. ]

The physics teacher teaches a calculus-based physics course
and uses the textbook: "Fundamentals of Physics" by Halliday,
Resnick and Walker. I'm guessing that this is probably a modern
version of the book I used when I started studying college physics
in 1966. (?)

It is my hope that whatever material I end up using will
"mesh" with what these students will (or already have) encountered
in their high school. If I choose a text it would be great if
I could find a modestly priced paperback that would be easy
on the student's (parent's) budget. We probably won't need
a vast amount of material for our part time summer work.

For almost a year I have been on medical disability because
of treatment for chronic leukemia/lymphoma and some other
medical issues. Prior to going on disability I was involved
with software engineering at various companies for over 30
years. I am 54 years old.

I received a BS in Math and Physics at Iowa State University
in 1970. I received an MS in Computer Science at the University
of Texas at Dallas (UTD) in 1980. I took some graduate level
courses in statistics at UTD after getting my MS there.

It is my hope that this "tutoring" assignment will mark the beginning
of a process of trying to get back to "gainful employment" for
me. The software engineering field is quite "overstocked" right
now. I'm trying to keep an open mind toward future employment
possibilities.

I really enjoyed my undergraduate work in math and physics. Even
though that study was a long time ago, I am fairly confident of being
able to effectively teach students. It is my hope that my enthusiasm
for both subjects will "infect" the students.

One of the things that I especially appreciated about my early
college study was the meshing of calculus and physics. My classes
on the two subjects were actually separate--but it was as though
they were both part of the same class.

In terms of a curriculum for my "tutoring" I would especially enjoy
an approach that would tie calculus into physics study for these
high school students. My high school physics class didn't touch
on calculus at all. I then went to college and the two were tied
together so well. It seems like a shame (to me) to try to really
study physics without leveraging calculus.

I apologize for the length of this message. If you're still with
me, I very much appreciate your patience. Any calculus/physics
books that you could recommend that would mesh well with and augment
a good high school calculus/physics curriculum would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Bob Millen


--
"What did Barrow's lectures contain? Bourbaki writes with some
scorn that in his book in a hundred pages of the text there are about 180
drawings. (Concerning Bourbaki's books it can be said that in a thousand
pages there is not one drawing, and it is not at all clear which is
worse.)"
V. I. Arnol'd in
Huygens & Barrow, Newton & Hooke