1) Purchase Text and Read:
Purchase Explorations in College Algebra, Second Edition and then:
a) Read Exploration 1.1 at the end of Chapter 1, pp. 50-52.
b) Read "U. S. GovÕt. Definitions of Census Terms" by Tony Roman, pp. 479-480.
2) Obtain an Email Account:
If you donÕt already have an e-mail address, you must get one. As a UMB student, you are entitled to a free e-mail address. Visit http://www.umb.edu/students/webmail.html for more information. Or go to sites such as www.yahoo.com or www.hotmail.com and follow the links for you to sign up for this type of account. Since you may not have a zip drive at home, it will be extremely useful if you know how to e-mail attachments to yourself or to others in the class (or to me). Note that the University uses your student e-mail address to send you important UMB-related information. Even if you do not use that address regularly, you may want to visit the web mail site and set up it up so that e-mail is forwarded to an account that you do use.
3)
Email Assignment:
If you do not already have email at home or work, get an e-mail account from the university (see instructions below). Send me a brief message before our next class. My e-mail address is: Joan.Lukas@umb.edu.
Your message should contain your name, information about where you are emailing me from: home, work, UMass, other, and the days of the week and times of day when you could meet me for extra help. This will assist me to schedule office hours convenient to everyone in our class. For example:
Hi, Prof. My name is ________. I'm in your Quantitative Reasoning class. I'm sending this email from work, where I have the use of a PC Computer. I hope I won't need a lot of extra help, but if I should, I could meet you any day right after class at 12: 30 PM; I can also meet on Weds. at 2:30 and on Tues./Thurs. At 11:00 AM.
4) Assigned problems:
a) Complete the review problems in the "3 Types of Percents" for Friday, January 28.
b) Write your "automathography" (see attached explanation). Type your automathography as a Microsoft Word document and submit it by email as an attachment by Friday, January 28.
c) Complete the Fast facts assignment by Monday, January 31.
5) Decide how you want to save documents produced in class.
We will be making different Excel and Word files in class, and you will want to save them for use at home and in the labs at school. You can save files temporarily to the Òscratch folderÓ on the desktop on your computer, but you will need a more secure place to store your information. There are three choices for how you will do this.
6) Portfolio Requirements:
Over the course of the semester you will be asked to compile a portfolio of work that you have produced in this class. The portfolio will be a record of what you have done in different aspects of this course and of the mathematical and quantitative reasoning skills you have mastered. The portfolio will be due on the day of the final exam and will be worth xx points out of the 100 points on the final. The following items will be required in your portfolio:
á your automathography
á your fast facts assignment
á one graded homework assignment of your choosing
á three examples of your written work
1. A 60-second summary analyzing a graph or data from a recent newspaper or magazine article
2. The 60-second summary from your Extended Exploration (FAM 1000)
3. Write-up of your a group presentation (Exploration 2.1)
á your end-of-semester written reflection
á your final exam
7) Automathography Assignment
An automathography is your "mathematical biography." Some of the things it may include are listed below. You can write about just one of the items in this list, but it's also OK to write about more than one. Be sure to type your automathography as a Microsoft Word document and submit it by email as an attachment by Friday, September 10.
á reflections on your best or worst math experience--or both
á a description of how you use math in your daily life or on your job
á how you feel about mathematics as a subject of study
á your confidence in your ability when called upon to do math
A sample automathography (mine) is included below.
I enjoyed mathematics as a young child, discovering facts about numbers and writing them on index cards, filing them away as my ÒsecretsÓ. I remember a problem that came up in the 5th grade, when our class was being taught by a substitute. The problem gave the height of a mountain and the depth of a valley and asked for the vertical distance. Most of the class, including the substitute teacher, calculated this by subtracting the depth of the valley from the height of the mountain. One other student and I did the problem correctly by adding these values, but the teacher insisted that we were wrong. I found this incident quite upsetting at the time, but looking back on it I realize that it may have been the first time that I understood that adults, even teachers, donÕt always know the answers.
Like many people, I was quite confused at my first introduction to algebra. Suddenly we were working with a mysterious ÒxÓ instead of my old number friends and there was no explanation of where this ÒxÓ came from. I remember crossing out ÒMathematicsÓ in my schedule book and replacing it by ÒGreekÓ. (ÒItÕs all Greek to me.Ó was a way of saying that you didnÕt understand something.) After a while I figured out what algebra was all about and began to enjoy it. I liked solving equations as a kind of puzzle and was disappointed when the introduction of the quadratic formula gave an automatic way of solving 2nd degree equations. As a high school student, my understanding of geometry was formal and theoretical rather than intuitive. This approach had both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, my way of dealing with geometry made it easy for me to learn the more abstract mathematics I encountered in college and graduate school. But I missed a lot by not developing my geometric intuition. In recent years, I have been working on repairing this gap.
I still enjoy learning mathematics and participate in a monthly mathematics group that includes several colleagues and our grown children who also enjoy mathematics. We choose different areas of mathematics to investigate and take turns presenting mathematical topics to the group.