I’ve been awarded a sabbatical for the fall semester of 2018 to write a new free, open-source textbook for GVSU’s new MTH 124: Functions and Models. The purpose of this course is to prepare students not-yet-ready for calculus for a first semester course in calculus.
MTH 124 has run for three semesters at Grand Valley, and I taught sections of it in both fall 2017 and winter 2018. The audience is students who have passed or placed out of Intermediate Algebra, but who otherwise would take 3-credit courses in both college algebra and trigonometry. Because college algebra (MTH 122 at GVSU) and trigonometry (MTH 123 at GVSU) are stand-alone courses that serve large numbers of students as terminal courses, and we found that many aspiring math, statistics, computer science, engineering, and physics majors — whose ultimate goal was to complete part or all of our calculus sequence — were taking MTH 122 and 123, we decided to create MTH 124 to focus on ideas that are most important for calculus to strive to prepare them as much as possible.
This aspiration begs an important question: what prerequisite ideas are most important for calculus? In the 2015-16 academic year, a group of us at GVSU thought about this carefully, and developed a syllabus of record for the course. As colleagues and I have taught the course, we’ve gotten a better sense of what should be included. Indeed, as I’ve worked with my students, I’ve written a fairly extensive set of activities; if you read the table of contents, you’ll get a good idea of how the course is organized.
So, my ultimate question is to potential users out there, before I start writing in earnest: what topics and ideas would you most like to see? From my existing table of contents and activities, what is missing? Are there things you see in the existing materials that don’t belong?
Another question I have is: what would you like to see process-wise? I expect to write in a style very similar to Active Calculus, with a preview activity followed by 3-4 activities per section, along with a handful of challenging writing exercises. I also plan to include WeBWorK exercises in each section. There are emerging possibilities with interactive graphics and more, so if you have thoughts, please share them. The goal will be a very student-driven, active-learning text.
Finally, a relatively minor question – but still one that is important to me – is: what should the title of the book be? The working title is “Active Precalculus”, as the text will very much be written in the style of Active Calculus. But the word “precalculus” is often misused in our community, so I’m inclined to try not to use it. I’ve thought of “Prelude to Active Calculus” or “Getting Ready for Active Calculus” … neither seems quite right. If you have a good idea, I’d love to hear it.
I would welcome hearing from you in the comments, on Twitter, or directly via email at boelkinm at gvsu dot edu. Your feedback will be most helpful if I receive it by June 15.
