books > Instructor's Materials
Resouces available publicly
- Books in digital form. All the books are available for free from this web site in digital form.
- Answer checker. Certain problems in the book have check marks. A student who has found a numerical or symbolic answer and wants to see if it is correct can use the answer checker through the web page.
- Discussion questions. These are conceptual questions sprinkled throughout the book, which are meant to be a springboard for active learning in the classroom.
- Exercises. In the back of each book is a set of group exercises. Some of these are paper and pencil activities, while others are miniature labs.
- Lab manual. My lab manual is available here.
- Instructor's Guide. Click here to download the instructor's guide in Acrobat format.
Resouces available to instructors only
The following resources can be downloaded from this web site, but the files are encrypted, so you'll need to get a password from me in order to decrypt them. You can e-mail me to obtain the password. You must be at an accredited school, you must have adopted the book, and I must be able to verify your e-mail address from the school's web page. Sorry, but I don't provide these materials to homeschoolers. The files are supplied in Adobe Acrobat and LaTeX formats.
Homework solutions. These may be useful to refer to when grading homework, and they they also address some of the common mistakes and conceptual problems students have. I give my students hardcopies of the relevant solutions after they turn in each homework assignment, and you are welcome to do the same, provided that you make it clear to your students that sharing these solutions with anyone else is an act of academic dishonesty. It contains the entire solutions manual in Adobe Acrobat and LaTeX formats.
Reading quizzes. A hallmark of successful active learning techniques is the use of reading quizzes to convince the students to read the book before coming to class. This frees the instructor from having to spend the entire class inroducing all the material from scratch. I have developed a complete set of short multiple-choice quizzes that correspond to the chapters of the book. (The version of the quizzes that I distribute omits a total of three questions I use with my own classes that are taken from Eric Mazur's excellent book Peer Instruction: A User's Manual. I highly recommend this book.)
Exam questions. I've developed a set of about 200 exam questions, which are similar in style to the homework problems in the book, i.e., they require a mixture of mathematical problem solving and conceptual answers. If you wish to use these with your own classes, you must agree not to redistribute them digitally or on paper. No redistribution on paper means that your students must not be allowed to take the exam home, i.e., when you hand back the exams, you can give your students enough time to review their scores and your comments, but you must then get all the exams back from them before they leave. (As with the quizzes, I recommend Mazur's book as a supplementary source of questions.)
How to view an encrypted PDF file
Just open the file in the normal way, using an application such as Adobe Reader, or xpdf. It will demand the password from you.
How to remove encryption from an encrypted PDF file
If you find it annoying to have to enter the password every time you use one of these PDF files, you can remove the password protection using the free pdftk application, which runs on a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and MacOS X. On Linux, the command to remove the encryption would be
pdftk solutions_encrypted.pdf input_pw password output solutions.pdf(substituting the real password for "password").
How to get the files in editable format
The following instructions are written for Linux and MacOS X users. It should be possible to do the same thing using Windows, but I don't use Windows so I don't know how.
Download and install the appropriate version of the free GPG cryptography program for your operating system. For Debian-derived versions of Linux such as Ubuntu, just do an "apt-get install gnupg." For MacOS, go to the web page above and follow the links under "Binaries."
Open a terminal window, and do this:
gpg <lm_solutions_encrypted >lm_solutions.tar.gz
Enter the password I've given you when GPG asks for it.
After decryption, unpack the file in the usual way (tar -zxf lm_solutions.tar.gz).