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Calculus in Context: The Five College Calculus Project
James Callahan, Kenneth Hoffman, David Cox, Donal O'Shea, Harriet Pollatsek, and Lester Senechal
Calculus in Context: The Five College Calculus Project is a thorough reframing of what it means to learn calculus. It starts with a “clean slate;” there is no presumptive commitment to any aspect of the traditional course. Instead, the curriculum is guided by the following principles:
- Calculus is fundamentally a way of dealing with functional relationships that occur in scientific and mathematical contexts. The techniques of calculus must be subordinate to an overall view of the underlying questions.
- Technology radically enlarges the range of questions we can explore and the ways we can answer them. Computers can be engaged as much more than tools for teaching the traditional calculus course.
- The concept of a dynamical system is central to science. Therefore, differential equations belong at the center of calculus, and technology makes this possible at the introductory level.
- The process of successive approximations is a key tool of calculus, even when the outcome of the process—the limit—cannot be explicitly given in closed form.
These principles are implemented from the outset. The very first chapter begins with questions about describing and analyzing the spread of a contagious disease. A model is built, a model that is a system of non-linear differential equations. Then a numerical assault is begun on those equations, and the door is opened to a solution by successive approximations.
In the following chapters, successive approximations and computational tools continue to assert their central role. For example, the concepts of local linearity and the derivative emerge from ever-more-enlarged computer “microscope” views of a function’s graph. This conceptual focus leads to a further study of differential equations and dynamical systems that concentrates on their scientific contexts and the structural and computational issues they present. The computational basis of integration is fully developed along the same lines and in a way that leads naturally to the fundamental theorem. Computer graphics provide dramatic visual evidence for the “big Oh” notation used to describe how Taylor polynomials give successively better approximations to a function. Even these few instances begin to illustrate how the principles cited above can be implemented and how that implementation can alter what it means to learn calculus.
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Statistical Inference via Data Science: A ModernDive into R and the Tidyverse (Second Edition)
Chester Ismay, Albert Y. Kim, and Arturo Valdivia
An open-source and fully-reproducible electronic textbook for teaching statistical inference using tidyverse data science tools.
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Atomic Physics for Everyone: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Precision Spectroscopy with No College-Level Prerequisites
Will Raven
This open access textbook introduces beginning undergraduate students and high school students to the world of quantum mechanics and atomic spectroscopy. Requiring no previous knowledge of physics and no math beyond basic algebra and sines and cosines, this book focuses on concepts to make the excitement of atomic physics more accessible for learners than ever before. It comes replete with learning goals, exercises and solutions, and an optional experimental component, making this text readily adoptable for both the classroom and the undergraduate lab. The book takes the reader on a lively and engaging tour through topics at the forefront of current science, including photons, quantum numbers, atomic energy levels, some different spectroscopy techniques, electronic structure, atomic notation, angular momentum, hyperfine structure, isotope shifts, the strong force, an introduction to the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and more.
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Abortion Pills: US History and Politics
Carrie N. Baker
This is the first book to offer a comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States. Public intellectual and lawyer Carrie N. Baker shows how courageous activists waged a decades-long campaign to establish, expand, and maintain access to abortion pills. Weaving their voices throughout her book, Baker recounts both dramatic and everyday acts of their resistance. These activists battled anti-abortion forces, overly cautious policymakers, medical gatekeepers, and fearful allies in their four-decade-long fight to free abortion pills. In post-Roe America, abortion pills are currently playing a critically important role in providing safe abortion access to tens of thousands of people living in states that now ban and restrict abortion. Understanding this struggle will help to ensure continued access into the future.
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Advanced General Chemistry
Alexandra E. Strom
Textbook adapted for CHM 118 at Smith College:
This course is for students with a very strong background in chemistry. The elementary theories of stoichiometry, atomic structure, bonding, structure, energetics and reactions are quickly reviewed. The major portions of the course involve a detailed analysis of atomic theory and bonding from an orbital concept, an examination of the concepts behind thermodynamic arguments in chemical systems, and an investigation of chemical reactions and kinetics. The laboratory deals with synthesis, physical properties and kinetics.
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Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community
Carrie N. Baker and Aviva Dove-Viebahn
The field of feminist studies grew from the U.S. women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has continued to be deeply connected to ongoing movements for social justice. As educational institutions are increasingly seeing public scholarship and community engagement as relevant and fruitful complements to traditional academic work, feminist scholars have much to offer in demonstrating different ways to inform and interact with various communities. In this collection, a diverse range of feminist scholar-activists write about the dynamic and varied methods they use to reach beyond traditional classrooms and scholarly journals to share their work with the public. Here is an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and importance of community engagement and to archive some of the important public-facing work feminists are doing today. Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, as well as administrators hoping to increase their schools’ connections to the community, will find this volume indispensable.
“In Public Feminisms, Baker and Dove-Viebahn have curated a vibrantly intersectional collection of essays that speak both to the longstanding commitment of feminisms to education and activism and the urgent need for this work in the contemporary moment. This book shows how scholar-activists are bringing together knowledge production and the sharing of that knowledge and community engagement through a series of compelling case studies. I can’t wait to teach it.” —Carol A. Stabile, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Oregon
Carrie N. Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Baumann professor in American Studies and a professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Aviva Dove-Viebahn is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University.
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Organic Chemistry II
Layne Morsch, Steven Farmer, Krista Cunningham, Zachery Sharrett, and Kevin M. Shea
This text has many contributors. It was adapted for use in CHM 223 at Smith College by Kevin Shea with the assistance of a Smith College Library OER Incentive Grant.
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Women and Political Systems Worldwide
Carrie N. Baker and Marcela Rodrigues-Sherley
In March 1964, two major events happened in the life of a 16-year-old Brazilian girl from Belo Horizonte: her country experienced a coup d’état that would lead to a twenty-one-year military dictatorship. She also started high school. Central State High School was no regular high school; it was the biggest hub for student activism in the country and the place where Dilma Rousseff would start her lifelong fight for democracy.
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La Princesse de Clèves by Lafayette: A New Translation and Bilingual Pedagogical Edition for the Digital Age
Hélène E, Bilis; Jean-Vincent Blanchard; David Harrison; and Hélène Visentin
La Princesse de Clèves, written in 1678 by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, countess of Lafayette, is widely known as the first modern French novel. This open-access pedagogical translation and edition draws on the digital format to offer a rich variety of materials for readers of French and English. Translator’s notes enhance the fresh and lively translation, actively comparing the current version with earlier editions to heighten awareness of linguistic nuance and complexity. Interactive paragraphs and lexical definitions encourage readers to move with ease between the French and English texts. Accompanying didactic essays empower readers to reflect on Lafayette’s vocabulary and on practices of translation more broadly.
This ebook edition offers pedagogical dossiers and a variety of innovative resources influenced by the Digital Humanities, such as a mapping interface with georeferenced historical maps, word mining exercises, a digital timeline, and social network analyses. In addition to overviews of Lafayette’s milieu and adaptations of La Princesse de Clèves, the editors also include excerpts from rarely-translated letters published in an early modern gazette in response to the novel. These features enable a new generation of readers to grasp the seventeenth-century public’s reaction to Lafayette’s work.
Drawing on the affordances of the digital format to promote multilingualism and humanistic inquiry, the edition simultaneously encourages active engagement with the specificities of a particular language and culture. This project results from a collaboration between four professors who teach at liberal arts colleges and argues for critical approaches to digital technologies to celebrate a classic text.
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Organic Synthesis
Kevin M. Shea and LibreText
My goal in writing this text is to help advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students learn key topics in organic chemistry that often don't come up in your Organic I and II classes. So, you can think about this as an Organic III text. My focus is on key reaction types that enable the construction of complex organic molecules: pericyclic reactions, transition metal catalyzed reactions, rearrangements, fragmentations, radical reactions, and carbene reactions. I hope that this text is a resource that helps you understand the mechanisms of these reactions and enables you to use these reactions in your own syntheses. I have provided a variety of mechanism and synthesis problems to help you practice these skills and make them your own. One of the main goals in my Organic Synthesis class is to engage deeply with current papers from the literature. I hope you will do the same and that this text will help you understand some of the concepts and reactions that often go unspoken in publications.
Chapter 1: Pericyclic Reactions
Chapter 2: Transition Metal Catalyzed Carbon-Carbon Bond Forming Reactions
Chapter 3: Neighboring Group Participation, Rearrangements, and Fragmentations
Chapter 4: Radical Reactions
Chapter 5: Carbene Reactions
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An Introduction to Logic: From Everyday Life to Formal Systems
Albert Mosley and Eulalio Baltazar
An introduction to the discipline of logic covering subjects from the structures of arguments, classical and modern logic, categorical and inductive inferences, to informal fallacies.
- Over 30 years of development provides a sound empirical based pedagogy throughout the text.
- Examples in ordinary language using familiar examples avoids the suggestion of an alien cultural imposition.
- A focus on the basic representational techniques of classical and modern logic.
- Students introduced to basic concepts of set theory, using Venn diagrams to represent statements and evaluate arguments.
- Students introduced to basic concepts of propositional logic and the use of truth-tables.
- Students introduced to basic concepts of predicate logic and the use of mixed quantifiers.
- Students introduced to the relationship between logic diagrams, circuit diagrams, and gate diagrams in computer science.
- Students introduced to the use of logic in ordinary and scientific contexts.
- Students provided a historical introduction to the development of modern probability theory and its relationship to logic.
- Students introduced to basic concepts of statistical inference, with non-technical treatments of hasty and biased statistical generalizations. And a unique treatment of stereotypical thinking in terms of statistical syllogisms.
- Students introduced to basic notions in analogical and causal inference.
- Exercises requiring both passive (recognition) and active (construction) skills.
- Exercises including locutions and examples from standard English and ethnic dialects of English (African-American, Hispanic-American, etc)
- Answers for sample exercises provided, making the text closer to a self-teaching module
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Case Studies in Systems Chemistry
George Fleck
This publication was produced as a teaching tool for college chemistry.The book is a text for a computer-based unit on the chemistry of acid-base titrations, and is designed for use with FORTRAN or BASIC.computer systems, and with a programmable electronic calculator, in a variety of educational settings. The text attempts to present computer programs that are relatively free of reliance on specialized large computer systems programs. The case-study approach presented is highly research and laboratory oriented. Similar subject matter is conventionally taught in most introductory college chemistry courses, but this text material attempts greater depth of instruction through utilization of the computational resources of a computer.