These courses are three-credit, second year, service courses. Each of the modifiers (three-credit, second year, service) deserves note.
These courses are only three credits, while Math 124/5/6 courses are five credits. Most of your students will be taking four or five courses, or even more, while your 124/5/6 students often were taking only three courses. Homework assignments should be appropriately shorter than 124/5/6 homework assignments.
Despite the course numbers over 300, many students take these as sophomores or even as freshmen. Math 307 can be taken immediately after 125, and both 308 and 324 have Math 126 as the immediate prerequisite. Thus the mathematical sophistication of the students will be very little advanced over students you have had in first year calculus.
On the other hand, some students wait a year or more after 124/5/6 to take these courses. Don't expect them to know particular differentiation or integration formulas on quizzes or tests unless they have had to use them a couple of times on homework or worksheets in class. (Watching you use a formula doesn't count.) For any prerequisite material more advanced than basic calculus formulas, assume you need to review an idea at least briefly before expecting students to use it.
A "service" course is a course we offer primarily for students in other majors. These courses are required or recommended for students majoring in science and engineering. The syllabi have been determined in consultation with our "client" departments, and instructors in other departments expect that we teach the announced syllabus. Follow the suggested syllabus for your course listed in Department's Course Materials webpages. Do not slight applications included in the syllabus! The applications are particularly important in 307: Spend the full time alloted for them, in particular on applications of linear second-order ODE with constant coefficients for homogenous and nonhomogenous problems (e.g., mechanical vibrations).
Teaching a service course also means most of your students are not math majors. While we want them to learn more than just "plugging and chugging" through memorized formulas, most of them expect to use the material in more applied courses, not in more advanced math courses. If you want to include some discussion of more advanced ideas, be sure to clearly label that part of your lecture as enrichment material they don't have to know for exams.
This last comment also applies to techniques you may think will make
computations simpler, but require more than the basic prerequisites of the
course. Here are two examples from these courses.
(1) Using complex numbers to simplify integration of
eaxcos(bx) in Math 307.
(2) Using matrix multiplication for the chain rule in Math 324.
In each case, the idea may be very helpful to many students, but may
be overwhelming to other students unless it is made clear they may ignore
the information if it is not helpful.
There's one more point related to service courses. When you hand out the student evaluation forms, be sure to explain that students should mark the course as "in your major" (or minor) only if they are math majors (or minors). If they are in another major which requires this course, the correct label is "program requirement." How the students answer this question affects the "adjustments" made to the medians for the first four questions, and the medians for these questions are considered when either your teaching or the department's teaching is evaluated. More information about the adjustments.
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Most recently updated on August 19, 2011