Re: undergrad physics course sequence

[Greg Clements <clements@CAMPUS.MLC.EDU>]

I am the physics faculty at Midland Lutheran College, Fremont Nebraska.  The
total enrollment for the college this fall is 1036 (the second largest
enrollment in the college's history).  Students can minor in physics but not
major in physics at our college.  The physics major was deleted in the early
1970's.  I have been teaching here since 1983.   I teach the two semester
introductory physics sequence, a one semester limited-algebra survey of
physics, Electronics, and Modern Physics.  One Astronomy course (taught by our
Earth Science faculty) is required for the minor.  The limited-algebra survey
course does not count towards the minor.  The Electronics and Modern Physics
courses are taught every other year during our 3 week January Interterm
session.  The Interterm courses have had as few as 1 and as many as 9
students.  Most of these students are pre-engineering or chemistry majors.
When student does well in the Intro. course and wants more advanced physics
courses I suggest that he/she takes one of the physics Interterm courses and
then transfers the next fall semester to a school which offers the advanced
courses.  I advise the pre-engineering students (about 1 per year) to transfer
after their freshman year.

A little note on the intro course might be interesting to some instructors on
the list.  The two semester introductory course is a concurrent trig-level and
calculus based course which mainly serves students in the health related career
areas.  The class meets MWF with all students.  All students buy a trig-level
text (currently Jones & Childers).  The students enrolled in the calculus based
course are given a calculus level text on loan for the year.  They receive an
extra hour of course credit and  meet on Tuesday for discussion of the
application of calculus to physics.  Both groups do the same labs.  The
calc-based students are assigned more difficult homework problems and
occasionally work problems from handouts that I create.  I make up separate
tests for the two groups.

The rest of my yearly teaching load is College Algebra, PreCalculus, and C++
programming.  The physics department web site is in its infancy but syllabi
etc. are to be found at:
http://www.mlc.edu/departments/physics/index.html

Greg Clements

"Carl E. Mungan" wrote:

> I have a question for those of you who teach physics in small undergraduate
> schools where faculty resources preclude teaching the entire menu of
> possible physics courses: How do you decide which courses (beyond the intro
> level) to offer? And what do you do when you have one or two really good
> students who really could benefit from advanced topic X but obviously the
> administration won't let you offer a course for two students even if you
> wanted to?