berkeman said:
How many pages is this? Are you able to scan them so you have soft copies? Or are they already in PDF or another format?
Background to how this material was used. The school I taught in was a working-class suburb. Students ranged from average to an occasional brilliant student. Most years I had a few exchange students from foreign countries who were always excellent. The biggest difference from most schools was that a much greater percentage of students took physics than in most schools. So I made the practice material and exams have mostly basic material with a few challenging problems for the best students. Feedback from students who took college physics indicated they were well-prepared.
How I taught. 1) Introductory lecture, introduction of terms, formulas, what the variables stood for, simple plug-in problems we worked together. 2) Work problems, work problems, work problems. Problem sheets of increasing difficulty until most students were on board. 3) Harder and multi-step problems. 4) The day prior to the test, a “practice test”. 5) The actual exam. Toward the end of my career I knew what the common errors would be and told the students what to be extra careful with.
Course content I taught in the traditional order. First semester – mechanics. Second semester – heat, light, electricity, waves, etc. Early in my career I spent a week on basic trigonometry at the beginning of first semester as most students had not yet had trig. Later I eliminated this because math was taught better and faster by math teachers. I included a few “weird” topics that are often left out of an introductory course: planetary motion, rotary motion with rotational inertia, liquids (density, Bernoulli equation, etc.) photoelectric effect, electromagnetism. Some topics I included just because they interested me and some because they were included in an annual physics contest at the University of Alabama where I sometimes took my best students. I seldom got to every topic but always included all the mechanics topics.
I will attach a few scans of material from one topic for anyone to see if it is usable. There is too much to scan the whole lot. I’ll just ship it to whomever wants it. There are about 20 folders, each folder for one physics topic. In each folder are maybe 50 to 100 sheets of problems and tests. Most with answers. The simple drawings and cursive writing may not appeal to many. The variables in the formulas may use different letters and symbols than you use. But physics is physics.. The problems vary from very easy to pretty hard.
If you want these I will box them up and mail them to you.
I'm getting ready to post this message and the forum software shrank the scans. If you open them up and zoom maybe you can read them better.
