Calculus 1 - Course Information

This section includes recent syllabi, SBG course standards and grading rubric, and advice for Calculus I students from former Calculus I students. 

This course is about mastering fundamental skills and concepts, as it is the first in a sequence that leads to Differential Equations. With that in mind, formula sheets are not provided for most sections in our course. You're asked to learn the differentiation and antidifferentiation rules, and how and when to apply them. I design the course with some scaffolding, so that you're not required to learn all of them at once. Instead, you learn a few new rules at a time. Knowing these rules makes everything easier. We wouldn't want to compute derivatives using the limit definition or compute integrals using the limits of Riemann sums. The discovery of these efficient, elegant rules, and the Fundamental Theorem, are two small parts of the beauty of calculus. 

Please download the differentiation and antidifferentiation reference sheets below, and create flash cards if you need to in order to commit them to memory. You won't need to get started on this until the appropriate unit, although you can work ahead if you'd like to. We'll talk more about their derivations in class, so that you won't simply depend on rote memorization. Our goal is for you to understand the rules, where they come from, how to apply them, and what they mean, geometrically and in applications. These are ultimately tools that will make the real work of calculus easier.

Reference Sheets for other topics, such as the Limits Summary Infographic and Riemann Sums Defined are provided for quick reference.

Lesson plans, lesson notes, and practice problems for Unit 1, which covers limits, are linked below. 

Limits make the rest of calculus possible!

U1 L1 is an abbreviation for Unit 1 Lesson 1.

U1 L2 P1 is an abbreviation for Unit 1 Lesson 2 Part 1.

Due to COVID-19, this semester did not go as any of us had planned. Here are the quiz keys for the current semester. The remaining quizzes and reassessments were taken online and administered through WebAssign, due to the pandemic.