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.

These are the quiz keys from the Fall 2018 semester. During that semester, standard I31, hyperbolic functions, was not a part of the course.  For Spring 2020, hyperbolic functions has been moved from Calculus II to Calculus I, and the area between two curves has been moved from Calculus I to Calculus II.

Here are the quiz keys for the current semester.