ABOUT THE TEXTS

1.) This year we will be using an open-source textbook from Rice University's OpenStax project. We are doing this because it is free (textbooks have traditionally been viewed as reference materials--there will rarely if ever been reading assignments made in them).  You will adiditionally have access to the book Mr. Fletcher wrote for the class years ago (see below), along with the class PowerPoints and pdfs. In short, you will have multiple sources from which to learn the theory.     

The OpenStax text and a SOLUTION MANUAL for its chapter-end problems can be downloaded at:
--College Physics

2.) Several years ago, I (Mr. Fletcher) wrote a non-Calculus physics text for the Honors class at Poly. The book was titled, cleverly enough, Honors Physics. It was, essentially, a very complete set of class notes.

Typical of physics texts used in physics classes literally across the country, the last year the book was used there were students who felt that it was helpful and students who thought it was of no help at all. The main criticism was that everything I said in class was reiterated in the book (as one disgruntled student said, "Even the jokes are the same!"). This was a bit irritating because it suggested that I had done a particularly lousy job of explaining the purpose behind the book. In fact, it was supposed to mirror what I do in class because it was my way of providing the same information to students who learn by reading as I provide to students who learn by listening.

Whether misunderstood or not, there was obviously a problem. My primary goal has always been to aid and support my students as they attempt to learn the physics being presented. If my book was not doing the job for even a small number of students, it had to go.

To that end, I began to use a commercial textbook (for you folks this year, that will be the OpenStax text).

3.) For those of you who have friends or siblings who had access to my text and who thought it was worth while, there is no reason to despair. I still think it does a good job of highlighting the things I want you to know, so I've put it on-line. You can download it in one of two ways.

The first way is to go to the Web site http://faculty.polytechnic.org/cfletcher. This URL is the Poly site on which all of the books I've written can be found. Clicking on HONORS PHYSICS should take you to chapter pdf's for the text. If you download one or more chapters, be sure you also download the SOLUTIONS to the chapter-end problems for those chapters.

The second possibility is to click on the SUPPLEMENTARY BOOKS link on the Honors Class Web site (that is, the Web site you are currently linked to). That should also take you to that same page.

There is only one caveat I should make before leaving you.

When I was using my book, I typically spent the first two weeks of the semester trying to impress upon my students how bizarrely amazing the physical world actually is. We talked about some of the crazier characteristics of the atom, about Cosmology and the Big Bang, and a little bit about Relativity. None of this was/is standard for a typical Honors physics course. I included the material because I find it interesting, educational, a bit mind-blowing and because unlike the AP folks, we had time--we didn't/don’t have a national, standardized test to worry about at the end of the year.

The commercial text we will be using this year covers none of those exotic topics and, in fact, neither do I (if you want to run head-long into stuff like this, you can take the semester long Cosmology, Astronomy and Relativity course I teach during the second semester!). That means that if want to download my book and use it for supplementary reading, you will have to skip the first two chapters before getting to the material being covered in the class. Additionally, the order-of-topics in the OpenStax text is slightly different from my book.

Bottom line: If you want to synch your reading of the commercial text with reading in my book, you are going to have to use my index and a bit of mixing and matching. I do apologize for this. Then again, you are getting two books for the price of no books with one written specifically for your class. Life could be worse!

Last comment: Even though you had some physics as freshmen, I will assume you know little and will start from scratch. If you are attentive in class, you should have no problem.

If you have questions in the coming weeks about either of the texts, please come talk to me. My job here at Poly is to help you understand physics. Any way I can do that, I will.

P.S. As an additional note, I received a surprising comment on one of my course evaluations a few years back when a student who was apparently feeling a bit snotty sniped that he/she wasn't sure that the book I had written had ever been OK'd for use by the school (it isn't, after all, a commercially produced text). If you are feeling simularly anxious, in the mid 1990's I wrote a two volume, 1300 page, Calculus driven, C-level AP physics text that is also not commercially produced, but that is nevertheless to this day on the AP recommended textbook list and is currently being used by somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-five school districts across the country (not to mention a herd of home-schoolers and first year physics teachers). I mention this only to let you know that, yes, I do know what I'm talking about when it comes to the world of physics, so yes, you can trust what I put in writing . . . honest.