Resources for calculus students

This page is a collection of resources outside the class for University of Oregon calculus students. Please let me know if you find other useful resources!

Warning: The resources listed here have mostly not been checked, and in many cases I don't know how reliable they are.

Instructor's office hours

Office hours are made to be used. Use them! Disadvantage: Only a limited amount of time is available.

Success in math courses

The University of Oregon math department's Tips for being successful in math courses.

I don't know of anything else good to put here. If you find something, please let me know.

Video lectures on the web

Videos (and associated pdf files of lecture notes) on Math 251, given by Dan Dugger, a University of Oregon math department faculty member. I have not looked at them, so please tell me your experiences. I strongly encourage trying them. With anything hard, the second explanation is always better. (I heard this with algebraic geometry textbooks, but it applies everywhere.)
Somebody in the math library staff recommended the Khan Academy. (Link valid Winter 2025.) I have had no time to look at any of its material. The department head has looked at a few examples, and believes (based on a small sample) that it often has reasonable explanations of algorithmic procedures, such as using the product and quotient rules for calculating derivatives. I have no information of the quality of what it says about understanding calculus or doing problems which require more than just following an algorithm.
The website requires JavaScript, which is a security hazard, and probably also cookies, which are a privacy hazard.
The following information is from 2017. The site described still exists, but seems less organized than the information below suggests.
The site https://www.youtube.com/user/mathbff ("Algebra and calculus help from an MIT graduate") has about 35 videos, mostly between 15 and 20 minutes each, on an assortment of topics including many of the computations we do in Math 251 (including several kinds of limits, using several of the differentiation rules, and finding tangent lines). The version at http://mathbff.com includes text descriptions of the contents of the videos. Ones for Math 251 are mixed with ones for Math 252 and for precalculus. This site was recommended by a student several years ago, who reports that there is more depth than at the Khan Academy, but that the emphasis is still more on how to carry out algorithms, with less about the meaning of what one is doing. I saw nothing about the more complicated applications of calculus that we will do in the later part of the course. As for the Khan Academy, please tell me about your experiences with this site.
As with the Khan Academy, the website probably requires JavaScript, which is a security hazard, and probably also cookies, which are a privacy hazard. It is part of Google, which is probably the worst corporate abuser of personal information in North America, and which will track everything you do, and correlate it with everything you do on any other Google site.

Tutoring

Math tutoring is available at the Tutoring and Academic Engagement Center. (See the heading "Math 251--253".) It has limited drop in math tutoring during the first week of classes, with regular service starting in second week of classes. In Fall 2013 it was open through Wednesday of finals week; that may be different now. Warning: In the past (around 2013), some math tutors there were not competent to tutor calculus. I have had students tell me they turned out to know more calculus than the person supposedly helping them. I don't know whether that has improved since.
Drop-in homework help is available at the math library, in Fenton Hall. I have heard nothing yet about how good the service is. Warning: The math department head knows of no quality control on the tutors.
I believe the math department has a list of recommended paid tutors.

This page maintained by N. Christopher Phillips, email. Please email plain text (7 bit ASCII) only (no web page coded files, Microsoft Word documents, binary characters, etc.; see the link above for more).

Last significant change 12 January 2025.