The Calculus Trap
19th February 2014
You love math and want to learn more. But you’re in ninth grade and you’ve already taken nearly all the math classes your school offers. They were all pretty easy for you and you’re ready for a greater challenge. What now? You’ll probably go to the local community college or university and take the next class in the core college curriculum. Chances are, you’ve just stepped in the calculus trap.
The best argument for learning calculus I ever heard was from a Dungeon Master. ‘You’re in a 10-foot-wide passageway that does an L into a five-foot-wide passageway. How long a spear can you get around that corner?’ That focused the minds of the players like nobody’s business.
February 19th, 2014 at 13:07
A great example (Dungeon Master), but most math books are written – and courses taught – by pure math freaks that live to love equations. The concept of relating the process of math to real-world, no, make that interesting problems is as foreign as translating the course into Klingon.
I say this as someone who took and re-took calculus enough times that people thought I was a math major. Finally the engineering and science profs organized and forced the math department to buy books that contained useful examples so that their students could learn to apply the math skills that they were allegedly learning in math class to their majors.
Notice I didn’t say “other science profs”. I agree with Nobel that math is a language.
February 19th, 2014 at 13:32
“How long a spear can you get around that corner?’
Wouldn’t the floor-to-ceiling height be greater than the width of the narrower corridor?
February 19th, 2014 at 14:57
..and ErisGuy proves Tim’s point perfectly!
February 19th, 2014 at 17:28
I got a D in calculus four times: Once in an undergraduate math course, once in an undergraduate economics course, once in a graduate computer science course, and once in a graduate business school course.
February 21st, 2014 at 09:20
RealRick, all math books I’ve learned from or taught out of are written to focus on real-world problems. That’s what non-math people don’t like.
Real-world math problems are word problems. As somebody who teaches math from freshman algebra to graduate level statistics, I promise you that the people who complain most about the word problems are usually the people least interested in learning math.