High School Calculus: Necessary or Just Evil?

- Taking calculus now gives you a leg up when you encounter it in college. My high school calculus class wasn't nearly as fast-paced as my college calculus course, but because our teacher went in-depth into delta-epsilon proofs, taking it at the college level was ridiculously easy. (I should have skipped first semester in college, actually, but I missed the cutoff on the stupid placement test by one point.)

- Repeated exposure makes things easier to learn. If it's difficult for you now, it will be easier when you look at it again later because you've been exposed to the core concepts.

i took a summer course, though. (mostly because i didn't waant to deal with the jerk of a calc teacher we had.) 8 weeks. intensive. and it was great.

it certainly made physics make a lot more sense, as well as giving me that kind of self-importance from having really learned something. (not a thing i encountered much in high school.)

i can't tell you about how useful it is in college though, 'cause i go to a hippie liberal arts school, and don't do anything involving hard science. ever.

Besides advanced degrees in science, other things in life that require college calculus (in the U.S. at least): architecture school, business school. Even if these seem unappealing to you now, it will be a lot less painful to do calculus sooner rather than la

I only took three years of math and two years of science, even though I was tracked to go the full five years. If you're taking AP Calculus, you might be able to get college credit, which is good.

now, calculus <-> being able to add, and i can't imagine doing any science w/o understanding it. you likely won't after first year, but if you take a decent E&M physics course in second or third year you will master it and begin making jokes like

remember the bag problem? the question asks integrate f(x) over the surface of the bag but the bag a fukcing crazy crumpled shape, HOW THE FUCK DO I DO IT? and then you notice that the bag has an exactly circular opening and employing stokes theorem you TRIUMPH!

I appreciate all that's said above regarding the poetry and usability of calculus in many areas, which is perfectly understandable to me. But it's not something I would ever choose to revisit, ultimately as much of a grinding of gears as my learning another language -- to me, the more annoying and regret-tinged lack.

I wasn't wrong though, you aren't running a multimational are you?

I think I will spend the afternoon contacting various CEOS of multinationals to see what they know about calculus.

I am also of the opinion that it is taught extrodinarily badly in schools and has developed a terrible reputation as a result. As a text I would recommend; Engineering mathematics as a learning aid. It treats calculus , and other branches of maths, as a tool to be used rather than as the elegant end in itself but makes calculus easy to do.

"Hence it was worse than Borstal": T.Booth

somehow i didnt realize that "quant" meant the same thing as "calculus" because i am retarded and so now i guess i am taking 12 course hours of calculus in 4 days! lol at me

i havent done this since highschool please help

if anyone knows of any good online tutorials, etc please let me know

it is starting to come back now

necessary, beautiful

I was unable to pass pre-calc in college, which changed my major from biochem to English. So don't ask me. :-/

i was on an accelerated math track through highschool and took calculus in 10th or 11th grade. then i didnt take a single math class in college at all and that part of my brain turned to mushy slime.

given my ILX username I feel like I gotta give props to calculus. I taught it for several years but I don't know of any good online resources for it.

i got a 4 on the AP!!

We didn't have an accelerated track, or any way to take calculus or even PRE-calc. I took all the math classes we had but it wasn't enough. College math went SO FAST and everyone already knew what they were doing.

<3 calculus

yeah laurel my class is moving ridiculously fast, the prof blew through 200 pages of the textbook in 3 hours. i have another class tonight.

but my accounting class is so easy and slow that it makes me feel stabby.

I left school halfway through the year that we did Calculus (I think it was Junior year?) It's one of the great regrets of my life that I didn't get any further into it.

I did actually plan to do some continuing education evening class in it, but they wouldn't accept my American credentials, and tried to make me do GCSE maths over again. :-(

linds splurge on a TI-89

my passing calculus in high school was a direct result of that calculator

we haven't been allowed to use calculators yet!

drop out of grad school then, that shit is impossible

hhaaaaa. i will ask my mom to look for my ti89 from highschool. i think they will let us start using them soon but i have only had 1 class of this.

Calc is great. My prof set up the tests so that calculators would give you a wrong answer.

i have never done calculus ever

when I taught calc, we just wrote the tests so that calculators wouldn't be helpful. You can do it all with pictures, and then it's more like philosophy than algebra.

looooove calculus and miss it a lot

i think maybe check yr local library for some review books though. it will come back faster than you think.

<3 calculus

also 5 on the ap
/BRAGGIN 1999

High school calculus > college calc. Everyone who takes college calc thinks they know it, and they really don't. HS, prob not.

My high school calculus class spent an entire semester on delta-epsilon proofs.

Infinitesimals, dude.

I take my firs calc ever today; wish me luck bros.

BACK 2 CKULE

good luck!

Good luck for you, too, grad skool beauty!

I dropped it in high school so that I could have a spare first period and sleep for an extra hour. In hindsight, that might not have been the best use of my time. I ended up having to take 2 calc courses in university. The first was a train wreck taught by an old Russian prof that nobody could even understand. The 2nd was one of the more pleasant experiences of my undergraduate career. I had a teacher who was able to not only explain the subject matter clearly, but also demonstrate the underlying elegance of the subject. It's one of those subjects that should be mandatory - especially for arts students, because it really does force you to think in a whole new way. That said, I will NEVER understand why it was a prerequisite for some statistics courses.

Taking calculus in HS? Sure, if you deeply love mathematics and think they are intensely intellectually satisfying. Then it is like eating a second helping of cake.

Alternatively, if you are committed to seeking a career in one of the hard sciences (say for example, chemistry as opposed to archaeology) or in engineering, then taking a shot at calculus in HS will give you a chance to acquire this useful tool, and if you struggle, it will allow you to take one or two more runs at it to get over that hump.

Other than that, the best it will ever do for you is put a shiny button in your transcript to make a college admissions officer swoon.

^^^ doesn't "get" math

also 5 on the ap
/BRAGGIN 1999

-- sleep, Thursday, August 21, 2008 11:12 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

!!

BRAGGIN BOUT JESUS

doesn't "get" math

That may be true. I am not one of those who deeply love math and find it intensely intellectually satisfying. However, I do have an aptitude for mathematical thinking and I do understand that math is the Other Great Symbolic System for representing the universe, in relation to language, which is the First Great Symbolic System. In standardized tests I always scored very highly, and nearly equally, in both the math and verbal components.

Further, I understand that whenever a set of relationships can be accurately represented mathematically, the resulting symbolic structure is much cleaner, sparer and sturdier than a representation in words, and therefore it can be manipulated more elegantly - and certain types of truth can be derived much more reliably. Planck's Constant, Pi, or Godel's Theorem can be seen as great truths, on an equal footing with any other fundamental intellectual concepts formed by humans, such as truth or justice.

However, I never pursued math past high school because, despite having the aptitude for it, my love of language exceeds my love of math by a very signifigant amount, and I pursued the spareness, clarity and elegance of poetry instead. There I excel at a specialized level.

This fact of my education robs me of a specialist's understanding of the symbolic vocabulary of math, and leaves my numeracy at a rudimentary level comapred to my literacy. When I read advanced formulae I am stymied by the symbols I never learned to interpret, just as a reader with an 8th grade vocabulary will be stymied reading Shakespeare.

But I can't help but wonder if you are literate enough to tell me what it is I do not "get" about math?

Aimless, you are quite intelligent, and I estimate, rather philosophically acute. You also have a rather obtrusive ego, especially for one who has known five decades of this world. Hidden from yr perception, perhaps, is a full and true appreciation of the world in which the "abstract" objects of mathematics live, a world governed by laws far stricter than those which apply to the world of sense and experience. It's a world of inestimable vastness, a world that beginning students of mathematics appreciate by treading down pathways cleared centuries, if not millennia, prior to their visits. To "get" mathematics is thus to have a sliver of appreciation for the mathtronaut's way, to catch an errant ray from his thick, nerdy goggles, and to absorb a whiff of the mathematical odor that eminates from his pores, unpleasant to the uninitiated, yet similar to the fabled "magic smoke" contained within every piece of consumer electronics.

Hope that helps.

A good book for this is Ian Stewart's Letters to a Young Mathematician, which is like a Screwtape Letters that makes you dig the mathstronaut mindset.

Mmmmm...

I think I have already expressed a willingness to acknowlege the value of the mathematical mindset - along with a fair and just appreciation for the fact that I am not among the elect of the mathematically gifted, or to put it another way, among "those who deeply love math and find it intensely intellectually satisfying".

And, I also think I have expressed that, for those who "deeply love mathematics and think they are intensely intellectually satisfying", that taking calculus at their first opportunity would be a very good idea, even a highly pleasurable one, akin to "eating a second helping of cake."

In light of what I have already said, how your well-meant clarifications, might lead me to understand how I am one who doesn't "get" math - other than in the ways I have already stipulated, I am at a loss to grasp.

I really don't think that the number of students who don't especially love math prior to calculus, who would suddenly acquire the necessary love of math and the mathematical acuity to greatly appreciate exposure to calculus in high school, and then to launch themselves on a full-bore career as a "mathstronaut" would be - let's say - few. Very few.

But I could be wrong about that. It has happened before. And I am just speculating here.

Has this happened to other ILXors? That they were, at best, lukewarm to math until meeting up with the seductions of caluclus in high school?

I haven't taken a math class since I was 15 and registered for "Elementary Mathematical Modeling" today - college algebra for liberal arts majors, word problems galore. I'm kinda scared.

Algebra is not anything to be much frightened of. There are no more than two variables to deal with at a time and the plots are all conic sections, which were mastered by the Greeks before 100 BC... even without having the zero or Cartesian coordinates to aid them.

Has this happened to other ILXors? That they were, at best, lukewarm to math until meeting up with the seductions of caluclus in high school?

Yes. Except it was more like 8th grade, and because I was reading about Leibniz and Newton and Young and weird aspects of physics and astronomy and non-Euclidian geometry for fun. But exposure to calculus, and what the guys who came up with it were trying to get to, made the math lights come on in my brain.

But I can't help but wonder if you are literate enough to tell me what it is I do not "get" about math?

Algebra is not anything to be much frightened of. There are no more than two variables to deal with at a time and the plots are all conic sections

Why thank you, Lamp. Enlighten me further.

Er, 8th grade is just a bit different than 12th grade, if you don't mind my pointing this out.

^^^ Actually just bitter about my C- in Algebriac Geometry. <3 calculus tho. For milo and bell I'd also say that working on problem sets with other ppl was a really good way of studying in all the math courses I took.

Yes, well, my high school didn't offer calculus or pre-calculus, as there was no one qualified to teach it, if I would have waited until then. I was pretty much on my own. Sorry if my experience didn't meet with your qualifications.

It is nice to know you fell in love with calculus.

My qualifications, such as they were, were not meant to denigrate this experience, but to express my earlier meaning with the utmost clarity and accuracy. After all, if X + Y = 3.57, then any solution where X + Y = 3.56 is inapplicable, and this fact has real meaning and consequence to the results... amirite?

Um, taking advantage of a rare opportunity to say Dan Perry otm.

After all, if X + Y = 3.57, then any solution where X + Y = 3.56 is inapplicable, and this fact has real meaning and consequence to the results... amirite?

Such is the wonder of mathematics that once one progresses beyond the issue of the precision of the mathematical language, then the truth of a statement such as this depends on the meaning of "X", "Y", "+", "=", and "3.57". Which is to say, professional mathematicians are extremely sloppy and imprecise.

Anyone versed in a bit of computational complexity theory realizes this absurdity when presented with an equation such as 3n^2 + 5 = o(n^2) = .0001n^2 - 15.

Yeah, okay, sure. But can old Greek people understand that?

3.141592

"In mathematics, the adjective irreducible means that an object cannot be expressed as a product of at least two non-trivial factors in a given set." SAY WHAT YOU MEAN AND MEAN WHAT YOU SAY!!!

xpost

Ah! I see that I never progressed to the point where "=" meant anything other than "=". This is a truly mystifying piece of information which I shall probably never fully absorb. I have always thought that "=" =/= "~". Silly me. Benighted and ignorant as I am.

Then again, I just can't see how anyone who has ascended to this quasi-mystical plane of mathematical awareness and resides there in complacent bliss would be someone who would not have lapped up calculus by the tender age of 18 and begged for more.

Just me. Again, I could be entirely mistaken in my estimate of folks here.

I wonder when Toby is going to weigh in?

When the proper dimensions intersect, my dear. Not before.

This class was alternately making me want to barf and cry tonight.I find it genuinely interesting though.

I love calculus!

If given a choice, cry first. Barf only if crying does not serve the immediate purpose of relieving your emotions.

I failed to reach math bliss -- I dropped out of grad school ABD -- but I also didn't much care for math in high school.

I got a 5 on the AP BC exam btw

crut you think youre so cool but youre not

I got a 3 on the AP exam.

xpost

No one has ever thought they were cool becuz they aced the AP BC exam.

Crutis is beyond cool, lampie.

I didn't get past geometry in high school. I don't really do homework.

Man, I wanna hear from gbx! He was the one who first twitted me.

As for the fabled "magic smoke" contained within every piece of consumer electronics I used to be a tech writer for a company that made chip testers for the silicon chip industry and I wrote the manuals for the electronics engineers who wrote the tests to see if their 1.5 million circuit chip designs actaully worked. Our testers were used to help design the first Pentium (tm) chips.

Calculus may have been integral to the original understanding of the physics and chemistry of silicon, as required to invent and manufacture the chips, but it wasn't needed to write the software to test them suckers.

You only needed to know if the electronic impulses propagated the correct logical results through the NAND gates, by reaching the expected high or low signal thresholds, and so forth. It was all binary math, predicated on signal strength, pure and simple.

im not gonna lie cruts cool

geometry was the subject of men in my high school, algebra & everything past it was for the birds, if u get me

aimless gbx was the first one who 'TWITTERED' you? get it twittered like twitter

Crutis is beyond cool, lampie.

I wasn't saying otherwise!

I used to know how to do calculus, but now I do not. I wonder if I could re-learn it from a book.

calculus is beautiful and amazing. i hated mathematics at GCSE (this is just trigonometry, simultaneous eqns etc) found it boring, uninspiring and tedious. but then had the most amazing teacher who started teaching us abt analysis and calculus and it was a big revelation for me.

it frustrates me slightly that most non-science ppl i know in the UK (who didn't pursue maths past GCSE) don't even know what calculus is so imo don't really understand what mathematics (which they claim to 'hate' or have 'never been good at') is either.