[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I read somewhere (in trying to decipher a horrifically mangled Calculus course for a tutoring gig) that a lot of what's done by methods of Calculus is becoming obsolete, and the most important skill is a high level of comprehension of upper-level analytic problem-solving. Will Calculus courses change radically in the future?

I can’t claim to be an expert on what the future will hold. I’m confident that calculus won’t become a dead letter anytime soon, but at the same time Mathematica ™ can do the painful algebra and can obviate the need to strain your brain finding the integral of an abstruse function. Consequently, IMHO, that drudgery will in future be absorbed into apps in cell phones. That would save a lot of frustration, and maybe the students' “little gray cells” can be more usefully deployed learning higher-level analytics.

Better yet they could take the Dale Carnegie Course, which would be more valuable to the typical student than that . . .

[Reily]

Read Asimov’s “A Feeling of Power”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

Doing things at least once by hand is still important. As much as I hate it and had points taken off in exams for transcription errors grinding through the algebra as part of your education is worth it.

Later use computer tools such as Mathematica, Maple, Reduce (Its free!), Maxima (Its free!)! If you haven't seen where the calculation results came from and how the tools "sort of" get there algebraically before. You need to! Without that experience these computer tools quickly become magic!

Aside: Google Reduce Computer Algebra System & Maxima Computer Algebra System they're free downloadable from Sourceforge. They are very powerful! Surprisingly powerful for being free!