‘A Bankrupt Concept of Math’: Some Educators Argue Calculus Should Be Dethroned

The 74 via Yahoo ^ | March 13, 2023 | Jo Napolitano

[grundle]

Successful completion of high school calculus has long been an unofficial must-have for those seeking admission to the nation’s top colleges: The course has, for decades, served as a signal to admissions officers that a student’s coursework has been robust.

But some in education say it’s time to reconsider this de facto requirement: Many schools — particularly those serving large numbers of Black, Hispanic or low-income students — don’t offer the course. And even when they do, it’s of dubious value, they say.

“High school calculus is a complete waste of time and a form of torture,” said Alan Garfinkel, professor of integrative biology and physiology and medicine at UCLA. “The view … that math is a bunch of symbolic expressions, and you bang on them with tricks to get other symbolic expressions, is a bankrupt concept of math, dating from the 19th century.”

The course, as it’s often taught at the high school level, is inaccessible and often perceived as irrelevant to students’ interests, critics say. Just 16% of high school graduates earned credit for calculus in 2019, according to data culled by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a statistic no doubt shaped by its unavailability.

Only 52% of schools with high student of color enrollment offered the course in 2017-18 compared to 76% of schools with low student of color enrollment, according to a 2021 report from the Learning Policy Institute.

[DoughtyOne]

I D I O C R A C Y

more than it was
cracked up to be

[Faith Presses On]

I took it in high school, but dropped it midway. Retrospectively, I’ve come to think that math at the secondary school level isn’t taught particularly well, or at least didn’t use to be. And I grew up in an upper middle class suburb. In less affluent places, it’s no wonder that most kids don’t do all that well with it. I remember a great many of the very smart kids in my algebra, geometry, pre-calculus and calculus classes also struggled to follow and learn the material.

Nevertheless, I’ve had a strong interest in math, reading about it quite a bit over the years, and recently read one of the “Dummies” books on calculus. It was very well-written, and I feel like I learned a lot from it. If I’d had that book back in high school, I think I would have completed the class with a good grade.

[Chgogal]

“The only reason I can imagine to minimize, dismiss, or eliminate mathematics is that more and more teachers have degrees in crap like Gender Studies than in classical liberal arts: mathematics, surveys of history, the sciences, and literature, ethics, rhetoric, logic, Greek, Latin, and at least one other language.”

You are absolutely correct.

[Reily]

Leibnitz fans differ in that!

[RinaseaofDs]

Garfinkel is an idiot, of course.

Can’t calculate infusion rates without understanding the partial pressures first. That’s differential equations, and highly dependent on Calculus. You can either understand how that’s done and then build trust in the tools, or think it is magic and trust the black box.