‘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.

[NorthMountain]

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.

Not everyone is capable of understanding calculus. Trying to teach calculus to people who lack the wit to understand it is a waste of everybody's time.

The ability to understand calculus is probably (perhaps certainly) a good predictor of success when studying science, engineering, or mathematics.

[Tired of Taxes]

Calculus is necessary for some majors, and it should not be dropped.

With that said, the requirement of calculus for a few majors might be questionable. For example, I read that calculus was added to reduce the number of CSC majors because colleges didn’t have enough professors to teach it. Today, CSC still requires calculus, but many colleges have added another computer-related major that focuses more on coding and requires statistics and logic courses, but not calculus.

P.S. The Left tries to make everything into a racial issue. Many homeschoolers of all backgrounds do well in calculus.

[Deplorable American1776]

Calculus, I guess, is another racist subject.. I guess if you want to build a bridge and if it falls apart because you couldn’t calculate the weight properly, it is because of white supremacists and mathematics racism...🤓

[PhillyPhreeper]

The good thing about standards is that there are so many of them.

[VanShuyten]

“ 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.””

He obviously went to an inferior high school. My calculus teacher went out of his way to show us how calculus was directly applicable to real-world problems.

[Gay State Conservative]

Wasn’t calculus developed to calculate the orbits of planets?

[cnsmom]

Now you can just identify as educated. No diploma needed.

[Billthedrill]

There is a certain irony in a Professor of a derivative field such as Integrative Biology not demanding calculus from the undergrads. (Bad math joke, sorry.) I hope he was restricting his argument to high school matriculants, as I suspect he was, since one couldn’t succeed in his own field without understanding, say, the importance of areas under a curve and their value within statistics. What he’s saying if I understand it correctly is that high school teaching of calculus is no more useful as a mental discipline than teaching of Latin or Greek used to be. The problem is that it isn’t any less, either. IMHO.

[D Rider]

As a now old time engineer, I know this. You should know the answer you expect before you run a program. Very view can do this anymore. I spent a career catching mistakes with calculations in my head.

[Wonder Warthog]

"How much calculus does a chemistry or biology or botany major need?"

Chemistry needs the same as engineers. Biology/botany less so.

[Iron Munro]

Here is the man who saw this coming.....

[Wonder Warthog]

"As a retired Math teacher, I can say with some confidence that if it wasn’t for Math in general (and perhaps Calculus in particular) we’d still be living in trees."

We had made it quite a ways out of the trees before calculus was invented by Sir Isaac Newton. Ur, Egypt, Babylon, Rome, etc., etc.

[vikingd00d]

>>How much calculus does a chemistry or biology or botany major need? Calculus is for engineering

For chemistry, you’ll need ODEs (which require calculus) for reaction kinetics, same for biology and botony when modeling population changes. Business finance will require calculus for Black-Scholes, for example, and stochastic calculus for profit expectations.

Calculus is not just for engineering. It’s a way of thinking about the world as state and changes to state.

[lastchance]

I think it is more because requiring calculus for college bound students skewers equity.

[Fledermaus]

Ha, groan

[stremba]

I was a chemistry major. I took three semesters of it. Try doing any kind of quantum mechanics without calculus- can’t be done. Thermodynamics also in almost entirely relationships derived using calculus. Pretty hard to study reaction kinetics as well without understanding differential equations.

Calculus is not just for engineering. It has its uses in most sciences and even in economics - things like marginal costs and sensitivities to changes in demand, interest rates, etc., all are derivatives.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Physics II, Chemistry II, Calculus (and Trigonometry),Advanced English... I earned 48 credit hours in college by Advanced Placement and testing.

[fruser1]

lim_x→a f(x) = L iff ∀ ε > 0 ∃ δ > 0 s.t. 0 < |x - a| < δ ⇒ |f(x) - L| < ε

[BikerJoe]

Yep just have the AI read everything to you off the phone and then u speak and AI will type it for you, calculate it for etc. Dumbing down of people

The AI is dumbing down also. About five years ago, we got Amazon Alexa. Over the next couple years, I observed it getting better at math, culminating in being able to do not just symbolic integration, but definite integrals. As of now, it can still do the symbolic integration, but NOT definite integrals. Why something like that LOSES a capability is beyond me.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Can’t do advanced physics without calculus.