I think that calculus should get much more credit on being a really cool course. Maybe my teachers did try to tell us this, maybe not but I think something more should be done to show this.
When learning about calculus through a book, it blew my mind. This was especially so because I was adept at advanced functions and learned to work with linear equations and figuring them out and how to use them in real life applications.
So I was reviewing the book and it soon told me that linear functions used methods to find out information on straight lines. That's awesome you say but wait theres more! Then it went on to say that straight line relationships are quite unrealistic in life and that in real life, the lines are more curved (like the one below).
So what? Well what blew my mind is that somehow, people figured out how to solve for information on curved graphs to then solve for real life situations. Further, the creativity needed to understand that as you zoom in enough on these curved lines, they will end up as straight lines which will then let you solve like a linear equation. They then figured out methods to get the sum of these calculations to use to then solve a whole curved line. WOW!
Maybe I should get more hobbies but people need to see this!
I hope to plan out a way to communicate my enthusiasm as a senior math teacher.
Maksym Cord
As someone who always excelled in math but detested drawing, graphing was the only part of math that I did not look forward to. The concepts all made sense to me and I could still do well, but knowing for most of the problems I would have to create a visual representation made me less motivated to do the work.
ReplyDeleteI continued to feel this animosity towards graphing for almost all of high school, to the point I questioned if I really wanted to teach math one day knowing I would have to do this stuff, until calculus came around. As you said in your post, a lot of the concepts we cover in calculus is more exciting then it gets credit for, looking at tangent lines and making meaning of them is what comes to mind for me. Calculus became a foundation of my understanding of how we make meaningful connections between the graphical representations to real world examples, as well as all the details we don't immediately see on our graphs. This also gave me a new perspective on graphing as a whole and allowed me to go back and enjoy what I had learned in previous grade.
I do believe our enthusiasm as teacher is infectious, and I hope our students can appreciate the material as much as we do.