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From that perspective, going through any kind of struggle (and building willpower/discipline) would be a good enough proxy for learning calculus. It’s a little
by ssivark 3y ago
From that perspective, going through any kind of struggle (and building willpower/discipline) would be a good enough proxy for learning calculus.
It’s a little sad that the best value that the OP can impute for learning calculus is masochism — I cannot imagine saying that for anything in the school curriculum that I actually learned/understood. I wonder (in good faith) whether the OP actually even absorbed calculus at all… (i.e. can they solve calculus problems even today, for example?) — if not, they’re not the person who should be making authoritative comments on the usefulness of calculus.
Calculus (Taylor approximations, perturbation modeling, error propagation, significant figures in measurement precision, gradient descent, etc — just off the top of my head) is so deeply embedded in my thinking, that it strongly shapes how I think and amplifies my effectiveness!
I disagree with the OP’s claim so fundamentally — they might as well claim that schools/education focus on literacy for the same reasons.
- smeej 3y agoI remember when the AP Calculus test questions were released only a month or so after I had taken and aced the exam. I had no idea whatsoever how to solve the problems I had solved easily in the very recent past. It's as you say. I didn't absorb it at all. I stuffed it in short-term memory and passed an exam. But that's all I learned. I learned how to stuff things in short-term memory. I didn't learn calculus.