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Personally, I hated calculus. It turned me off of math for a long time -- there was too much emphasis on memorizing heuristics for solving problems, like integr
by jey 13y ago
Personally, I hated calculus. It turned me off of math for a long time -- there was too much emphasis on memorizing heuristics for solving problems, like integral tricks and trigonometric identities. Worse, calculus was used as the canonical example of "college-level math", so it seemed that further math courses would just be about memorizing more and more problem solving tricks.
(In my view, solving integrals is a search problem, and search problems are for computers. I want to understand the concepts and the algorithms, not be a glorified calculator.)
- tonyarkles 13y agoI half agree. I'm not sure if your or most calculus curriculums involved much derivation, or whether I ended up lucking out and getting a great instructor. We ended up deriving a number of the "integral tricks" from "scratch" (e.g. Fundamental Theorem of Calculus). Sometimes they went way over our heads, but I generally found that the derivation process really helped me understand at more of a gut level what was going on.