Is it time to kill calculus? [View all]

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Is it time to kill calculus?
Math curricula are designed to shepherd students toward calculus. Some mathematicians think this path is outdated

DANIEL ROCKMORE
SEPTEMBER 26, 2020 6:00PM


(Salon) Many parents relish reliving moments from our childhoods through our children, and doing homework with them is its own kind of madeleine. For Steve Levitt of "Freakonomics" fame — who is, in his own words, "someone who uses a lot of math in my everyday life" — a trip down memory lane vis-a-vis math homework became a moment of frustrated incredulity rather than gauzy reverie. "Perhaps the single most important development over the last 50 years has been the rise of data and computers, and yet the curriculum my children were learning seemed to have been air-dropped directly from my own childhood," he told me. "I couldn't see anything different about what they were learning than what I learned, even though the world had transformed completely. And that didn't make sense."

Levitt has made a career of questioning the received dogma. In this case, what he saw was that "A mathematical way of thinking, numeracy, data literacy, is far more important today than it has been; the ability to visualize data, the ability to make sense out of a pile of numbers, has never been more important, but you wouldn't know that from looking at the math curriculum." Data combined with the use of mathematical ideas had transformed the way he and others look at the world. Should data also change the way we teach mathematics?

In most schools, children are grounded in basic arithmetic in elementary school, and then, somewhere between middle school and high school, force-fed the "algebra-geometry-algebra sandwich". The first year of algebra ("Algebra I" ) continues to reinforce basic arithmetic, and then brings in fractions. The familiar starts to give way to the unfamiliar when variables and functions are introduced. That's when "x the unknown" makes its first appearance in word problems and linear equations, which for many marks a first sign of confusion rather than buried epistemological treasure.

Things then take a big turn, and math class time-travels to the days of ancient Greece for lessons in formal geometric proofs ("Geometry" ) that Euclid would have little trouble stepping in to substitute teach. Following that is a yearlong return to algebra ("Algebra II: The Sequel!"
), which given the previous year's partial hiatus from x's and y's and numbers first requires a lengthy review and then finally a return to new functions (exponentials, logarithms, polynomials) that either amuse or irritate you, depending on your taste, predilections, and teacher. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2020/09/26/teaching-data-science-instead-of-calculus-high-schools-math-debate/