[BeetleB]

> something tells me they're not going to understand Calculus no matter what lens you view it through.

From my experience as a tutor, you are quite wrong in coming to that conclusion. Most people conflate mass and weight all the time, and have a fuzzy understanding of acceleration. It's not because they're thick in the head and incapable, but because they don't care. That doesn't mean they don't care about other applications where math can help.

And standard calculus textbooks go beyond what you are describing. All the ones I encountered would have the integral of force with displacement to get work (which confuses people when they hear it's the same as "energy").

> This seems absurd.

The truth often does seem so.

[crazygringo]

> Most people conflate mass and weight all the time, and have a fuzzy understanding of acceleration.

Conflating mass and weight is generally irrelevant in calculus textbooks, since they're generally giving you the mass, and weight doesn't even come up.

And coming in having a fuzzy understanding of acceleration is fine, because calculus is where you learn what acceleration is.

Learning that velocity and acceleration are the first and second derivatives is the most intuitive way to introduce them to anyone.

If you're taking calculus but you don't want to learn what acceleration is, then I don't know what you're even doing. Even if you're doing it for finance or medicine or something, velocity and acceleration are still the most useful and intuitive ways to introduce derivatives.

[BeetleB]

> And coming in having a fuzzy understanding of acceleration is fine, because calculus is where you learn what acceleration is.

Really? Because I learned what acceleration was a few years before I'd been introduced to calculus.

> If you're taking calculus but you don't want to learn what acceleration is, then I don't know what you're even doing.

Your statement highlights very well the point I'm trying to make.

> Even if you're doing it for finance or medicine or something, velocity and acceleration are still the most useful and intuitive ways to introduce derivatives.

I didn't point it out in my earlier comments, but I learned basic calculus in the 10th grade by two very simple (non-physics) concepts:

The derivative gives you the slope of the tangent (and I had already been taught a year prior that the slope of the tangent is the "point" rate of change). We'd already studied the relevancy to physics (or other applications) of getting the slope of the tangent in prior years (in physics courses, which is where one should be introduced to it). So I definitely did not need a math textbook to give me context.

And the integral gives you the area under the curve. I did not even need a physics application, as I'd done years of geometry up to that point to understand the concept of "area". Again, the application to things like energy was appropriately left to a further physics course.

BTW, I never said providing context in a math book is a bad idea - just that it'll help some people and hurt some people by the book's choice of context. If I were doing 1:1 tutoring, I would definitely try to provide context from the real world. The difference is that I can try to identify the relevant context for the particular student.

That alone was sufficient in motivating me to learn more. Of course, you can go from there to computing volumes, etc.

[crazygringo]

You're speaking from the perspective of how you happened to learn things.

>> If you're taking calculus but you don't want to learn what acceleration is, then I don't know what you're even doing.

> Your statement highlights very well the point I'm trying to make.

But you're missing the point I'm making. Which is that sometimes there is a simply a clearest way to explain a subject regardless of what a student is interested in.

Saying you want to learn calculus but you're not interested in acceleration is like saying you want to learn 20th-century European History but you're not interested in WWII.

I've done my share of teaching. I greatly appreciate that you need to make things relevant to students. But at the same time, you just have to teach what the thing is, using the time-tested analogies that actually work to educate students.

If a student doesn't want to learn calculus because they have no interest in what acceleration is, then I don't think they want to learn calculus at all.

[jbaber]

This is spot on. Everybody has lots of favorite subjects. They're not all the same.