[nudetayne]

I don't know anything about your classes except for what's in your post, but in my experience, most teachers who have this opinion of their students are usually not aware that it may be their teaching style that results in basic math classes being "hard". That teaching style typically boils down to regurgitating what the book already provides, which isn't what students need. I've also found that teachers who use that methodology don't actually know the subject matter terribly well outside of whatever cookie-cutter textbook is being used.

[bilbo0s]

I accidentally voted your comment up.

I meant to vote it down.

Calculus is not basic math. And many students find it difficult. I remember Calculus 3, in particular, was hard for me. Now I look back at Green's Theorem, Lagrange multipliers, Vector fields and surface integrals and it all seems so basic. But that was NOT the case for the 17 year old me sitting in that big lecture hall.

[nudetayne]

Thanks for mentioning the ever-important votes! They mean so much to me.

Many students find It difficult because they have bad teachers, bad textbooks, or both. Also, in the future, spouting off math-related terms doesn't really add anything to the discussion. Anyone can open a book and look at the table of contents and copy some unfamiliar words down.

[bilbo0s]

Didn't mean to offend you guy.

As a rule, whenever I accidentally up or down vote someone, I leave a message explaining the mistake and my reasoning. Doesn't happen often... but I always thought of it as a courtesy. Again... no offense was intended.

On the question of math topics not adding anything to the discussion. Well, we'll need to agree to disagree. The point was that Calculus... is NOT an easy subject to learn. And you get a sense of how esoteric it seems to an initiate by looking at the topics it encompasses.

Finally, try to relax a little man... no need to get snippy on HN. We should be able to have a discussion on a, relatively uncontroversial topic, without getting emotional.

[nudetayne]

You didn't offend me, I guess my sarcasm wasn't evident. I just find the voting system to be pointless. I also don't know how you thought I was being emotional.

As for calculus, it's incredibly easy to learn - you just need the correct book. Most students don't know that unfortunately. Inventing calculus on the other hand isn't easy, but fortunately most of that has been done for us.

[jimhefferon]

You are mistaken. Calculus is hard.

[MaysonL]

Calculus is hard for most people.

[tjr]

I suspect most of [EDIT: many?] HN readers breezed through calculus using nothing but free online resources. With zero attitude, I say that I am truly impressed. I wish I was that amazing of a student.

I followed the more typical educational path of taking calculus in college. Some of it was easy, some of it was hard, but I seriously doubt that I would have been self-motivated enough to go through the entire sequence of calculus course material on my own. The pressure induced by being part of an in-person class, for a grade, and not for free, made me feel like I had to learn the material, and avail myself of whatever resources I needed, be it asking questions of the professor, going to tutoring sessions, reading extra books, whatever, to make sure that I learned it.

I totally wish I was so self-motivated that I could learn absolutely anything at any breadth and at any depth without any external reason to do so. But on my own, there are limits to what I make myself study. Which isn't to say that I'm stupid on my own, but rather, I appreciated the in-person college experience mainly for applying pressure on me to learn things that I wouldn't have otherwise. (And as a result, I did become more inclined to study broader and deeper on my own.)

In my cursory experience with MOOCs thus far, I don't see them applying that same pressure. Maybe they can; I'm not sure. But unless they do, I think that a lot of people (especially outside of HN, etc.) will find value in actually going to school.

[jimhefferon]

Yes. If you draw a bell curve of all first year students, say at schools where the entering avg Math SAT is 500 or above, then the shaded area of those who struggle with Calculus would, in my estimation, encompass .9 or more of the area below that curve.

This is despite hundreds of years of effort by well-meaning, perceptive, and hard-working teachers and students to refine the presentation to make the subject as clear as possible. Because most teachers and most texts are not the dipshits of the world. In short, Calculus is hard.

The thing about massive courses is that they are massive. When you get big, you cannot help but get average. In my experience average students (say at the schools I mentioned above) need support, including reasonably intensive personal attention from an experienced and knowledgable teacher. I don't believe the typical person in my course can pick it up on their own. (Not to dismiss the potential; I think there is a lot of exciting stuff happening that can help people learn. But I've seen nothing that would make attention unneeded.)

I do perceive that many HN readers could just pick Calc up, and frankly so could I, which is a good reason to read HN. People here pique my interest every day. But often in the discussions following articles like the one here missing is an understanding that you (speaking to a typical reader) are not average.

[rdouble]

I majored in math and had pretty good ACT and SAT scores but I still find Calculus and related math very difficult.

My unscientific observation is that some people find the analytical/continuous parts of math difficult but can still do really well with stuff like abstract algebra, combinatorics, linear algebra, and so forth. Other people (i.e. physics & engineering majors) are the exact opposite.

Then of course there are a select few who are good at both.

My brother is a math teacher and was more of a physics guy and his claim is that people who struggle with calc generally had poor instruction in trigonometry in their youth. I'm not sure how true this could be but I definitely hated my trig instructor the most out of any teacher I've ever had.

[nudetayne]

I simply have to disagree. I've only met two teachers I didn't think were dipshits and that's over the course of a B.S. in bioengineering, a masters in CS, and a trip through an MD/PhD program. These are all at top ranked schools, too. These people may have been smart, but they certainly weren't quality instructors. In my opinion, teaching should be something people do when they retire for fun. The two non-dipshits were doing exactly that.

Students should absolutely be able to pick it up on their own, but most classes use crappy textbooks and the teachers recite from the crappy textbooks. Stewart's Calculus is used by a ton of schools and that book is utter garbage. The guy is using it as a way to print money, which is fine, but you'd think after 10 versions, he'd eventually get things right.

[jimhefferon]

Thank you; you have made my point better than I did.

[nudetayne]

I'd say our posts are completely opposite in thinking. You think most texts and instructors aren't dipshits, I think they are. You think Calculus is hard to learn, I think it's easy.

[FraaJad]

Well... Jim Hefferon wrote this fairly popular textbook on linear algebra for one... http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/

[mikeash]

I've never once seen a math teacher who got more than half the class to really properly "understand" in the way that's described. I've had teachers who went by the book, I've had teachers who ignored the book. I've had teachers who were boring, I've had teachers who were incredibly engaging. None of them really reached most of their students.

[nudetayne]

My differential equations professor had a 98% passing rate for that class over a 20-year span. He was an ex-Bell Labs and later Lockheed employee though, so he actually knew the material and how to teach.

[danso]

Can you clarify exactly what your experience is?