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BeetleBHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

In undergrad, I worked as a math tutor at their tutoring institute

… In undergrad, I worked as a math tutor at their tutoring institute. We had two calculus classes - one for engineers/science and the other for business/economics. If you're into Newtonian stuff or it's relevant to your degree, then your approach is all great. What I consistently saw is people in degrees like biology (or even industrial engineering) had a harder time learning because of those physics applications in the book. They came in with one problem: Having trouble with the calculus. And then they discovered they had two problems: To understand calculus they suddenly had to understand physics as well. You'd get students who were totally adept at differentiating and integrating, but would struggle with the problems that involved physics. Yes, it is important to be able to translate real world problems to math ones, but it's a bigger problem when you don't care about that particular field. Same problem with the business students. …

Original discussionGalois Theory234 source comments · at import
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VY
VyseofArcadiaHN

Chapter 1 is brilliant. I've been shouting from the rooftops for years that math[0] courses need more context . We can prove X, Y, and Z, and this class will teach you that, but the motivating problem that led to our ability to do X, Y, and Z is mentioned only in passing. We can work something out, and then come back and rework it in more generality, but then that reworking becomes a thing in and of itself. And this is great! Further advances come from doing just this. But for pedagogical purposes, stuff sticks in the human brain so much better if we teach the journey, and not just the destination. I found teaching Calculus I was able to draw in students so much more if I worked in what problems Newton was trying to solve and why. It gave them a story to follow, a reason to learn this stuff. Kudos to the author for chapter 1 (and probably the rest, but chapter 1 is all I've had time to s…

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DG
dgacmuHN

I got to see that yesterday with my daughter: her algebra book used PV=nRT as an example of joint proportion and asked some questions about it. She, having never seen the ideal gas law, was quite thrown by it. That said, after we went through it and had a brief physics lesson, it worked quite well and I'm glad they used the example instead of just making something up -- but it required having a tutor (me) on hand to help make the context make sense.

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freestyle24147HN

If someone is having trouble understanding the absolute most basic part of classical mechanics (masses undergoing acceleration) something tells me they're not going to understand Calculus no matter what lens you view it through. It's not even about the equations, it's simply using it as a backstory for the motivation of the mathematics. > If you can find an application the student is interested in, then by all means, use that approach. For a general purpose textbook, though, it hinders learning for many students who don't care for the particular choice of application the book decided to use. This seems absurd. Just because some people will find a particular application less interesting, I don't think the answer is to throw out ALL applications and turn it into a generic boring slog through which no one will be able to see when and how it's useful.

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MI
mihaitodorHN

That's me with statistics. I have 0 interest in gambling and sports, so most of the examples put me off instantly. I'll need to study this topic in the context of biology (bioinformatics), so I'll want to find a good stats learning guide which avoids those topics.

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MP
mp05HN

Your mileage may vary, but my industrial engineering program had two semesters of proper physics and two semesters of engineering mechanics.

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