YEAH, I LIKE MATH. BECAUSE IT'S THE SAME IN EVERY COUNTRY: Late in our weekend discussion of higher-level math,
our own Kim Cosmopolitan couldn't help but wonder:
So here's a question: I feel like I am far from the only person in the world who sailed along in math before being generally befuddled by calculus. (For background - full on mathlete, did ok in calculus, but only because of a friend who taught me the "how tos" before every test, which I promptly forgot thereafter.) I have heard similar stories many times. Is this because (a) calculus is hard, yo, or is it possible that (b) calculus is sufficiently harder than "regular" math that your average high school math teacher isn't necessarily capable of bringing the degree of teaching skill required to get the students fully onboard? Or alternatively (c), this wasn't others' experience and my own mathematical abilities were more limited than they seemed to be during grades K-11.
J. Bowman's thoughts, below the fold:
It's not you; calculus is that hard. I posted something similar above, but in terms of both abstraction and complexity, calculus is a big leap over algebra (which is, itself, a bit of a jump from arithmetic). There are so many concepts that most students won't have seen before: real numbers, limits, epsilon-delta (which tends to also be the introduction to mathematical proof), continuity, combination and composition of functions... and that's before we even get to the derivative. By the time you reach the Mean Value Theorem and the Fundamental Theorem (my favorite theorem, despite my distaste for the discipline), most students have, as spacewoman puts it, decided to be a lawyer.
(My story is the same. Solid, top-level mathelete, aced everything through pre-calculus, and then hit a wall somewhere during AP Calculus from which I never recovered. And then Economic Statistics in college was a disaster, a true mercy grade (back when I thought about double-majoring).)
