Calculus Students Who Can’t Subtract Negative Numbers
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One of my friends tutored Calculus 1 students at WashU last year, and there’s so many crazy stories of educational dysfunction. Like one day, they were helping a student who was stuck on subtracting negative numbers.
Yeah, a calculus student stuck on subtracting negatives. They were doing a problem that asked them to calculate a derivative, and the student couldn’t do -27 minus 14.
I mean, no wonder they had no idea what was going on in the class or how to choose what derivative rule to apply to each function or how to work with functions.
Like, for crying out loud, they don’t know how to do arithmetic! And just because you graduated doesn’t mean you get to leave all that math you’re supposed to learn behind cause everything builds on each other.
Algebra builds on arithmetic. Calculus builds on algebra.
You’re never done with anything. It always comes back, and you gotta keep building on top of it.
If you wanna solve calculus problems, it’s not just the new stuff in calculus that you need to know. It’s also all the foundational material from algebra and arithmetic, trigonometry, everything that is gonna come back and get exercised.
And if you can’t do it, you’re gonna struggle until you refresh that knowledge. So when we’re putting students into calculus who don’t know middle school math, it’s no surprise that they’re completely underwater.
Further reading:
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