Who Needs Calculus?
Thermodynamics connects calculus to physical states of matter and their transitions. The math tells a story. Once upon a time, a winter day turned to colder night. As the temperature plummeted, it squeezed water from the air like a sponge. But it was cold enough, dry enough, that the water skipped its wet stage entirely. Each molecule found a nucleation sight, its new home as an ice crystal. Together, one after the other, they built this frost in two stages — perhaps even two days. Big, clear crystals, small, white feathers, all dependent on temp, pressure, time, and the landscape beneath them. I love this image especially well for the springtail photobomb. Carry on wee traveler!
The strangest thing about teaching math, is that so much of the discourse around the subject devolves into, “But when are we ever going to actually USE this again?”
It is such a — forgive me — stupid conversation.
What do I mean by stupid? If you’ve hung out here for any time at all, you know I’m not going around measuring people’s IQs with a yardstick. What I really mean by STUPID is UNCONSCIOUS.
When a student challenges me “When am I ever going to use this again?” What she’s really saying is, “I am struggling. I see that some of my classmates are breezing through this. This makes me feel incapable and unimportant and less-than everyone else, like a failure. I am feeling so insecure that I’m going to lash out against the stuff that is hard. If I put it down, maybe nobody will put me down.”
Because that student has a cell phone in her pocket (that is supposed to be in her locker), because she drove in a car that runs on fossil fuels that were pumped out of the ground and refined into gasoline so that she could get to school in a building that will not collapse under the weight of the snow that falls on its roof and because she flushes her poop down a toilet that is hooked up to a massive network of pipes and processes to keep waste separate from her drinking water which conveniently flows out of her kitchen faucet — she uses calculus. She rests gently on the soft, cushy bed that thousands of people who know calculus have built for her. Do we all need calculus? Yes. If we enjoy all the things that calculus has built, we do. Does each individual person need to be able to preform calculus? No. Of course not. But it will never hurt to learn a little. To see the curtain pulled back on the world we live in. To feel empowered that we could do any job we want to do.
We can reap the benefits of calculus without doing any integrals ourselves the same way we can enjoy listening to music without ever singing a note or reading a staff. But are our lives richer for music teachers helping us participate in music more deeply? You bet! It is the same for math.
I don’t actually have an opinion on whether or not kids should, on a case-by-case basis, take calculus. It’s so personal. You don’t have to learn calculus for me to see you as a whole and perfect human. If you know for sure you want to specialize young and fill advanced math space with something else, by all means do! But honor the path you leave as much as the one you take. Give thanks for the musicians who create music that moves your body and your spirits and for the engineers that laid the road flat and smooth in front of you and the poets who distill beauty and feelings into sparse words on a page. There is enough reverence to go around.
And if you find yourself fuming about the unimportance of a massive and influential body of knowledge, stop. Pause. Feel in your body. What is this REALLY? Fear? Inadequacy? Failure? Make some space for the feelings. Invite them in. Hold them lovingly. A feeling can’t be wrong, but it can tell lies. So don’t take the chatter too seriously. We all really do need calculus. You are worthy of love and honor right here in the messy work of learning.