Oh. Your. God.
I cannot tell you how happy I am that this semester is over. (Well, it’s not, really. I still have a two finals to write and a small container ship of homework yet to grade, but you get the idea.) It’s not that this was a bad semester per se, but with the freakish number of blizzards we had this year and the two multi-day conferences I attended, I ended up losing two weeks of class, which has meant that the past month I’ve been covering material so quickly that I nearly red-shifted my classes out of existence.
It’s just been one of those exhausting, stressful, problematic semesters, the kind that make you question whether you really want to come back and do it again next semester.
So at 5 PM, I was simply ready to shut my office door both on my actual office hours and on the metaphorical train wreck the end of of the semester felt like. However, a student popped up with a last-minute question on his exam make-up, and seeing as how this student is hardworking and active in class, I let him in.
We discussed the questions relating to Taylor series he had on his exam, and the conversation drifted from the practical aspects of Taylor approximation to the metaphorical idea of the Taylor series as a “genetic” model for functions (which is how I teach the subject), including some of the philosophic implications that arise from this. It was an interesting, engaging, and surprising metaphorical discussion that, in the end, connected the idea of analytic continuation with the “nature versus nurture” debate.
Finally, the student stapled his work, handed it in, and slung his backpack over his shoulder. As he was leaving, he stopped for a moment, and then said, “I gotta tell you, this is the third time I’ve taken Calculus II, and I still think that a lot of it is bullshit. I’ve talked to some of my friends who are now working in industry, and they’ve said that the amount of calculus they use on a daily basis is next to nothing.”
I’m so not coming back semester, I thought.
“But,” he continued, “I think that this time… this time I get that calculus isn’t really about just integrals and derivatives and stuff. It’s about being able to say take something from the world — idea like “fluid flow” or “electrical current” or “genetic destiny” or whatever — and express it in a way that let’s us say something new or unusual or helpful about it. Anyways, I think I appreciate calculus a lot more now.”
And then he headed home.
I can’t wait for next semester to start.
