On Jun 4, 11:40 am, "Hawke" wrote:
But does everyone need to take
calculus every year in high school? As the situations where this kind of
information is so small and in such specialized areas wouldn't students be
better off learning something that would be useful to all of them?

It's been pointed out that this wasn't actually an application of
calculus.

But speaking of calculus, my experience was that everyone on the
serious side of the college track slogged through a very laborious pre-
calculus course, but only some went on to take calculus afterwards.
The problem is that those who didn't didn't get the benefit of all
their hard preparatory work. All they saw was really, really mess
algebra. That 'aha' moment when they teach you that you can cross out
some of the terms and form a simpler expression, and then show you
it's implications graphically and in the real world, was reserved for
those who decided to tackle the dreaded calculus.

In other words, I think the school got it backwards. Teach the
essential ideas of calculus in the required course - explain
derivatives and integrals graphically - show how they relate to the
real world. But save the algebraic grunge work of deriving it all
for the elective class. Everyone else can be shown a few simple
integrals, and then how to use numeric methods to solve anything not
readily apparent by inspection.

When not encumbered by the whole algebra thing, calculus is actually
quite approachable, and really kind of cool. But instead of sharing
that, we keep the nifty implications as a little inside reward for
those willing to slog through the math of deriving them.