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Originally Posted by ManicMechanic
Motivating students to do the boring work helps, and connecting math to previously discovered concrete examples (rather than to what they can imagine/discover) seems to work well with my lower level students. For example, whenever students ask "Why do we have to know about singularities?", the Tacoma-Narrows Bridge, coupled with a discussion of resonance caused by undefined frequencies gets their attention. |
In that case, you should definitely talk to them about flutter.
747 Wind Tunnel Flutter Test
It's been really interesting reading everyone's responses. I went to a magnet school, and for us Calculus AB was a graduation requirement. I thought that was pretty awesome, even my friends who said they were "bad at math" still got mostly 4s and above on the AP.
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Originally Posted by JVN
It is my hope that natural curiosity would drive people to seek out this understanding. Algebra is of course (imho) a big part of this understanding.
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Spot on! I think Linear Algebra was probably the coolest class I took even if I liked it the least. I always get excited when something I thought was unrelated pops up in a new place, and Linear Algebra has this tendency to show up just about everywhere. But that sort of natural curiosity means that I would be okay with really any class so long as it wasn't pointless.*
*I can't think of a pointless class I took with a good teacher...