Calculus Learning Guide
I love attempts to shake up maths education, and I reckon the first passage is a pretty neat explanation, but it seems to slide quickly downhill from there.<p>The first three chapters are a bit airy-fairy - I get that that&#x27;s its schtick, but they&#x27;re also pretty light on content.<p>The fourth reads like it&#x27;s been taken straight out of a maths textbook by a &quot;cool&quot; teacher - engaging but not fundamentally simpler than what one learns in class.<p>The fifth teaches how to use Wolfram Alpha to perform calculus. I could teach a dog to use Wolfram Alpha.<p>It all seems to suffer a bit from the &quot;Dummies guide&quot; syndrome - it&#x27;s easy to simplify the first few lessons on a subject, but you pretty soon hit a wall when you reach the parts that actually require a bit of mental legwork.<p>Calculus is not a simple subject. By teaching it better, you can probably improve the situation by, like, 20%, but you can&#x27;t magically make a complicated subject trivial. It just doesn&#x27;t seem like the way forward for education. We need to make the difficulty more rewarding, not pretend that it doesn&#x27;t exist.