Calculus In High School–A Reflection

I can remember sitting in my high school calculus class thinking to myself: “This is great! I’m taking a college-level math course!” This was spring my my Junior Year.

Five years later, while I appreciate the opportunity to preview the material, I’ve almost completely switched sides on the issue. Rather than supporting calculus in high schools, I’d rather not see it taught at all in favor of a more intense algebra, geometry, set theory, logic, probability, statistics, and discrete mathematics curriculum started in 6th grade (at the latest) culminating in, perhaps, a rigorous pre-calculus course during the senior year. Here in Minnesota, when I graduated I needed four years of history and English but two years of mathematics.

The reasoning here is simple: mathematics is a paradigm of thought which deals (in its pure form) in abstract objects upon which abstract operations are performed. Once one learns to think mathematically and see the connections between things like algebra, statistics, and analysis it becomes much easier to expand one’s mathematical knowledge. So rather than pushing for calculus as some sort of status symbol for students we should instead be forcing them to develop mathematically in preparation for higher levels of abstraction later.