alt Hacker News,, additionally, moving limits to the end of a first-year course allows students to develop intuitions around the derivative first before seeing the formal proof of their validity’’
Waiting a year to get from intuition to theorems is a perfect way to ruin math.
Math is not supposed to be easy/simple, but it supposed to be a great way to understand systems based thinking.
At the same time there could be more examples taught on why these building blocks were historically needed and what they are used for solving nowadays.
> Waiting a year to get from intuition to theorems is a perfect way to ruin math.
It's interesting that you chose to make that point in a thread about calculus specifically. It had pretty shaky foundations for most of its history, and even today, there's a pretty significant disconnect between the mechanics of epsilon-delta and the meaning we assign to the result.
> Math is not supposed to be easy/simple, but it supposed to be a great way to understand systems based thinking.
Math is a means to an end. Making the tool easy to use is a desirable property. I've heard "it's not supposed to be easy" applied to many disciplines, from film photography to software engineering, and I think it's mostly gatekeeping.