By Charley Knight

Lao Qi

The basic act of China’s educational reform has been and is being carried out, namely, reducing the curriculum and content of the curriculum. Although this practice appeals to the taste of some people, including ordinary people who are ignorant of education, it harms the children of workers and peasants in the long run. The reason for this, because the general population does not understand, is still talked about. For the children of workers and peasants, sooner or later they will experience the pain of reduced competitiveness brought by “burden reduction” more deeply. Therefore, publish this article, hoping to inspire some people.

Calculus is on the chopping block, even in college STEM majors, as degree programs seek to streamline and boost graduation rates. This is wrong and does a great disservice to our students.

Like philosophy, calculus teaches us how to think. Most STEM educators have benefited from studying calculus. Those in favor of dropping calculus from the required curriculum should think critically about how they would be able to understand the world without calculus knowledge. The idea was so alien to me that it was hard to understand.

As a proponent of quantitative training in pursuing a biology degree, I was recently asked whether there should be calculations in exams and whether students should use calculus. The question is based on the assumption that if I do not require students to use the mathematics of calculus, then our degrees do not need to teach calculus.

I think this is a wrong concept. There are several reasons, one of which is that calculus teaches us how to think. It’s not just a rule for taking derivatives and taking products. For me, calculus is about ratios, changes in ratios, and how to use those ratios and make predictions. For the biological world I study, these have become researchers’ intuitions and have a profound impact.

A far-reaching example comes from climate change and politics. There is an oft-quoted saying that we must “reduce the rate of carbon dioxide emissions”. The ratio changes over time. Obviously, reducing the rate of carbon dioxide emissions is essential to avoid the negative effects of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

However, the details of climate policy and projections are often studied in order to “limit the rate of growth of carbon dioxide emissions” so as to keep the growth rate constant. In fact, this is “business as usual”. By contrast, carbon dioxide is increasing at an even more frightening rate, which has been typical of human history since the industrial Revolution.

Similarly, some tasks are to reduce per capita carbon dioxide emissions to 1992 levels. As a result of population growth, today’s carbon dioxide emissions will greatly exceed those of 1992, and the 1992 requirements will not reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today.

The area under the co2 emission rate curve is the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere at any given time. This may seem intuitive to many of us. If not, you should take calculus.

Another example of the importance of calculus comes from one of my ecosystem Ecology courses. Net ecosystem productivity (NEP) is the biomass stored in a system during a year. NEP has two components, total primary productivity (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (ER). GPP produces biomass, which ER returns to the atmosphere in the form of CO2. Forgive me for this simple equation: NEP= Gpp-ER.

The figure below shows diurnal and seasonal variations of NEP, GPP and ER in temperate forests (Chapin, Matson and Vitousek, 2011).

Ecosystem Ecology students have to interpret these graphs and tell me whether the system stores carbon in a day or a season. The sum of NEP represents carbon storage over a period of time, and it should be clear that the system stores carbon throughout the day, but it is less clear whether there is a net benefit throughout the year. If this seems intuitive to you, it’s probably because you took calculus.

In addition, there are many other concepts of calculus to explain the biological phenomena in this diagram. For example, GPP rises linearly with time and season up to a point. In other words, there is an inflection point. Why is that?

For a certain time of day, when there is plenty of light and all the leaves are photosynthetically saturated, more light does not lead to more photosynthesis.

When GPP no longer increases linearly, it indicates that the leaf area of the system is saturated, and the increase of leaf area alone will not lead to the increase of GPP.

I could spend an entire hour talking about the biological inferences that can be derived from these curves, and they all relate to concepts in calculus. If you think that all the detailed mathematics of calculus is necessary, not necessarily, but the concepts of calculus are.

Original link: medium.com/datadriveni…

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