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Showing posts from June, 2019

Calculus and the Trinity - in Thanksgiving for Mr. Wallace

Trinity Sunday, Year C My favorite teacher in high school was Mr. Wallace. Mr. Wallace taught calculus.  It was a small class, and it got even smaller when we winnowed to Calc 2 senior year.  Over those two years, Mr. Wallace got to know us pretty well. It was clear he cared about us beyond our math skills and was interested to learn about what we were up to in our non-math hours, too.  He read our speeches, laughed at our campaign slogans, and sympathized with our college application struggles. But Mr. Wallace was also a great teacher.  He made calculus feel interesting and relevant, which, as I discovered when I revisited the subject in college, was perhaps not the norm.  Whenever possible, Mr. Wallace weaved our real-life high school experiences into the examples he used. We measured the rate of the growth of couples forming as Prom got nearer, and the frequency and future likelihood of decent school lunches, and we graphed a regression line comparing the amount of hours e