Home Page	MEI Courses	Registration	Workshops & Consulting	Courseware Archive & Consulting	Guestbook

The Role of Hand Calculation

The emphasis in the courses is on conceptual understanding of calculus as a collection of tools for measurement. That entails a lot of visual interpretation, and some calculational ability involving numbers and formulas, of course. The difference between this course and many others, though, is simply that the hand calculation isn't the central goal. It's expected that students perform hand calculations, and understand procedures, but almost nothing is taught as an algorithm to be memorized.

We do expect literate people who took calculus courses to be able to take standard derivatives by hand. They know the differentiation rules, and a list of derivatives of some special functions like trig functions, logs and exponentials. They should be able to do them correctly by hand. In our experience, the difficulties aren't with knowing the rules, they are with recognizing the patterns.

We expect our students to calculate integrals. Here, for example, is a short list of integrals we expect students to do by hand immediately after they encounter the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.

Of course we go on to have them learn some of the standard procedures for finding integrals, like integration by parts, various trig substitutions, and the like.

Once again, though: What we don't do is make such calculations the final goals for student learning.