Economics at Swarthmore

interesteddad
Sat, 13 Jan 2007 02:23:02 +0000

interesteddad, a big thanks to your daughter for her perspective on this especially the wisdom of continuing on math track. My daughter’s math professor was encouraging her to continue taking higher level math classes but this girl wasn’t sure if that is how she wanted to spend her college years–taking classes that she couldn’t enjoy.



Been there. Done that! My daughter reached the same conclusion after placing into the final semester of the calc track.

I know of other high school math whiz kids at other similar colleges that reached the same conclusion. I think it is very common. I think there’s just a different aptitude for math with numbers and math without numbers. Interestingly, my daughter took the advanced stat course and breezed through it. She has no problem learning math rules and solving problems. The proofs in math track courses did not compute.

She actually talked about it with her high school math teacher. The standard college calc book is a different approach to teaching math, an approach that is required for advanced theoretical math, but one that is very different from the AP calc approach that was a piece of cake for my daughter.

She was glad she took the calc course and the theory of special relativity physics seminar. Both gave her a good taste of potential math or physics major and, therefore, a solid basis for knowing that’s not what she wanted to do for the rest of her life!

She recommends that, if students are going to take college calc, take it first semester when it’s pass/fail. That’s a free pass to find out if it clicks.