My Fifty Years of Calculus

At the end of the fall 2015 semester, our Department of Mathematics at The University of Tulsa relocated to newly renovated offices, and I had the task of emptying my office drawers and cabinets after twenty-eight years in the same office. I found all of my calculus notebooks that I had saved from the late 1960s, when I was an undergraduate and took my first calculus courses. After more than thirty years of teaching calculus, and in observance of my fiftieth anniversary of having taken my first calculus course, I would like to share some of my experiences in learning and teaching calculus. As an undergraduate at Barnard College, I took a sequence of calculus courses at Columbia University that was intended for physics and engineering majors. I now teach in a mathematics department that is within the College of Engineering and Natural Sciences at The University of Tulsa, so my observations are relevant with respect to calculus for engineering students. Much has stayed the same, but the use of technology, student demographics, student academic/social support, the curriculum, and the way calculus is taught are some things that have changed, comparing my calculus experiences from 1967 to those of my students in 2016. Not all the changes appear to be for the better, and there are tradeoffs. The discussion focuses primarily on anecdotal examples, although some statistical data are included.