A few years ago, when I was a graduate student, I received an urgent call for help from a Dean in charge of the Food Sciences program. Her students were struggling with the calculus course and they needed extra classes. When I looked at the notes they were receiving from the professor, it was evident that he was using the same notes to teach his food science students that he was using to teach those heading into pure mathematics. His “epsilon-delta proofs,” while more rigorous than heuristic explanations, were inappropriate for this group of students. While the content was valid, the method of teaching did not match his students’ level of sophistication. What was needed was a discussion of the meaning of rates of change, how to calculate them when expressed algebraically, and how to apply them in specific situations. Sometimes, it’s not the content that makes it appear “useless” but the way it is taught.
In other cases, content that appears irrelevant should be included in a curriculum, even though its immediate application is not evident. For example, anyone studying biology should probably be taught something about the waggle dance of the honeybees, even if they do not intend to do research on bees. The waggle dance of the honeybees provides insight into the concepts of group behavior that we see in ant colonies and other insect species. In his comments below, Joshua shares his insights with respect to a similar complaint in engineering. Joshua Gross’s answer to Why do universities still teach useless theoretical math in undergraduate engineering?
