I started out as a biology major. I squeaked through calculus, and organic chemistry finally did me in. Had I gotten as far as physics, I’m fairly certain that calculus would have been necessary.
Two things I want to mention-
Unlike some other subjects, a bachelor’s in biology is not meant to be a terminal degree. It’s meant to qualify you for further study. Sure, you can get a job with a bachelor’s in biology but aside from teaching high school biology, I can’t think of one for which it’s both necessary and sufficient.
Secobd, the calculus requirement could be used as a sort of screening device- perhaps the thinking is if you can’t handle calculus, you also won’t be able to handle statistics or some other course. I’m not saying the thinking is necessarily correct- I know perfectly well why I had trouble with calculus and it had nothing to do with my innate ability. It had to do with a combination of my high school scheduling that ended up with me not taking trig, and scoring well enough on the placement test to get into calculus.But I had a computer science professor try to discourage me from taking his class, because if I couldn’t handle calculus, I certainly couldn’t learn to program in anything more difficult than BASIC .
Now this
I wouldn’t say this looks like laziness,but neither does it look like a learning disabilty. It looks far more like a fear of math (although I could be wrong) Either find out which it is and deal with it , or find another career, because if you can’t handle problems with more than two steps, I have no idea how you’ll be able to figure out weighted averages for grades or how to grade on a curve.
I guess I’m partly in league with p@cific@812 in the understanding that math, physics, chemistry, etc. can have other uses outside simply teaching you math, physcis, chemistry, etc.
I’m an engineer and end up doing relatively complex calculations of various types in my job almost every day. I work in a range of everyday electronics and electical math, physics and vector analysis, basic trig and so forth. However, I’ve not actually USED calculus since college. Although I do dabble with it every once in a while just for fun.
So, to Honesty - yeah math can suck in school, especially the way it’s taught a lot of the time. But as I recall, college was hard - isn’t it supposed to be?
I’ve been taught Biology, yet I doubt that I’ll use any of it. I’ve been taught Chemistry, haven’t used it yet either. History? Useless. English? Nearly so.
In short, school is designed to give you a broad base of knowledge so that you are not completely ignorant of the world around you.
Incidently, I’ve only found one skill useful in my job. It happens to be computer programming, something that I taught myself outside of school. Go figure.
Doreen is on the right track and was very polite about it. To be honest, Honesty, regardless of debates over whether it is directly or only tangentially necessary for pursuing a career in biology the hard fact is that many (not all) science departments, and not just in biology, use passing calculus (or a similar math) as a crude, backdoor intelligence test to weed out freshmen who are probably not going to be able to handle the increasing amounts of rigor as the courses get harder over time. It minimizes the department’s investment in eager, but ultimately unable “wannabees”.
It may be unfair and unjust, but if you want to be a biology major you had best resign yourself to understanding calculus or find a different school or discipline.
I have a fine arts degree, and I did this automatically in my head. Then pld beat me to referencing the distributive property, whose name I had forgotten, but whose function makes perfect sense.
I hate to say this, but I agree with the sentiment in this thread: If that kind of elementary arithmetic ties you in knots, then any scientific field will likely be a bad fit. Even field biologists have to record their observations in numerical form, after all.