2 - Twenty Questions about Precalculus

Summary

Editor's note: This paper is the text of the keynote address given by Lynn Steen in October 2001 at the conference Rethinking the Preparation for Calculus. (For an overview of the conference, please see the preceding paper in this volume by Jack Narayan and Darren Narayan.)

Introduction

Approximately fifteen years ago a workshop similar to this one took place at Tulane University where a merry band of reformers sought to make calculus lean and lively. I had the opportunity to address that workshop with a list of twenty questions for calculus reformers. Thus I thought it appropriate to take a similar approach to this current workshop, to help launch your work by asking twenty questions about precalculus. (For comparison, I reproduce in Appendix A the questions that I put before the calculus reformers at Tulane. There you will find not 20 but 28 questions, the extra eight being added to the manuscript as a result of issues raised during the workshop. The full text with elaborations on each question can be found in [3].)

At the time of the Tulane workshop I was President of the Mathematical Association of America, and in that capacity had some degree of oversight responsibility for MAA's many committees. Even as the Tulane rebels were training their sights on calculus, I was well aware that then, as now, more college students study precalculus than calculus.