That’s the question I asked myself when I was trying to prepare a particular lesson in calculus. What does it mean to be going 58 mph at 2:03pm? More specifically, what does that 58 mean?

You see, here’s the issue I was having… You could talk about saying “well, if you went at that speed for an hour, you’d go 58 miles.” But that’s an if. It answers the question, but it feels like a lame answer, because I only have that information for a moment. That “if” really bothered me. Fundamentally, here’s the question: how can you even talk about a rate of change at a moment, when rate of change implies something is changing. But you have a moment. A snapshot. A photograph. Not enough to talk about rates of change.

And that, I realized, is precisely what I needed to make my lesson about. Because calculus is all about describing a rate of change at a moment. This gets to the heart of calculus.

I realized I needed to problematize something that students find familiar and understandable and obvious. I wanted to problematize that sentence “What does it mean to be going 58 mph at 2:03pm?”

And so that’s what I did. I posed the question in class, and we talked. To be clear, this is before we talked about average or instantaneous rates of change. This turned out to be just the question to prime them into thinking about these concepts.

Then after this discussion, where we didn’t really get a good answer, I gave them this sheet and had them work in their groups on it:

I have to say that this sheet generated some awesome discussions. The first question had some kids calculate the average rate of change for the trip while others were saying “you can’t know how fast the car is moving at noon! you just can’t!” I loved it, because most groups identified their own issue: they were assuming that the car was traveling at a constant speed which was not a given. (They also without much guidance from me discovered the mean value theorem which I threw in randomly for part (b) and (c)… which rocked my socks off!)

As they went along and did the back side of the sheet, they started recognizing that the average rate of change (something that wasn’t named, but that they were calculating) felt like it would be a more accurate prediction of what’s truly going on in the car when you have a shorter time period.

In case this isn’t clear to you because you aren’t working on the sheet: think about if you knew the start time and stop time for a 360 mile trip that started at 2pm and ended a 8pm. Would you have confidence that at 4pm you were traveling around 60 mph? I’d say probably not. You could be stopping for gas or an early dinner, you might not be on a highway, whatever. But you don’t really have a good sense of what’s going on at any given moment between 2pm and 8pm. But if I said that if you had a 1 mile trip that started at 2pm and ended at 2:01pm, you might start to have more confidence that at around 2pm you were going about 60 mph. You wouldn’t be certain, but your gut would tell you that you might feel more confident in that estimate than in the first scenario. And finally if I said that you had a 0.2 mile trip that started at 2pm and ended at 2:01:02pm, you would feel more confident that you were going around 72mph at 2pm.

And here’s the key… Why does your confidence in the prediction you made (using the average rate of change) increase as your time interval decreases? What is the logic behind that intuition?

And almost all groups were hitting on the key point… that as your time interval goes down, the car has less time to fluctuate its speed dramatically. In six hours, a car can change up it’s speed a lot. But in a second, it is less likely to change up it’s speed a lot. Is it certain that it won’t? Absolutely not. You never have total certainty. But you are more confident in your predictions.

Conclusion: You gain more certainty about how fast the car is moving at a particular moment in time as you reduce the time interval you use to estimate it.

The more general mathematical conclusion: If you are estimating a rate of change of a function (for the general nice functions we deal with in calculus), if you decrease a time interval enough, the function will look less like a squiggly mess changing around a lot, and more and more like a line. Or another way to think about it: if you zoom into a function at a particular point enough, it will stop looking like a squiggly mess and more and more like a line. Thus your estimation is more accurate, because you are estimating how fast something is going when it’s graph is almost exactly a line (indicating a constant rate of change) rather than a squiggly mess.

I liked the first day of this. The discussions were great, kids seemed to get into it. After that, I explicitly introduced the idea of average rate of change, and had them do some more formulaic work (this sheet, book problems). And then  finally, I tried exploiting the reverse of the initial sheet. I gave students an instantaneous rate of change, and then had them make predictions in the future.

It went well, but you could tell that the kids were tired of thinking about this. The discussions lagged, even though the kids actually did see the relationships I wanted them to see.

My Concluding Thoughts: I came up with this idea of the first sheet the night before I was going to teach it. It wasn’t super well thought out — I was throwing it out there. It was a success. It got kids to think about some major ideas but I didn’t have to teach them these ideas. Heck, it totally reoriented the way I think about average and instantaneous rate of change. I usually have thought of it visually, like

But now I have a way better sense of the conceptual undergirding to this visual, and more depth/nuance. Anyway, my kids were able to start grappling with these big ideas on their own. However, I dragged out things too long. We spent too long talking about why we have to use a lot of average rates of changes of smaller and smaller time intervals to approximate the instantaneous rate of changes, instead of just one average rate of change over a super duper small time interval. The reverse sheet (given the instantaneous rate of change) felt tedious for kids, and the discussion felt very similar. It would have been way better to use it (after some tweaking) to introduce linear approximations a little bit later, after a break. There were too much concept work all at once, for too long a period of time.

The good news is that after some more work, we finally took the time to tie these ideas all together, which kids said they found super helpful.