arrow_back Not so, if you took a "reformed" calculus course, like the course which we now teach at UNL, from the Harvard Book. But, traditionally, understanding how limits work was dealt with fairly quickly, and was kept separate from the techniques of working calculus, which took up the rest of the course.

Things are better with the new book. Now students are encouraged to remember what the derivative of a function means, in terms of the limit of a difference quotient, throughout the course. The students do a lot of numerical experimentation with limits, which gives them the experience of plugging in smaller and smaller intervals and watching the behavior of the function.

Even so, this is still a far cry from the precise definitions of limits we'll have in this course.