AP Calculus: Inflection Points in the News

May 11

If you’ve read my previous blog post about using relevant Newspaper Articles in class (see my blog post HERE about this), you’ll know that I LOVE finding newspaper articles related to education, mathematics, higher education, AI, financial aide, job advice, issues facing adolescents, and more. I like to share these with my students either by reading the articles in class or posting them to my Google Classroom stream, and ultimately most of them get laminated and displayed on my newspaper display wall:

As my collection of newspaper articles grew, I began noticing trends in these articles, particularly with the common use of the phrase “inflection points.” I thought this was neat, especially since I spent a significant part of my AP Calculus class talking about rates of change, concavity, and points of inflection. I thought it would be helpful for my students to think about inflection points not just in terms of a graph’s rate of change, but in their everyday life.

A couple of years ago, I began putting together a PowerPoint with all the newspaper articles I had and could find on the Wall Street Journal website, and I used this as the introduction to a video I remade that year related to analyzing graphs and finding points of inflection. The students really like the references to current events! Below is a Google Slideshow that I went through in the video’s introduction, Downloadable versions are below.

As I state in the Slides, former President Biden especially loved to use the phrase “inflection point” in his speeches: he appears in the Slides a few times, and here’s a video of him using the phrase as well!