1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:19,000 Welcome to Students Incorporated. I'm your host, Mr. Jason. Join me weekly as my team and I produce content that's informative, positive, fun, and uplifting. This podcast is created and produced with the help of students from the International Community School of Bangkok. 2 00:00:19,000 --> 00:00:41,000 Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm joined by co-host Mia and Frank. Today's episode is sponsored by the ICS Sports Medicine Club. The Sports Medicine Club provides events, knowledge, and engaging experiences that unite those who are interested in the topic of sports medicine and sports and are looking to improve their performance and stay active and healthy. 3 00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:57,000 Members of the club help with the annual Red Cross blood donation drive, as well as participate in and host other related events in the form of seminars or job shadowing. So thank you to Toya and all club participants for helping to sponsor this episode. 4 00:00:57,000 --> 00:01:12,000 Alright, moving on. In today's episode, we'll talk with two teachers, both of whom teach very focused and specific subjects. Mr. Paul will be in our first segment and we'll be discussing cell structure and other biology related things. 5 00:01:12,000 --> 00:01:32,000 Then we'll welcome Mr. Jeremy for our second segment, in which we'll find out what parametric equations are, along with other calculus related stuff. Why are these important? Well, stick around and find out how these things relate to everyday life. But before we jump into biology, let's hear our quote of the day and get some headline news. 6 00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:49,000 Our quote of the day comes from Albert Einstein, the man himself. He's quoted to have said, period of mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. Numbers are in a way a language. The more you study them, the deeper you understand. 7 00:01:49,000 --> 00:02:07,000 Different types of math, such as calculus and algebra, are different dialects. This highlights the creativity and aesthetic nature of mathematics. It also suggests math has an inherent beauty in its form of abstract ideas and how numbers are arranged. 8 00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:27,000 Einstein claims that mathematics is built on logic, like poetry, but also requires creativity and thought. And that's our quote of the day. Now on to some headline news with Mia. Thank you for our quote of the day, Frank. Now here's some headline news from around the world related to the topics of biology and math. 9 00:02:27,000 --> 00:02:41,000 Our first headline comes from sciencedaily.com. Scientists have found that cancer cells may use lipids to hide from the immune system. So cancer cells are cells that don't mature into cells with specific jobs. 10 00:02:41,000 --> 00:03:01,000 Usually, while the cells are still in control, white blood cells kill them to stop them from uncontrollably reproducing. Now, scientists at Rockefeller University have discovered that cancer cells, in order to not get killed and to multiply, are using lipids, or in other words, fat to hide. 11 00:03:01,000 --> 00:03:13,000 While it is a bad discovery for us, we do have ways to treat cancer, and this might lead us to develop a way to treat patients better and ultimately cure cancer easily. 12 00:03:13,000 --> 00:03:35,000 Our next headline comes from quanta-magazine.org. Athletes can now utilize mathematics to gain an upper hand in their respective sports now. The technology of analyzing athletes' acceleration data and creating digital twins of athletes has helped even Olympic swimmers like Andrew Wilson win national championships and Olympic gold medals. 13 00:03:35,000 --> 00:03:52,000 This shows that sports is not only about how skilled you are in the game, but also how data-driven analysis and understanding of the mathematics behind the sport can greatly improve performance and ultimately help athletes succeed at the highest levels of their respective sports. 14 00:03:52,000 --> 00:04:10,000 And finally, our last headline comes from news.medical.net. As microplastics in polluted environments find their way into our vital organs like our liver, lungs, and intestines, scientists have now discovered that they have found a way into sections of our brains. 15 00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:32,000 So from autopsies conducted from 2023 to 2024, it is concluded that 8 of the 15 individuals experimented on with consent have died of vein blockage of the brain from microplastics, and scientists are now starting to find a way to stop this from being a very serious issue in the near future. 16 00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:45,000 And that's our headline news for this episode. 17 00:04:45,000 --> 00:05:01,000 Thank you for the quote in the headline news. Ever wonder what a cell is made of? Or why is having some general knowledge about biology important? Well, Mr. Paul's here in the studio to tell us why. I'll hand over the mic to Mia to kick off this first segment. 18 00:05:01,000 --> 00:05:15,000 Hello, Mr. Paul and welcome to the show. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. All right. Be here. Thank you. That's great to hear. All right. So to get us started, could you please introduce yourself and let us know what you do here at ICS. 19 00:05:15,000 --> 00:05:27,000 All right. My name is Paul, but most students will call me Mr. Paul. I teach biology, general biology, and AP biology. 20 00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:35,000 All right. Thank you. Now I've got a follow up question. What inspired you to get into biology in the first place? 21 00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:52,000 Okay, so this question or rather, I'd say my answer to this question. I'm not sure I want Ms. Amber to hear the answer to this question. So can you promise me Ms. Amber won't listen to this podcast? 22 00:05:52,000 --> 00:06:05,000 It's okay. It's okay. So when I was in high school, I skipped school several times and particularly the change between ninth and tenth grade. 23 00:06:05,000 --> 00:06:19,000 Somehow I should have taken biology and I missed it and the school never caught it. I graduated from high school. I never took AP biology and I never even took general biology. 24 00:06:19,000 --> 00:06:30,000 So who would have thought I'd be teaching biology now? Well, in the years after that, I was into university. I didn't know exactly when I wanted to study. 25 00:06:30,000 --> 00:06:43,000 I kind of thought maybe finance or like that whole world of investment seemed interesting for a while. But I had thought I should just take a biology class. 26 00:06:43,000 --> 00:06:53,000 I was living in my home state of Minnesota. So at the University of Minnesota, I signed up for a biology class and had a great professor. 27 00:06:53,000 --> 00:07:13,000 I think it was just kind of the right time of my life. I think I realized like biology at the time for me was kind of bringing up big, big questions that seemed really important like where did I come from? 28 00:07:13,000 --> 00:07:27,000 Where did we as humans come from? Is there a God? It doesn't answer those questions directly, but it touches on them. So it was something that I just was like, I want to take another of these classes and then another and another. 29 00:07:27,000 --> 00:07:31,000 Before I knew it, I was graduating with a biology degree. 30 00:07:31,000 --> 00:07:45,000 That is an interesting way and how you came to teach biology. But yeah, so we know that cell structure is something that is taught in biology. So could you give us like a quick overview of like what cell structure is? 31 00:07:45,000 --> 00:08:06,000 All right. So I guess like the question asking what is a cell structure is kind of like asking the question, what is a car part? Right. So we could go through parts of a car from bolts to seats to steering wheels to radiators. 32 00:08:06,000 --> 00:08:24,000 And I would say the same thing with cell. Everybody knows about the mitochondria and the nucleus. And I think of the cell structures themselves as being not super interesting to just talk about cell structures. 33 00:08:24,000 --> 00:08:43,000 But it's you have to understand the structures and in order to discuss functions and like just like in a car and the door of a car, you have a motor that moves a window up and down. 34 00:08:43,000 --> 00:09:01,000 And I suppose when that first came out, that was a pretty amazing thing. Well, when you look into the cell and you see that there are structures that are motors that are moving things around at such a such a small, small scale. 35 00:09:01,000 --> 00:09:16,000 I feel like the structure leading to an understanding of the function gets me to this point of like, wow, that's super amazing. So all right. Thank you. That brings back a lot of memories from my 10th grade biology class. 36 00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:28,000 But except it's with Mr. Darrell, not you. So I'm sorry. Sad. I missed out on half. All right. Now for my next question. What are some other key areas of biology that you teach? 37 00:09:28,000 --> 00:09:39,000 When we teach biology, we have this approach where we're looking at biology as like different from a systems perspective. So kind of like the car example. 38 00:09:39,000 --> 00:09:52,000 And the last question you asked where we can look at the whole ecosystem, right? How parts within that ecosystem work together. 39 00:09:52,000 --> 00:10:07,000 And so we look at the parts and we look at their function and how it works together. We could bring it down to the level of an organism and talk about organ systems and how organs function together to allow for a human to be alive. 40 00:10:07,000 --> 00:10:22,000 And then probably the area we focus most on though is the cell, both in general biology and AP biology. And we're looking at the cell again as a system of parts. 41 00:10:22,000 --> 00:10:42,000 And the reason that we focus most on the cell is because this is the fundamental level where life is possible and we can look at all of the diseases and disorders in our bodies really can be traced back to the level of the cell. 42 00:10:42,000 --> 00:10:51,000 So that's maybe how we look at biology. It doesn't describe everything we teach in biology, but a big, big picture view. 43 00:10:51,000 --> 00:10:56,000 Yeah, I think that's a great take on it. I'm actually taking biology right now. So yeah. 44 00:10:56,000 --> 00:10:57,000 Nice. 45 00:10:57,000 --> 00:11:00,000 But I'm studying half of what you're saying. 46 00:11:00,000 --> 00:11:02,000 Maybe I should be asking you questions. 47 00:11:02,000 --> 00:11:14,000 Maybe you should be asking me a question. But yeah. So yeah. Why do you believe that it's important for people to study biology, especially when it comes to understanding the world around us? 48 00:11:14,000 --> 00:11:21,000 All right. Well, that I feel like is a very big question that I could talk about for a long time. 49 00:11:21,000 --> 00:11:39,000 I think of the ICS mission statement, which has the phrase, it's talking about what we're trying to produce in our students and this idea of to know and apply wisdom for the good of our world and the glory of God. 50 00:11:39,000 --> 00:11:49,000 So at a basic level in taking biology, it would be the same for any subject, right? 51 00:11:49,000 --> 00:12:01,000 Like having a basic knowledge level of a certain field is important just for being a well-functioning human in society. 52 00:12:01,000 --> 00:12:12,000 So like an example I saw just yesterday, a person I know, social media posted this thing about bees and honey. 53 00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:22,000 And it was saying things like, if you put honey on a metal spoon, the live enzymes will immediately die. 54 00:12:22,000 --> 00:12:31,000 And something about honey having this special energy that's just perfectly suited for the brain. 55 00:12:31,000 --> 00:12:40,000 And if you study biology, you'll know that an enzyme is a protein and it's not alive when it's outside of a cell. 56 00:12:40,000 --> 00:12:50,000 And I guess in a way it just helps you to analyze a claim like that, which we see lots of that kind of stuff on the Internet. 57 00:12:50,000 --> 00:13:03,000 And just to be able to kind of not get swept away by things promising bigger than they really are or conspiracy theories, right? 58 00:13:03,000 --> 00:13:07,000 Like having a basic knowledge of biology is helpful for that. 59 00:13:07,000 --> 00:13:14,000 The second level is the application level. And this is kind of the phrase for the good of our world. 60 00:13:14,000 --> 00:13:24,000 And then I'm thinking of whether it's studying ecology, which as you know, we're studying right now. 61 00:13:24,000 --> 00:13:34,000 And a lot of times when we're talking about ecology, we're looking at things that if we understand how these systems work, 62 00:13:34,000 --> 00:13:45,000 then when there's an issue like climate change, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, some might say that, 63 00:13:45,000 --> 00:13:50,000 I've heard a claim that if there's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the ocean will just absorb it. 64 00:13:50,000 --> 00:13:59,000 Well, we just in biology looked at how increased carbon dioxide will result in more acidic ocean. 65 00:13:59,000 --> 00:14:04,000 And that will, as a result, decrease the growth rate of corals. 66 00:14:04,000 --> 00:14:08,000 And so you can just kind of understand how things work. 67 00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:17,000 And then once you understand how things work at that system level, then you can look at what needs to be done to correct it, right? 68 00:14:17,000 --> 00:14:22,000 With humility, of course, because all of these systems are very complex. 69 00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:24,000 So that would be the application level. 70 00:14:24,000 --> 00:14:34,000 And then I think the biggest one for me is, and what really drew me and continues to draw me into biology is the sense of wonder. 71 00:14:34,000 --> 00:14:49,000 As when I look at these mechanisms at the cellular level, again, it's so amazing, the complexity of all these machineries and communication systems. 72 00:14:49,000 --> 00:15:04,000 And I just saw an interview with the famous American scientist Francis Collins, who is the head of the Human Genome Project, and just wrote a book. 73 00:15:04,000 --> 00:15:18,000 And he made a statement saying, like, in his work in biology and in the lab, he said, like, the laboratory really became a cathedral to him. 74 00:15:18,000 --> 00:15:37,000 In his path to God, like, as you're understanding the intricacies of how DNA works and how the cell works again, it's like you're seeing the fingerprints of God in the lab or in your studies. 75 00:15:37,000 --> 00:15:46,000 So I feel like that is kind of what keeps me excited as I go back into studying complex things in biology. 76 00:15:46,000 --> 00:15:59,000 All right, for sure. And I think at the start where you mentioned the ICS mission, I think that as students, at least, I think we overlook that mission a lot of times, even though it's in every classroom we walk into. 77 00:15:59,000 --> 00:16:03,000 Because I think we're all thinking one thing, and it's that I have to get into this university. 78 00:16:03,000 --> 00:16:07,000 How is your class going to look on my transcripts and such? 79 00:16:07,000 --> 00:16:13,000 And so thank you for reminding us of, you know, just the end goal of ICS's mission. 80 00:16:13,000 --> 00:16:27,000 All right. For our next question, could you share an example or two of how a basic understanding of biology can help us make better choices about health, the environment, or even the products we use? 81 00:16:27,000 --> 00:16:37,000 All right. So here I kind of touched on the environment already. 82 00:16:37,000 --> 00:16:54,000 And I think, again, it's that understanding that for the environment, it is a complex system of interacting parts. 83 00:16:54,000 --> 00:17:19,000 And so if we're trying to manage, let's say, a national park and looking at populations of predators and prey, and for some reason the ecosystem is out of balance because of, often it's like climate change is one reason, but there could be disease, other things that result in imbalance. 84 00:17:19,000 --> 00:17:48,000 If we don't understand the effect of how these animals or plants interact with each other and how energy flows through an ecosystem, then we have very, very, very, very little chance of applying effective measures to preserve the biodiversity of that ecosystem and our world in general. 85 00:17:48,000 --> 00:17:58,000 Right? So really, we're starting in general biology to just describe these complex systems. 86 00:17:58,000 --> 00:18:22,000 And for us as humans, for us humanity to steward well the earth and its resources, it's going to require some ICS students to keep on going with their studies and understand these things really, really well so that we can make good choices in how we steward. 87 00:18:22,000 --> 00:18:36,000 All right, so now moving on to the final question. In what ways do you think studying biology can shape our perspective on issues like sustainability, food production, or medical advancements? 88 00:18:36,000 --> 00:18:53,000 Okay, so a little bit of a similar question here, but maybe this time I'll pick medicine. In AP biology, we get a little bit deeper into the mechanisms of the cell. 89 00:18:53,000 --> 00:19:07,000 And just last week, we were looking at something called cell transport, how cells move materials in and out of them using pumps and channels and other proteins. 90 00:19:07,000 --> 00:19:25,000 So an example of that was how is it that our intestines, as food travels through our intestines, how is it that we absorb glucose from our food? So, sorry if you didn't really want a biology class, you should ask somebody else to come. 91 00:19:25,000 --> 00:19:45,000 I'll get to the motivation here in the end, but I gotta just describe. So, I won't describe all the mechanisms, but it takes a very complex set of multiple different types of protein to keep different concentration gradients 92 00:19:45,000 --> 00:19:56,000 and in order to move glucose from the intestines into our intestinal tissues and then from there into our blood. 93 00:19:56,000 --> 00:20:02,000 And so we talked about that as an example of what we're required to understand for the AP curriculum. 94 00:20:02,000 --> 00:20:21,000 And then after that, I showed them an example of, for instance, the disease cholera, which is more of a third world disease. It's very easily treatable, but hundreds of thousands of people still die every year because of this disease. 95 00:20:21,000 --> 00:20:35,000 So, for the good of our world, right? So the cholera is a bacteria that gets into our digestive system by usually drinking contaminated water. 96 00:20:35,000 --> 00:20:45,000 And so if we're going to be able to treat a disease that kills now 100,000 people a year, but if we didn't know how to treat it, it would be killing maybe millions of people a year. 97 00:20:45,000 --> 00:20:57,000 So, to understand, like, so cholera gets into our intestines, it releases this toxin, this toxin goes into those same cells that absorb glucose. 98 00:20:57,000 --> 00:21:10,000 By a series of changes, it causes water to leak out of those cells into the intestines and the result is what none of us want to have, just horrible diarrhea, right? 99 00:21:10,000 --> 00:21:20,000 And so water is just flowing through the intestines. Well, that results in glucose being washed through and sodium ions being washed out. 100 00:21:20,000 --> 00:21:25,000 And this system of pumping glucose into the cells requires those. 101 00:21:25,000 --> 00:21:37,000 And so in order to understand how to treat it, well, the way we treat it is with just like oral rehydration salts, which a lot of us have gotten when we've been sick, right? 102 00:21:37,000 --> 00:21:43,000 The doctor will send those, you mix it, stir it up, drink it, and all it is is just sugar and salt. 103 00:21:43,000 --> 00:21:53,000 And it just happens to be that those two substances are exactly what are lacking in our intestines because of the diarrhea. 104 00:21:53,000 --> 00:21:57,000 And so we can't pull glucose in if we don't have both sugar and salt. 105 00:21:57,000 --> 00:22:10,000 So who would have known how to design this treatment if they didn't understand the whole system of how your cells take in glucose and what the cholera toxin does? 106 00:22:10,000 --> 00:22:20,000 And these packets are like, you know, 15 baht. They're very cheap and they're very easy to distribute in places where cholera is affecting people. 107 00:22:20,000 --> 00:22:26,000 And they can take the death rate of cholera from up to 50% down to less than 1%. 108 00:22:26,000 --> 00:22:36,000 So just with something very simple. But again, the point is it requires an understanding of the biology before you can come up with the treatment. 109 00:22:36,000 --> 00:22:44,000 All right. Thank you, Mr. Paul. I actually hope I don't get that disease anytime soon. 110 00:22:44,000 --> 00:22:46,000 But if you do, it's very treatable. 111 00:22:46,000 --> 00:22:48,000 Still, though, I would not. 112 00:22:48,000 --> 00:22:50,000 I hope you don't, too. 113 00:22:50,000 --> 00:22:53,000 All right. So I actually have one more question for you. 114 00:22:53,000 --> 00:22:58,000 We like to end our guest segments by asking them for some advice. 115 00:22:58,000 --> 00:23:04,000 So, Mr. Paul, what advice would you give to students who are interested in the medical field? 116 00:23:04,000 --> 00:23:22,000 OK. Well, so if a student is in ICS currently, a good path toward medicine certainly would be taking biology, then AP biology and anatomy and physiology. 117 00:23:22,000 --> 00:23:26,000 And definitely a good amount of chemistry and physics, too. 118 00:23:26,000 --> 00:23:34,000 But probably chemistry and as many chemistry and as many biology classes as you can would be recommended. 119 00:23:34,000 --> 00:23:42,000 And then going on from there, I think a lot of ICS students are interested in the medical field. 120 00:23:42,000 --> 00:23:50,000 I think I would say, you know, maybe there's students that feel like the medical field would be interesting just because I think it's a great I think it's a great direction. 121 00:23:50,000 --> 00:23:54,000 Because, again, it's the good of our world. 122 00:23:54,000 --> 00:24:00,000 It's a way to earn a living by like alleviating human suffering. 123 00:24:00,000 --> 00:24:12,000 Right. So I would say don't pursue a medical career because you want to like have the prestige of saying you're a doctor. 124 00:24:12,000 --> 00:24:20,000 Right. Like pursue the medical field because you care about human suffering and you want to help humans. 125 00:24:20,000 --> 00:24:24,000 All right. Thank you, Mr. Paul. I only took like the basics. 126 00:24:24,000 --> 00:24:30,000 So like biology, chemistry, not physics, anything but physics, because I'm not going into biology. 127 00:24:30,000 --> 00:24:35,000 I'm going into law. But I think that our talk today, it was very insightful. 128 00:24:35,000 --> 00:24:46,000 And I think from someone who's not going into medicine, I feel like I now kind of understand like why people choose it because there are some people that, you know, do doctor for that prestige. 129 00:24:46,000 --> 00:24:52,000 But yeah. All right. Thank you so much, Mr. Paul. You are welcome. Glad to be here. 130 00:24:52,000 --> 00:24:56,000 All right. And thank you, Mr. Paul. And that concludes our first segment. 131 00:24:56,000 --> 00:25:03,000 We'll be right back after this short PSA announcement from Mr. Paul. 132 00:25:03,000 --> 00:25:07,000 One, two, three, four. 133 00:25:07,000 --> 00:25:12,000 Every day, millions of cells in your body are working tirelessly to keep you alive and well. 134 00:25:12,000 --> 00:25:17,000 But did you know that the choices you make can either help or hinder their efforts? 135 00:25:17,000 --> 00:25:24,000 Your cells depend on you to provide the right nutrients, enough sleep and regular exercise. 136 00:25:24,000 --> 00:25:29,000 When you eat healthy foods, you're fueling your cells with the energy they need to function. 137 00:25:29,000 --> 00:25:33,000 When you stay active, you're helping them stay strong and resilient. 138 00:25:33,000 --> 00:25:38,000 And when you get enough rest, you're giving them the time they need to repair and regenerate. 139 00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:43,000 But it's not just about what you do. It's about what you avoid, too. 140 00:25:43,000 --> 00:25:51,000 Bad habits, substance abuse and poor diet choices can damage your cells, leading to long term health problems. 141 00:25:51,000 --> 00:25:59,000 By living a healthy lifestyle, you're not just taking care of your body, you're supporting the very building blocks of life itself. 142 00:25:59,000 --> 00:26:02,000 Remember, healthy cells mean a healthy you. 143 00:26:02,000 --> 00:26:12,000 Make the right choices today because your cells are counting on you. 144 00:26:12,000 --> 00:26:16,000 Thank you, Mr. Paul, for helping us with our PSA for this episode. 145 00:26:16,000 --> 00:26:19,000 And welcome back to our second segment. 146 00:26:19,000 --> 00:26:23,000 For this segment, we welcome Mr. Jeremy to the studio. 147 00:26:23,000 --> 00:26:28,000 Have you ever wondered what a parametric equation is or how it's used? 148 00:26:28,000 --> 00:26:31,000 Well, I can't tell you, but Mr. Jeremy can. 149 00:26:31,000 --> 00:26:34,000 So Mia, go ahead and get us started with our first question. 150 00:26:34,000 --> 00:26:38,000 Hello, Mr. Jeremy. Welcome to the show and to the studio. 151 00:26:38,000 --> 00:26:40,000 Very excited to have you in here. 152 00:26:40,000 --> 00:26:46,000 All right. To get us started, could you please introduce yourself and let us know what you do here at ICS? 153 00:26:46,000 --> 00:26:50,000 Hi, I'm Mr. Jeremy and I'm the high school calculus teacher. 154 00:26:50,000 --> 00:26:54,000 I also teach pre-calculus and I've been here for about 18 years. 155 00:26:54,000 --> 00:26:57,000 That's impressive. 18 years. 156 00:26:57,000 --> 00:26:59,000 Now, I've got a follow up question, actually. 157 00:26:59,000 --> 00:27:04,000 So what inspired you to get into teaching math and specifically calculus? 158 00:27:04,000 --> 00:27:07,000 That's a great question. I hope I don't ramble on too long. 159 00:27:07,000 --> 00:27:14,000 I think the first story would start back when I was in high school and I was thinking about what kind of career I wanted to get into. 160 00:27:14,000 --> 00:27:19,000 And I think we have an engineer or something come to our classroom and share with our math class. 161 00:27:19,000 --> 00:27:21,000 And I was pretty good at math already. 162 00:27:21,000 --> 00:27:25,000 And as they were sharing, it sounded like, oh, they make a good amount of money. 163 00:27:25,000 --> 00:27:30,000 And I was talking to my mom about it and she said, well, Jeremy, don't just think about money. 164 00:27:30,000 --> 00:27:32,000 Like, is this really what you want to do? 165 00:27:32,000 --> 00:27:34,000 Like, think about what this job entails. 166 00:27:34,000 --> 00:27:38,000 Like, are you going to be sitting in a cubicle working or, you know, what does it mean? 167 00:27:38,000 --> 00:27:43,000 And as I thought about it, I realized that I really wanted to be more in an area of service working with people. 168 00:27:43,000 --> 00:27:46,000 I really love the academic environment. 169 00:27:46,000 --> 00:27:48,000 And so I decided I wanted to be a teacher. 170 00:27:48,000 --> 00:27:51,000 Now, I just loved all of school, like really. 171 00:27:51,000 --> 00:27:55,000 So I was thinking, oh, it could be social studies, science, math, art. 172 00:27:55,000 --> 00:27:56,000 You know, I love these things. 173 00:27:56,000 --> 00:28:01,000 And so when I was thinking about pursuing education, I was really I was still pretty open to that. 174 00:28:01,000 --> 00:28:11,000 Then when I was doing my college, going to university to take the placement exams and choose my or declare my major, 175 00:28:11,000 --> 00:28:16,000 I went in to take a math test and I was late getting there for because of a flat tire. 176 00:28:16,000 --> 00:28:18,000 They let me stay anyway because I was an honors student. 177 00:28:18,000 --> 00:28:20,000 They said, OK, well, you don't have to come back. 178 00:28:20,000 --> 00:28:22,000 It's a long drive for you. 179 00:28:22,000 --> 00:28:26,000 And I'm taking this math placement exam and it's just so long and I couldn't figure out why. 180 00:28:26,000 --> 00:28:28,000 It just kept getting harder and so long. 181 00:28:28,000 --> 00:28:29,000 I come out of the exam. 182 00:28:29,000 --> 00:28:31,000 I said, that was a really long exam. 183 00:28:31,000 --> 00:28:35,000 And the advisor, she was just tapping her pencil. 184 00:28:35,000 --> 00:28:39,000 She was like, yeah, it's an adaptive exam. 185 00:28:39,000 --> 00:28:44,000 And I never heard of this before, but it was using like kind of I mean, it's like early AI, I guess, where it was like, 186 00:28:44,000 --> 00:28:48,000 if you do well, it gives you harder questions to see how far you get. 187 00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:50,000 So she asked me what major I wanted to do. 188 00:28:50,000 --> 00:28:51,000 Well, I want to do education. 189 00:28:51,000 --> 00:28:53,000 And I'm not sure which subject you're doing math. 190 00:28:53,000 --> 00:28:57,000 And because she had to sit and wait through all of that, I did well math. 191 00:28:57,000 --> 00:29:05,000 And it really makes sense because if you can teach and if you can teach math or science, like that's where the jobs are. 192 00:29:05,000 --> 00:29:14,000 And as far as like calculus specifically, then when I came before I taught at ICS, I was teaching at a bilingual school. 193 00:29:14,000 --> 00:29:21,000 The students there, it was a math focused program and their curriculum was very cyclical, but it was getting to be too easy for them. 194 00:29:21,000 --> 00:29:27,000 And they asked me, the students asked me, could we just learn calculus next semester? 195 00:29:27,000 --> 00:29:30,000 So these were probably grade 11 students at the time, I think. 196 00:29:30,000 --> 00:29:31,000 Maybe they were grade 12. 197 00:29:31,000 --> 00:29:36,000 But so that second semester, I said, well, yeah, I guess it's been a while since I've been in school and I kind of had to try to relearn it. 198 00:29:36,000 --> 00:29:38,000 And so I started relearning it. 199 00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:42,000 And it was about the same time that I started teaching, that I applied to work at ICS. 200 00:29:42,000 --> 00:29:45,000 There was an opening that the previous calculus teacher was leaving. 201 00:29:45,000 --> 00:29:46,000 And so it just made sense. 202 00:29:46,000 --> 00:29:50,000 And as the years went by, ICS had more and more students. 203 00:29:50,000 --> 00:29:54,000 We went from two math teachers to now we have about five high school math teachers. 204 00:29:54,000 --> 00:29:59,000 And so now, rather than teaching pretty much every subject of math, I'm focused on calculus. 205 00:29:59,000 --> 00:30:03,000 I think that's actually a really interesting way of how you came to this career. 206 00:30:03,000 --> 00:30:05,000 Now, I've also got this question. 207 00:30:05,000 --> 00:30:10,000 Could you give us like a quick overview of like what a parametric equation is? 208 00:30:10,000 --> 00:30:12,000 Okay, parametric equation. 209 00:30:12,000 --> 00:30:19,000 I love that you asked this in a radio format because normally I'd be waving my hands and pointing at things and drawing pictures. 210 00:30:19,000 --> 00:30:21,000 So this is the way we're going to do this. 211 00:30:21,000 --> 00:30:25,000 We can say just close your eyes and imagine looking up at the ceiling. 212 00:30:25,000 --> 00:30:29,000 And up at the ceiling, you have a nice big square or rectangle or something. 213 00:30:29,000 --> 00:30:34,000 And if you look along one wall, you could think about that as going left and right or maybe north and south. 214 00:30:34,000 --> 00:30:35,000 Okay. 215 00:30:35,000 --> 00:30:39,000 And then you look the other way and that's like going east and west. 216 00:30:39,000 --> 00:30:43,000 So if you've been in a math class, you've learned about the x coordinate and the y coordinates. 217 00:30:43,000 --> 00:30:48,000 And you know that you can go left and right for x and you can go up and down for y. 218 00:30:48,000 --> 00:30:53,000 But now imagine that there's a bug up on the ceiling and it's walking around. 219 00:30:53,000 --> 00:30:54,000 Okay. 220 00:30:54,000 --> 00:31:00,000 So you can track its position by looking at different places where it is as it's walking around on the ceiling. 221 00:31:00,000 --> 00:31:06,000 But if you just draw a picture tracing where you went, what you end up with is some kind of random thing. 222 00:31:06,000 --> 00:31:10,000 But you don't know when it was at those different places. 223 00:31:10,000 --> 00:31:18,000 So what a parametric equation does is even though your graph is x and y, so it's left and right, it's up and down. 224 00:31:18,000 --> 00:31:20,000 But now we're adding a time to it. 225 00:31:20,000 --> 00:31:27,000 If I just look at the picture, if I traced out where that bug was walking, I would just see where it walked and I wouldn't know when. 226 00:31:27,000 --> 00:31:31,000 So what the parametric equation does, it tells you x based on time. 227 00:31:31,000 --> 00:31:33,000 So it only tells you left and right based on time. 228 00:31:33,000 --> 00:31:38,000 Then it looks at the y and it only tells you that y based on time. 229 00:31:38,000 --> 00:31:40,000 So it tells you the up and down based on time. 230 00:31:40,000 --> 00:31:42,000 And you put those two things together. 231 00:31:42,000 --> 00:31:45,000 Now you can track where that is and you can kind of think about a machine like this. 232 00:31:45,000 --> 00:31:49,000 This applies to any kind of machine like a 3D printer or something like that. 233 00:31:49,000 --> 00:31:54,000 You've got this thing that wants to move back and forth one way and up and down the other way. 234 00:31:54,000 --> 00:31:56,000 And so it's able to map out where everything goes. 235 00:31:56,000 --> 00:31:58,000 That's parametric equations. 236 00:31:58,000 --> 00:32:01,000 Well, then you add, you've got a whole room, a 3D space. 237 00:32:01,000 --> 00:32:03,000 So now we can add a z-axis to that as well. 238 00:32:03,000 --> 00:32:09,000 You can add other as many variables as you need to that and they're all based on time. 239 00:32:09,000 --> 00:32:11,000 All right. Thank you for that. 240 00:32:11,000 --> 00:32:13,000 I'm getting a lot of flashbacks and pre-calculus. 241 00:32:13,000 --> 00:32:15,000 All right. 242 00:32:15,000 --> 00:32:22,000 Now, other than the parametric equation, what are other key areas of calculus that you teach? 243 00:32:22,000 --> 00:32:27,000 Okay. So the biggest idea, the most important thing in calculus is the derivative. 244 00:32:27,000 --> 00:32:30,000 And the derivative is about rates of change. 245 00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:33,000 It's an instantaneous rate of change. 246 00:32:33,000 --> 00:32:38,000 So everything about rates of change, anything you can think of where you can think, 247 00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:44,000 I can put this in a rate, miles per hour, meters per second, people per square kilometer. 248 00:32:44,000 --> 00:32:48,000 Anything that you can think of as a rate, calculus will apply to that. 249 00:32:48,000 --> 00:32:53,000 And I know you just said you're having flashbacks for pre-calculus. 250 00:32:53,000 --> 00:32:57,000 One of the challenges with pre-calculus is that you're always jumping from topic to topic 251 00:32:57,000 --> 00:32:59,000 because there's so many things that you need to do. 252 00:32:59,000 --> 00:33:02,000 But with calculus, you like jump into this thing called the derivative. 253 00:33:02,000 --> 00:33:03,000 It's about rates of change. 254 00:33:03,000 --> 00:33:08,000 And you just keep developing that idea and going deeper with it, working backwards with it. 255 00:33:08,000 --> 00:33:12,000 And it's always founded around the rate of change. 256 00:33:12,000 --> 00:33:14,000 So yeah, I actually never took calculus before. 257 00:33:14,000 --> 00:33:17,000 I was just nodding my head, pretending, yeah, I understand that. 258 00:33:17,000 --> 00:33:22,000 But yeah, so why do you think that calculus is important for students to learn 259 00:33:22,000 --> 00:33:26,000 even if they don't plan to pursue a career in math or engineering? 260 00:33:26,000 --> 00:33:32,000 Okay. So one way to answer that is we would be surprised at how many different disciplines 261 00:33:32,000 --> 00:33:37,000 are going to use calculus, even though it might not necessarily directly seem like it does. 262 00:33:37,000 --> 00:33:45,000 So you might, like anything, like I just said, anything involving rates of change could be about calculus. 263 00:33:45,000 --> 00:33:49,000 So if I think about something like business, if you go to business school, you have to learn calculus 264 00:33:49,000 --> 00:33:57,000 because you might be thinking about how your profits, how your rates of return and things like that. 265 00:33:57,000 --> 00:33:59,000 So there's rates involved, it might apply. 266 00:33:59,000 --> 00:34:04,000 So finance, rates of interest, things like that, it would apply to medicine. 267 00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:08,000 So if you're thinking about dosages of medicine and how that's going to be diluted in your bloodstream 268 00:34:08,000 --> 00:34:12,000 as it goes on and keeping those things up, that's going to involve calculus because, again, 269 00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:14,000 it's about rates of change and things. 270 00:34:14,000 --> 00:34:19,000 Computer science, it's big because this is how we're developing things like AI technology and stuff. 271 00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:22,000 It's founded in the mathematics. 272 00:34:22,000 --> 00:34:26,000 But even above just thinking about careers, just when you learn to challenge yourself 273 00:34:26,000 --> 00:34:31,000 and think mathematically and have more tools, it teaches you kind of a new way to think. 274 00:34:31,000 --> 00:34:36,000 It opens you up to harder stuff and just to be able to solve new kinds of problems 275 00:34:36,000 --> 00:34:40,000 and how we approach problems, even if we're not necessarily using those calculus concepts. 276 00:34:40,000 --> 00:34:45,000 It's teaching us new and stretching our brains to just deal with different things. 277 00:34:45,000 --> 00:34:47,000 All right. Thank you for that. 278 00:34:47,000 --> 00:34:55,000 And since calculus is mainly learned inside of classrooms or let's say a lecture hall. 279 00:34:55,000 --> 00:35:01,000 Now, outside the classroom, could you give us some examples of how calculus is used in real life situations? 280 00:35:01,000 --> 00:35:05,000 OK. I love this question because you said just said real life. 281 00:35:05,000 --> 00:35:12,000 And I've never used calculus at the grocery store or while driving through traffic. 282 00:35:12,000 --> 00:35:14,000 It is a specialized thing. 283 00:35:14,000 --> 00:35:22,000 We're getting into some really difficult mathematics and it's aimed at things like sending people to the moon. 284 00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:29,000 It was developed as a way of tracking planets and understanding celestial motion. 285 00:35:29,000 --> 00:35:32,000 These are big lofty concepts. 286 00:35:32,000 --> 00:35:38,000 The cool thing was as they developed these ideas about calculus and saw how they related to physics, 287 00:35:38,000 --> 00:35:43,000 they also started to see, like I mentioned, these business or medicine kind of applications 288 00:35:43,000 --> 00:35:47,000 where it just went in so many different directions. 289 00:35:47,000 --> 00:35:51,000 And so will you use an everyday life? Probably not. 290 00:35:51,000 --> 00:35:55,000 I use it because I'm a calculus teacher and that's the only place I use it. 291 00:35:55,000 --> 00:36:02,000 But I do know that my students are going to walk away and they're going to pursue careers where they might have to use it in unexpected ways. 292 00:36:02,000 --> 00:36:04,000 I think that's a great take on it. 293 00:36:04,000 --> 00:36:11,000 And, you know, like, sure, it might not be used every day, but you won't know until the day you might actually use it one day. 294 00:36:11,000 --> 00:36:12,000 So I've got another one. 295 00:36:12,000 --> 00:36:21,000 So what role does calculus play in modern technology and how can students appreciate the impact of calculus in the digital age? 296 00:36:21,000 --> 00:36:25,000 Yeah, it's a great question, because even if you don't use calculus, 297 00:36:25,000 --> 00:36:29,000 we should understand that it does underlie most of the technology that we use. 298 00:36:29,000 --> 00:36:36,000 Anything robotics, AI, we just take this stuff for granted and we don't think about how it works. 299 00:36:36,000 --> 00:36:40,000 I don't want to know sometimes, you know, so you just it's too much, you know, 300 00:36:40,000 --> 00:36:45,000 it's enough to figure out how to use it, but to really appreciate what's going into it. 301 00:36:45,000 --> 00:36:47,000 That's some really deep stuff. 302 00:36:47,000 --> 00:36:53,000 So there's things like image processing, you know, or AI generation. 303 00:36:53,000 --> 00:36:58,000 You know, these things are using calculus to do that, predicting stock market trends, 304 00:36:58,000 --> 00:37:05,000 analyzing network traffic on your computers, like to figure out how to how to allocate resources. 305 00:37:05,000 --> 00:37:13,000 So really anything that is about efficiency or change, that's that's where calculus is coming into play. 306 00:37:13,000 --> 00:37:17,000 All right. Typically, we would like to ask our guests for advice. 307 00:37:17,000 --> 00:37:23,000 So, Mr. Jeremy, what advice would you give to someone who's thinking about studying math beyond high school? 308 00:37:23,000 --> 00:37:32,000 One of the things or the first thing that comes to mind is just the way that we as students often view math as being like, 309 00:37:32,000 --> 00:37:36,000 OK, here's a problem, solve that, here's a problem, and here's a technique to solve it. 310 00:37:36,000 --> 00:37:43,000 We learn all these little algorithms or all these these little tricks and we get a problem set of problems that are identical to that. 311 00:37:43,000 --> 00:37:49,000 And and it is important to do that because we're building skills when we do that kind of thing. 312 00:37:49,000 --> 00:37:53,000 But that's not the way that mathematics is applied in the real world, because if it was, we could just let our computer do that. 313 00:37:53,000 --> 00:37:55,000 We say, oh, here's one. There's this kind of problem. Do that for me. 314 00:37:55,000 --> 00:37:58,000 Here's this problem like AI could take that over. 315 00:37:58,000 --> 00:38:08,000 But the way mathematicians are actually working in the real world is they're presented with a problem that does not look like anything that you've seen in a textbook before. 316 00:38:08,000 --> 00:38:15,000 And they have to go back to all those tools that they learned as younger people and just, OK, what tools do I have? 317 00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:19,000 And there might be a hundred ways to solve that problem or approach that problem. 318 00:38:19,000 --> 00:38:24,000 Some might be more efficient than others. Some might give conflicting answers. 319 00:38:24,000 --> 00:38:27,000 And they have to be able to resolve that kind of stuff. 320 00:38:27,000 --> 00:38:41,000 So my advice to you as you study that is to try to think about application and understanding the concepts that are underlying just being proficient in solving problems and getting 100 percent on your tests. 321 00:38:41,000 --> 00:38:43,000 That's not really what you do. 322 00:38:43,000 --> 00:38:48,000 Like, yeah, that's that's good. And that probably shows that you have some understanding of mathematics. 323 00:38:48,000 --> 00:38:51,000 But you have to go deeper and ask the deeper question like, why does this work? 324 00:38:51,000 --> 00:38:53,000 Why am I using this instead of this? 325 00:38:53,000 --> 00:38:57,000 Or, hey, could I do this instead? And maybe the answer is yes. 326 00:38:57,000 --> 00:39:04,000 Maybe I'm just teaching it this way because I have a room of 20 students that I have to find the best way to get to a goal. 327 00:39:04,000 --> 00:39:15,000 And so focusing on that viewing math as a problem, like I guess a box full of tools and we're finding the right tools to apply the situation. 328 00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:17,000 We might have a lot of ways to approach it. 329 00:39:17,000 --> 00:39:18,000 All right. Thank you. 330 00:39:18,000 --> 00:39:40,000 Thank you, Mr. Jeremy. And that concludes our second segment with Mr. Jeremy and everything you wanted to know about calculus and how it's relevant to our everyday lives. 331 00:39:40,000 --> 00:39:51,000 As we end this episode, we want to thank Mr. Paul and Mr. Jeremy again for coming on the show and helping us understand why biology and calculus are relevant to our everyday lives. 332 00:39:51,000 --> 00:40:02,000 Stay tuned for our next episode as we host special guest Miss B. Chanita, a well-known local artist whose works have garnered both domestic and international recognition. 333 00:40:02,000 --> 00:40:08,000 And as always, this podcast would not be possible without the hard work and support of our international student production team. 334 00:40:08,000 --> 00:40:16,000 All music and sound effects are courtesy of Pixabay.com, a vibrant community of creatives sharing copyright free images, videos and music. 335 00:40:16,000 --> 00:40:38,000 And we are signing off until next time. We are Students Incorporated, because your voice matters.