# Is there a point at which it makes decidedly more sense to learn about a “linear approximation” to a function, rather than a “tangent”?

I'm tutoring a first-semester calculus student, and we were looking over the slides the teacher has used.

After teaching (or rather, repeating, for those who completed AP high school math) basic derivatives, there's a couple slides about "linear approximations" and how to find them. The student had a hard time grasping the idea until the end, when she realized "oh, this is just the tangent to the function at that point", and realized she already knew this from high school.

This, after going through the whole idea of $$f(x) \approx f(a) + (x-a)f'(a)$$ for some constant $$a$$.

In HS, she learned how to find a linear approximation by applying the point-slope formula, where the slope is the derivative at this point, and the point is the point at which the tangent touches the curve.

What I'm wondering is, will there come a time further down the line where the idea of a "linear approximation" is a better way of looking at it than as "just" a tangent?