I feared calculus, right up until circumstances forced me to not only take calc in high school but to take the hardest level of calc my school offered (AP BC Ca

I feared calculus, right up until circumstances forced me to not only take calc in high school but to take the hardest level of calc my school offered (AP BC Calculus, counted as 2 semesters of college calculus). I was greatly benefited by an amazing teacher. I've always felt that calculus is one of the most important branches of mathematics for the simple insight it should hammer home time and again: An infinite amount of infinitely small things can and will add to infinity. All too often, humans fail to see the cumulative effect of an integral. Every branch of math has these types of insights built into them. Calc the power of instantaneous change. Geometry shows the beauty of a proof - and if you scratch a little bit, the shattering epiphany that triangles are literally the same everywhere, always and forever. The reality is that many of these concepts are simply absorbed into our culture, and we fail to realize it until someone explains that it took centuries of work to formulate the concept of 0. When it comes to education, I believe the struggle has far more to do with testing standards than the material. It's easy to teach to process, much harder to teach insight and further harder to test. In reality, none of this matters until your institution decides and commits to truly educating its students. tldr - None of this matters until your institution decides to truly educate its students.