I hated calculus until learning Physics. It was so abstract and seemed useless. I'd much rather be presented with a problem, like how far did this ball travel

I hated calculus until learning Physics. It was so abstract and seemed useless. I'd much rather be presented with a problem, like how far did this ball travel, then learn calculus as a tool to solve that problem. I agree with you though that attempts to teach Physics without calculus are sorely misguided. It's ridiculous to force students to memorize kinematic equations that can be trivially derived from each other.