Calculus was the first time in mathematics education where I actually had to understand systems and how to derive results from first principles. Prior to that e

Calculus was the first time in mathematics education where I actually had to understand systems and how to derive results from first principles. Prior to that everything was just memorizing: "this is what logarithm is", "socatoah", multiplication tables, etc etc. I straight up hated math until calculus (now I have a math PhD). I'm sure the same could be accomplished with other fields of math but I don't feel it's necessary to switch. Would be extremely hard to find good teachers and course materials for combinatorics or graph theory to.