I grew up in the midwest US, and what we called "word problems" were a pretty common component to learning (classes), practicing (homework) and verification (te

I grew up in the midwest US, and what we called "word problems" were a pretty common component to learning (classes), practicing (homework) and verification (testing). The one that stuck with me is the explanation of how speedometers and police radars actually calculate speed using derivatives in pre/entry calculus. We also learned to write very basic proofs. I would consider both of these to be the essay equivalent of mathematics. Students who didn't show an interest in higher maths courses either took slower versions of the earlier courses where they could get more time with the material, or more business oriented maths such as basic statistics and accounting. AP Calculus was the closest I experienced to "shut up and calculate", if only because our teacher somehow managed to get behind the lesson plan in our first week and we ended up doing homework for lessons the night before the class where she would actually explain it. That was the second most brutal experience of my academic career, only after the semester in college where I was taking a macro economics course taught by a Polish grad student and a micro econ course taught by a Greek grad student; neither of them pronounced things (especially, and perhaps obviously, the greek letters in equations) the same way, and it turned into a nightmare keeping things straight.