You're speaking from the perspective of how you happened to learn things. >> If you're taking calculus but you don't want to learn what acceleration is, then I

You're speaking from the perspective of how you happened to learn things. >> If you're taking calculus but you don't want to learn what acceleration is, then I don't know what you're even doing. > Your statement highlights very well the point I'm trying to make. But you're missing the point I'm making. Which is that sometimes there is a simply a clearest way to explain a subject regardless of what a student is interested in. Saying you want to learn calculus but you're not interested in acceleration is like saying you want to learn 20th-century European History but you're not interested in WWII. I've done my share of teaching. I greatly appreciate that you need to make things relevant to students. But at the same time, you just have to teach what the thing is, using the time-tested analogies that actually work to educate students. If a student doesn't want to learn calculus because they have no interest in what acceleration is, then I don't think they want to learn calculus at all.