I should have taken calculus my senior year in high school but I decided to take Mechanical Drawing instead. It didn't require math but it did emphasize the ability to think in 3 dimensions and then render 3 different 2-dimensional views of the top, side, and end. More important was the instructor who was continually telling us to "Analyze it". He also required accuracy; if one of us turned in a drawing that he thought was not our best effort, he would tear it up and charge us 5 cents for a new piece of paper.
Later, in college, I was deemed mathematically challenged so I had the 4 days a week calculus course instead of the 3 days for the other sections. At the end, we all took the same exam and the people in our class usually did very well but still received Cs for the full term. Convinced me I was not suited to be an engineer. When I was in grad school, I had to take a statistics course -- actually 2 different ones but taught by the same instructor who was a lot like my high school Mechanical Drawing teacher in that he insisted that we be able to interpret the numbers spit out by the Cyber 6400 computer that we fed with punched cards. When I encountered calculus in articles I read, I at least understood what the symbols were expressing even if I would have had difficulty performing the calculation myself.
I should have taken calculus my senior year in high school but I decided to take Mechanical Drawing instead. It didn't require math but it did emphasize the ability to think in 3 dimensions and then render 3 different 2-dimensional views of the top, side, and end. More important was the instructor who was continually telling us to "Analyze it". He also required accuracy; if one of us turned in a drawing that he thought was not our best effort, he would tear it up and charge us 5 cents for a new piece of paper.
Later, in college, I was deemed mathematically challenged so I had the 4 days a week calculus course instead of the 3 days for the other sections. At the end, we all took the same exam and the people in our class usually did very well but still received Cs for the full term. Convinced me I was not suited to be an engineer. When I was in grad school, I had to take a statistics course -- actually 2 different ones but taught by the same instructor who was a lot like my high school Mechanical Drawing teacher in that he insisted that we be able to interpret the numbers spit out by the Cyber 6400 computer that we fed with punched cards. When I encountered calculus in articles I read, I at least understood what the symbols were expressing even if I would have had difficulty performing the calculation myself.