I used to spend hours at a time with those books when I was a child

My father introduced this book to me when I was around 10. I will forever be grateful. https://www.worldofbooks.com/products/calculus-the-easy-way-...

Basic integration and differentiation would fit right in with algebra class. You can teach it in about half an hour.

> The need for and relationships between concepts in calculus, logarithms and trigonometry were a recurrent problem for me. Oh my gosh, this was me growing up! I loved tinkering with electronics and programming, but I kept bumping against my lack of knowledge wrt more advanced math topics. I usually hacked around it, or more often just switched to a different project. Now that I'm taking calculus, I feel like I always have a corresponding application for each topic we cover. It's very exciting!

> There ought to be something similar for calculus too. mathacademy.com very thourough and highly effective.

They shouldn't teach calculus like they taught it to me and my peers. Basically we just one day started "differentiating" equations. We learnt a completely mechanical process. Like how to chop an onion, except it doesn't actually feed you or taste delicious. It took me a while to realise the point. It's all about rates of change. They should start with that. No need to bother with the maths, just look at graphs and be like "that's a steeper slope than that", and, ooh, that one's sloping in the opposite direction. This is a fundamental intuition that's so useful to have. Most people don't understand that braking is acceleration. They just don't have the mental model that lets them see fuel burn and braking as opposite things. The sooner this intuition is there the better. Then teach the maths.