can confirm, people who don't know math very well have a much harder time learning physics. Also, simple physics(forces, energy, momentum, etc.) without calculus is kluged horribly. IMO calculus should be a co/prerequisite for every physics course.
Just helped my girlfriend through a semester of non-calculus E&M. She said, "I've noticed that the average power in an AC circuit is 1/2 of what it is for a DC circuit when you have the same voltage and current. Why?". And so I tell her "Because the integral of sin^2(x)dx is 1/2 over n-number of cycles. Now, if you want to know why that's true... well, do you have 5 spare hours before your final in the morning?". So non-calculus physics just revolves around memorizing formulas, which is no way to truly comprehend the concepts of physics. In fact, a disdain of route memorization attracted me to physics in the first place.
I think about that ranking on average every 3 to 4 months, and usually agree. Edit: ...that it's written by someone who likes math and physics like myself. Oh and also, my sister has a degree in sociology, and she's accomplished some things that put me to shame.
I took physics for the first time my junior year of high school, at one of the best physics programs in the entire world for that level, according to past test scores. The first thing the teacher did was ask us if we knew calculus. Literally, he read us a bit of the syllabus and then began teaching integrals and derivatives. Junior year was also the first year we were allowed to take calc, so it was concurrent, but he knew it would take the math teachers a month to introduce us to our first derivative, and he refused to teach physics without derivatives. He was and is the best hard science teacher I or anyone I know has ever had. So I learned calc from graphs of distance, velocity and acceleration.