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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3021 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The science myths that will not die.

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.