[jrgoff]

I don't know how or where you learned calculus, but when I learned it and when I taught it, the classes were filled with physical world examples to motivate and train the material. That said, my experience as a student reflected on as an instructor, was that a lot of the explanation and example stuff didn't have a lot of fertile ground in my mind yet when I was first learning the material. I'm sure it helped, but there were definitely times when as a grad student I reviewed the foundational material and thought "This makes so much sense, why didn't they teach me this when I was in high school?" only to realize that almost certainly they had taught me that in high school and I just didn't have the mathematical maturity yet to retain it. I think I was also hampered in my chances of learning the conceptual fundamentals because I was able to do most of the work through a solid ability at algebraic manipulation. While solid skills in algebraic manipulation is quite important, I do think it would be a good idea to restructure those classes so that a solid conceptual understanding is also more necessary to pass the class. Of course, easier said than done.