[east2west]

It may be because of your math education but I was introduced to trigonometry in junior high in China. I had, and my classmates had, no trouble understanding them as functions of angles coming from ratios. It is the glue that binds circles and triangles and squares and ... . By high school analytic geometry greatly expanded their scope and use. This is the problem I saw in American high school when I moved to US: shallow introduction to mathematical topics made them vapid and jejune. Ancient Greeks were enthralled by trigonometry, ancient Egyptians built Pyramids and ancient Chinese built great dams with trigonometry. Calling it practically useless and pedagogically only useful as a prep for calculus is going too far.