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Comment by taternuts | Hacker News Reader

I definitely remember the first time I could no longer slack off, take 0's on homeworks, and ace tests to get a C+/B and it was in high-school :(

I jumped to AP Calculus without taking the pre-requisite AP class everyone else had taken, and I thought I was so cool and smart. By the weeks end I no longer felt so cool and smart - I was completely lost.

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Calculus sucked more for me because here in Brazil the education system doesn't include it in the high-school curriculum, so unless you're on some top private school, you only first hear about "calculus" in college. In the USA and other places there's exposure to it prior to college, which I believe is sensible.

As a side note, I can't stress enough how bad the education system is in Brazil (in the sense of lack of structure, motivation, etc.), even at college level. Almost everything I know is self-taught (including English). I sometimes hear complaints about public school in the USA, and there's a meme that americans are "dumb", but it seems miles ahead to what I had access to.

I don't know if things differ by location or have differed by time, but in my observation many U.S. high school students don't see calculus either.

Yeah, luckily the area I grew up in happens to have one of the top rated public school districts in the nation, so most things that were offered in private school education-wise were offered in public school as well.

From my experience, there's probably much less calculus-taking going on in American high schools than you think. Of that, even less is anything resembling calculus.

In India we had pretty advanced calculus in our senior and pre senior year. This included extensive use of calculus in physics courses. Electrodynamics was totally calculus based and we used to have lots of 'word problems' involving calculus. This was pretty standard across most schools, so much so that when I went to college to do my engineering we had zero basic calculus classes and went straight to advanced calculus. I have no clue if learning advanced calculus this early helped us or not. Or exposing the whole class to these courses was such a good idea. However now they are easing these courses a bit and moving some of the tougher parts out.

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