I've been learning calculus on youtube. I took calculus for a whole year, but until tonight I always thought calculus was magic (and when a naturalist says something is magic...). I think one of the reasons I always thought of calculus as magic was because my professor never explained what everything was. I never once heard my professor say that the derivative of a function was the formula for the slope of the tangent line at any given point on the curve of the function. Not once do I remember him saying that! He explained the definition of the derivative without explaining how to find the definition of the derivative. Thanks to khanacademy on youtube, I finally know where the definition of the derivative is derived [ha ha ha] and what it's for. I know I can't just blame the professor. I could have done my part and read the textbook or looked up youtube videos during the year: the problem is the system. For the first quarter of the year, I was waking up at 5:00 AM for school, and according to recent research teenagers aren't meant to wake up so early. During the last three quarters I would wake up at 7:00AM, but that's still not enough.
