Americans seem to make a really massive deal out of calculus. I wonder if that's counter-productive and puts people off.
You give it a special name, you talk about other topics purely in relation to calculus ('pre-calculus') as if calculus is the central big thing, and people talk about dreading it at college.
In the UK we never used the term 'calculus' when we learned it at school - we were just introduced to differentiation one day without any fanfare as part of an ongoing maths course, and then integration later. You didn't get a chance to get apprehensive about it and build up a mental block because you didn't know it was coming and it was no big deal.
FWIW, prior exposure to calculus is really helpful for tackling introductory undergrad engineering classes. If you can't do derivatives and some basic integrations without thinking, then you will really struggle in the subject-specific engineering classes (e.g. Circuits, Statics, etc.) that you start to take in your 2nd year. Not sure if pre-college calculus experience is as helpful for other fields, though.
Our high school physics teacher pushed for alignment of math schedule with physics lessons, as basic mechanics is much more intuitive with the understanding of derivatives, and derivatives get a clear illustration (of the principles, and also of the reasons why one might care about derivatives) in these physics lessons, so it makes sense to teach these topics hand-in-hand.
In the UK, differentiation and integration aren't taught for GCSE maths (to ~16 year olds, last year of compulsory schooling) [1] but are for AS-level maths (to ~17 year olds) [2]
However, students select which AS-levels and A-levels they want to study; students can drop math entirely if they so wish. And some CS departments will accept such students, putting them through a high-speed remedial math course.
> They explained derivatives to us on the first year of UK university CS degree
That's done partly as a refresher for those who didn't do maths at A-level (so would be 2 years out of not doing maths at all) and to take into account some systems that don't teach it.
At least that was the case for my UK university CS degree.
Yes this was my experience in Australia as well we did not have separate "Algebra", "Geometry", "Calculus" etc classes it was all just 'Mathematics'.
From memory I think concepts from Calculus were first introduced in year 10/11 via geometry (plotting curves and finding points of inflection) from there derivatives just made a lot of sense - slopes as a rate of change and all that.
You give it a special name, you talk about other topics purely in relation to calculus ('pre-calculus') as if calculus is the central big thing, and people talk about dreading it at college.
In the UK we never used the term 'calculus' when we learned it at school - we were just introduced to differentiation one day without any fanfare as part of an ongoing maths course, and then integration later. You didn't get a chance to get apprehensive about it and build up a mental block because you didn't know it was coming and it was no big deal.