A good friend of mine who is a math PhD and math lover helped me learn to love calculus when I was in my 40s.

I hated calculus in college and struggled with it, though I ended up passing with acceptable marks.

What my friend showed me is that calculus is easy but calculus problems tend to be very hard. The concepts of calculus are elegant and beautiful, and they aren’t very hard to wrap your mind around.

But calculus problem sets tend to feature very complex algebra and trigonometry, as you say.

When I decided in my 40s to really master calculus from the love of math, I started tackling problem sets that my friend would help me with. And I noticed that he was right, every time I started struggling it was because I didn’t have the algebra or trig skills I needed.

So we would pause, for as long as we needed, while I worked on problems to develop those missing skills.

And I had a blast!

Calculus became, instead of drudgery, something super fun and illuminating.

I’ve heard from some college math professors that they wish high school students would stop taking AP calculus and start taking more advanced algebra and trigonometry.

I don’t know if that’s a solution to college freshman hating calculus, but it might be part of a solution.