I think there must be something genetic related to calculus. Both my daughter and I are great in algebra and statistics, but struggle with calculus. I’m fine with differential calculus but integrals are a puzzle.
In Feynman’s autobiography he wrote that he just saw calculus as a young teenager. Grrr.
That’s so different from me. My eyes glazed over with Algebra, but with calculus everything just clicked, the practice of breaking down larger problems into smaller ones.
Could be a maturity thing too. Big difference between what a 13yo can handle vs a 17yo.
This makes me feel better because I dropped out of first year med school. Actually it wasn’t biochem that killed me, it was physiology, specifically all of the electrical EKG-related stuff. I don’t really believe in electricity, so it was never going to work out.
Mine was gym. I was big and fat. The classes consisted mostly of doing calisthenics and then things like climbing a rope up to the ceiling (no way), struggling to cross from one end to the other of the parallel bars (ditto), chinning on a chin bar (likewise), mounting a horse (don’t be silly), pushups (never succeeded in doing one properly) and situps (finally something I could do). Then forward and backward rolls (I once did a real backward roll, just once). Twice a week for 4 years of HS. God, I hated it. Always got straight D’s.
Then there were the two years of Latin. Some grammar and vocab the first year, but the second year was entirely devoted to translating portions of Caeser’s Gallic Wars. Omnia Gallia divisa est in partes tres. We’d get three or four lines to translate every night. I think I did manage B’s though.
Good God, I hated PE. When I was a child, I was a bookworm and never played catch or other ball games with friends, and my father never did that with me.
During recess, while most boys played sports, I hung out with friends who also didn’t play sports.
Starting from the middle of elementary school through the end of elementary school, we would have those games where people would pick teams. That was embarrassing.
I loved probability and statistics. Just show how different we can all be.
Math. I did well with basic arithmetic, and I could do simple algebra, but anything beyond that was beyond me. Sines and cosines and logarithms and whatnot completely flummoxed me. Forget functions and relations, trigonometry, and calculus; the teacher refused to believe that I simply could not understand them. I tried, but every math class was yet another forty minutes of torture, while she tried to make me understand them. When they told me that I failed Grade 12 math and had to go to summer school, I said “Screw that; I’m never taking math again.” And I never did, in addition to not going to summer school.
Other than that, it was Phys Ed. I was actually not bad at it; I could catch a football, catch and hit a baseball, and sink a basket. But I did not look like a jock, nor was I so klutzy that I attracted any attention, I was just mediocre, so no gym teacher ever learned my name—I was simply, “You there!” I hated being referred to that way. “Smith, Jones, Brown, and You There—get over here.” All my other teachers learned my name; that the gym teacher never bothered to was insulting.
At high school, I was in an extremely talented Math class. Unfortunately, I was almost always at the bottom of it.
We did the GCSE ‘O’ level syllabus in one year, then the ‘O’ level ‘Additional Maths’ the next year, ‘A’ level the next, and ‘A’ level ‘Further Maths’ the next year.
Normal people do just normal ‘O’ and ‘A’ level maths, 2 years each… but my class was exceptional.
I was not.
I asked to be dropped down to a lower class but my teacher refused.
I got a good result for normal ‘O’ level, an OK one for ‘Additional’, a poor grade for ‘A’ level, and barely scraped into a pass for ‘Further’.
I was out of my league.
French.
If I’m not particularly interested in, say, chemistry, and you tell me that I’m required to take a year of chemistry, and you add that every student here is required to take a year of chemistry because that’s how important it is — fine, I’ll adjust my mindset and do my best to cheerfully learn stuff that I can believe will come in handy later.
After all, maybe the powers-that-be are right about how important it is? Such that it’s worth a year of my time?
If I’m unenthusiastically struggling with year after year after year after year of French, and you tell me that it’s not required, because it’s not at all important, as evidenced by the fact that plenty of kids here (a) satisfy the requirement by taking a different foreign language, and (b) will spend the rest of their lives never using what I’m learning now — well, I’m going to figure that, hey, I, too, may spend the rest of my life never once using this stuff, even while I could now be spending years learning useful stuff.
Because, if the powers-that-be are right, it may be as unimportant for me as it is for folks who aren’t wasting years and years on this!
Decades later — yup, it’s never come in handy.
Funnily enough, French has come in handy for me, as it’s a great place for a vacation, and the French don’t much like speaking English. I wish I could remember more of it.
German, on the other hand, I’ve not had cause to speak since the day I left school. Back in the 80s, Germany was the future of industry, and German was set to be our ticket to professional success. Turns out, at the same time, the Germans were all learning English…
Driver’s Ed. My mother had some bad experiences teaching my sister a few years prior and just refused to take me out driving for practice and there was no money for private lessons. In class, we had one day a week for behind the wheel (the other two were written and simulators). So one period with three students in the car meant we all got maybe ten minutes of time behind the wheel. Not enough time to learn anything but ample time to demonstrate your inability to maneuver a Crown Vic down some suburban streets. Each time was a humiliating event and I hated it. I managed to get my permit out of the class somehow but it was years before I actually got my license.
I’m another one who struggled with math. I did fine in English, history, geography, science, and art, but math (beyond basic algebra) defeated me. Once I was an adult, it really bothered me that I flubbed this basic discipline that others could take in their stride, so more than once I’ve sat down at the computer and brought up some basic algebra and geometry tutorials, but I get a few pages in and my brain starts to glaze over. I guess I’m missing the math lobe of my brain.
I could have wrote this.
Yea, I hated PE. I wasn’t good at sports, and had no interest in them. In some PE classes, two jocks were assigned to pick teammates, and I was always picked last or second-to-last. I sensed the humiliation I experienced amused the PE teacher.
Chemistry
High school
Teacher graded tests on a strict class average, so if I got and 84%, a C+ or even B- for most teachers, but in that class, it happened to be the lowest grade, it was an F. There was one test I got a 90% on, and it was a D. It was so demoralizing.
I asked to change teachers, but the other class at the same time was full, and though my counselor tried to move my classes around, she couldn’t get me in the one class that had an opening. Surprise. I guess I was behind the news, and most people beat me switching to the other teacher.
I did drop the class before I got an F. I ended up taking “General Science,” a stupid class, that I barely attended except when there was a text, and got an A in. So it was a lot better for my GPA.
How’d you do in English?
(Sorry, couldn’t resist!)
Oops… “written this”? Yea, I didn’t do well in English, either. 
I had an English class in high school that had three fatal flaws. First, the instructor would criticize students’ word choices from their essays in front of the whole class on a weekly basis. Secondly he would drop our grades one letter grade for each time we talked out of turn. Thirdly he would call our parents and ask if we had undiagnosed developmental disabilities.
I was submissive to authority but my parents would curse at him over the phone. He later became an administrator which was a far better choice.
Anything math. I struggled with arithmetic from day one. I still count on my fingers. In Algebra class, the first day, I sat down and it was like a movie: I felt myself, sitting at the desk, receding, far away from the teacher at the blackboard writing god knows what incantations . Failed spectacularly. Had to go to summer school, where I failed again even more than I had in regular school. I’m convinced they only let me out of high school because I took bonehead math (add/subtract/multiply/divide - which I did OK) twice. Otherwise, I would still be sitting there in study hall, clueless.
That matches my disappointment, and hatred, with geometry.
I remember being so proud of being good at Algebra in junior high, then in high school I had my very first geometry class.
My first day’s homework had stuff like “Three-legged stools don’t wobble. Write a proof for this.”
In hindsight that one seems obvious (3 points define a plane) but even knowing that piece of useful information doesn’t go very far into producing a proper proof.
And remember that this was on day 1, for a fifteen-year-old kid who had never even seen a geometry book before. I think the teacher showed kindness and gave me a D in that course.
Another vote for PE. Then, as now, I had zero interest in sports. I did the bare minimum to squeak by with a C. PE was only required for the first two years of high school, for which I was extremely thankful.
Runner-up was English. I always excelled in math and science classes, and detested things like English and history. I did great on the mechanical parts of the actual language; I hated the study of literature. And having to write.
My worst English class was freshman year of high school. In elementary and middle school, I was in “GATE” - “Gifted and Talented Education.” In 7th grade, I decided I wanted to have the image of a rocker (we called them “stoners” then), and didn’t like the stigma of being in the “nerd” program. So I started intentionally tanking in my English and History classes. Nothing drastic, I’d usually get Bs and Cs. My plan worked: for high school, I was put in “normal” classes.
I found my initial freshman English teacher to be very strange. A couple of weeks into the school year, he announced that there was an opening in an “honors” English class. I had no idea what “honors” meant. I told him I was interested, because I saw it as an out to his class.
So this teacher made it happen, and I was transferred. My first day walking into the honors class, the first thing I noticed was all of the same people that had been in my classes in junior high. I stopped dead in my tracks and thought “my god, what have I done?”
That’s how I learned what an honors class is. We had always used the term “GATE” before high school, so I’d never heard the term “honors.” And, the new teacher turned out to be much worse than the old one. I went back to my previous plan of intentionally getting Cs, and was put in a normal English class my sophomore year. Where I stayed put. Never again did I make the mistake of trying to get out of a class because I didn’t like the teacher. Well, not until college, anyway.