Calculus: Useful tool or cruel torture?

Last night I experienced my first calculus class. I'll be attending two four-hour classes a week until the beginning of August. They're held one night a week after work and on Saturday mornings -- every Saturday morning for the rest of the summer. It's a two-month crash course offered by Berkeley's Extension program. I'm forced to wonder who at Berkeley thought that a Saturday-morning, summer calculus course would be a good idea. I'm sure they were cackling away as they scheduled that one.

I've always been impressed with Berkeley Extension instructors in the past. The guy teaching this course seems good, too. He's Russian and he has a very entertaining accent. He's extremely animated and says things like, "I am not a Russian spy who makes a big mess in your heads," and, "Smart people always ask 'Why is this?' It is natural to ask 'Why is this?'" He seems to be very interested in us as individuals and whether or not we're actually following him. I can tell that my effusive nodding will keep him at bay for a very limited amount of time.

The biggest thing that I learned in the first class, is that I have definitely never taken any calculus before. I'm still surprised by that. I guess it should be expected since I was an English major, but I really thought I had squeezed some in somewhere. Nope!

Though everything was brand new, I was able to follow along for the most part. My biggest problem was the lack of context for any of it. Like, "Great, that's how I find a derivative -- now why would I ever want to know what the derivative of something was?" We didn't really get into that and I need that sort of thing. I'm a big-picture kind of girl. Checking out a variety of calculus books at the library has allowed me to piece together some of the basics:

1) Calculus is the mathematics of motion and change. It's used to do things like predict the orbits of satellites. Engineers use calculus. With calculus you can answer questions like, "What is the strongest rectangular beam we can cut from a cylindrical log?"

2) In calculus operations are carried out on functions, similar to the way that algebra uses symbols.

3) Calculus was developed independently by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1675 and Isaac Newton in 1676, thus there are two completely different systems of notation for calculus and both are still used.

4) I need to learn calculus for business school because it deals with making predictions or calculating rates, including population growth and similar things, based on curves.

For those of you who might be inclined to follow along and pace independent study with my course, last night we reviewed the forms of the equation for a line, slope of a curve at a point, definition of limits, limits theorems, limits of polynomial and rational function, infinity and limits, definition of derivative, derivative as a constant and power functions, derivative as a limit, and finally the derivative of the sum of two functions. We're using a book called Calculus and its Applications, 10th edition, but I think you could probably follow along with most any calculus book.