You've heard nasty horror stories about (arguably) the most notorious class in high school, but to what extent is everything you hear true? Have you assumed immediately that what people have said about Calculus is completely reality and not at all exaggerated? Maybe that one time someone said he pulled three all-nighters to study for Calculus sounded strange to you. Maybe there was some hint of doubt in the back of your mind that what people claimed they experienced was nowhere near the truth. And, frankly, you're right.

Calculus is no horror story, nor is it something that you'll find haunting you 20 years from now. In fact, if you ask me, Calculus is one of my favorite classes exactly because of how easy it becomes once you sit down and understand it.

For further context, it's not like Calculus is the only rigorous class I have this year and thus allows me to have more time to study for the class. I have Calculus in addition to five other difficult courses that take up just as much time every night to study for, so by saying Calculus isn't bad, I mean that even someone taking a dangerous schedule can ace the class.

Calculus is an applied mathematics course, so knowing the formulas and stopping there isn't going to help at all. You have to know when to use them, why you use them and what the formulas themselves mean. From related rates to series, there are pages upon pages of formulas and variables that all tie together in the end.

So what's the secret to turning the infamous Calculus into a doable class? You have to be committed and interested.

Don't like math? Don't take Calculus. This isn't something you can take just because Calculus sounds rigorous and would look appealing on an application. You have to love math, and you have to want to know more. Calculus isn't a simple "how to;" it teaches you why math exists in the first place.

If I really think about it, everything in Calculus is just a more in-depth version of something we have been taught in a previous Algebra or Geometry course. Not one thing (possibly besides related rates and optimization) comes to mind where we learned what the mathematical concept was before learning how to do it.

Know what area is? You learn how to find area under a curve on a graph, one of the most basic concepts of Calculus.

Know what a function is? You learn how to model any function using a polynomial and one of my favorite parts of the class.

You already know all of the information that comes up in Calculus, but now, it's time to understand what all of it really means. My teacher would start every unit by showing a visual representation of what we would be learning, and though it made no sense when we first started, I remembered those moving images when I took each test.

There is so much value in taking the class, and any exaggeration about Calculus' difficulty shouldn't overshadow the true importance of its content. If you're interested in math more than the average person, you need to take Calculus. You just might understand why you love math so much in the first place.