I love calculus, it's such an amazing collection of fascinating, elegant (and useful!) concepts that give you a transformative insight on mathematics in general. It's very frustrating to see it taught so poorly so often though.
One problem that teaching calculus has is that it's very dependent on having a solid foundation in other mathematics such as advanced algebra, trig, etc. In today's school systems that encourage gaming the system as students and teaching to the test as educators it's rare for most students to actually understand or be competent with material they've allegedly studied. When they hit something that starts off where they left off and builds upwards, if they have any weaknesses in that foundation it will show immediately and slow them down immensely.
Add on to that all the other problems of typical calculus instruction such as a desire to make it hard as a matter of protecting calculus education as a status symbol for "smart" people, the ability to ratchet up the difficulty arbitrarily through requiring memorization of a potentially infinite set of "trivia" (every trig. identity, every method of differentiation/integration, and so on), while generally not concentrating on the abstract concepts or the fundamentals.
One problem that teaching calculus has is that it's very dependent on having a solid foundation in other mathematics such as advanced algebra, trig, etc. In today's school systems that encourage gaming the system as students and teaching to the test as educators it's rare for most students to actually understand or be competent with material they've allegedly studied. When they hit something that starts off where they left off and builds upwards, if they have any weaknesses in that foundation it will show immediately and slow them down immensely.
Add on to that all the other problems of typical calculus instruction such as a desire to make it hard as a matter of protecting calculus education as a status symbol for "smart" people, the ability to ratchet up the difficulty arbitrarily through requiring memorization of a potentially infinite set of "trivia" (every trig. identity, every method of differentiation/integration, and so on), while generally not concentrating on the abstract concepts or the fundamentals.