How hard is Calculus?

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In order to go to my program of choice, I have to take grade 12 Advanced Functions, and either Calculus or Data Management. I can't stand anything to do with Data Management, but how hard is Calculus? I'm not doing so good in my grade 11 Functions, I have a 62% right now, but I do find algebra stuff easier then graphing. Is there a lot of algebra in Calculus?

Algebraic techniques are required to do calculus. Some graphing might be used as well- you can't really understand calculus without taking a visual approach to it. I never found calculus very hard, but it is more difficult for some.

As I've heard many professors say "Calculus isn't hard, it's the algebra you have to use with it that is". The only difficult part of calculus is integral, and that's just the basic derivations of it at the beginning. Once you get over that, it's pretty smooth sailing.

The concepts behind calculus are intuitive, but there's always the chance that your teacher or the textbook could hide all the intuition via mathematical formalism. The derivation of the integral via Riemann sums is a great example of this - we spent two weeks of calculus doing the derivation (first for equal width and then for arbitrary partitions) of the integral as a limit of Riemann sums.

Differentiation will require a bit of clever algebra, and most of the later integrals are essentially puzzles where you have to determine the technique(s) as well as what order you may use them. But, as has been said, most of the ideas in calculus can be explained visually through nontechnical language. It's just the formalities that will get you.

I just finished a calculus course on differentiation. You will need to know graphing and basic algebra techniques. At my university, we also have to do proofs. If you are required to take integral calculus and you are not good at graphing and functions, it will be difficult to know the material indepth enough to do well.

Yes, calculus does have algebra but it also has lots of other things. Visit ecalculus and other websites to get a general feeling for it.

It might not be an issue, because one of the few math teachers who teaches Calculus at my school I can't deal with and I will fail if I have him again (or get kicked out of the class for fighting with him)
So, if I get him, I'll try to switch, and if I can't, I'll have to take data management.

It really depends on you. I personally found calc very hard, nearly failed Calc 1, failed calc 2 and had to retake it. It also depends on how they the teacher teaches it. I once had a teacher that came about it from a very theoretical standpoint and I picked up nearly nothing. I had another teacher that showed you straight foward how to do everything, the best calc teacher ever. But thats just my experiances.

I couldn't do it in high school. All I remember was finding the gradient of a parabola was very unintuitive (it extends infinitely!) and x^3 equations were like sentences of gibberish, I just had no idea what to do with them. It seemed like every time I had to get something different out of the equation the way to do it was backwards to the last thing. Then layers of this reversing kept being piled on boggled me.

Maybe it was the way I was being taught but I never really did well with that sort of stuff. Perhaps I am just bad at visualisation though so couldn't "see" what the equations were doing. I loved geometry though, did really good in that :/

From what I understand, you need a firm understanding of algebra in order to move on to calculas because calculas is simply advanced algebra.