I really do wonder sometimes if a series of "recognizing which kind of math you need to google" courses would be more useful for the vast majority of people than traditional math courses are, past elementary school.

[EDIT] Making the later high school math classes and early university math classes focus entirely on practical application might also be a good idea. I have a feeling it would turn off ~0% people who will eventually become mathematicians, and then the other 200 people in that one mathematician's graduating high school class might actually use what they learned every now and then, once out of school.

Isn't that what calculus (the math course) is?

I mean, I don't recall the exact recipe for most calculus operations, even though I spent hours in college learning them. But I do know that I can build a taylor series* to approximate certain functions, and that it will be pretty quick and have a bounded error.

* Use Wolfram Alpha

Most math classes are kinda that, but you could get a lot more covered if you focused more on "here's a real world problem, 1) what sorts of math do you need to solve it? 2) OK, now solve it and apply the result (you may use the Web, calculators, apps, whatever)" than "here's how you mechanically follow through with that".

I'm probably in this camp. Was always a techie, but a poor student. Is there a good programmer's guide to calculus that could fill me in on the basics in a few hours, or is it really one of those things that takes a full college semester?