I remember staring at a trigonometric identity in high school and thinking, 'When will I ever use this in real life?' Years later, as a programmer, I realized that the logical structure behind proofs — not the formulas themselves — shaped how I debug code. But is that enough to justify making every student suffer through calculus? I've met plenty of successful engineers who barely passed college math, so maybe we're teaching the wrong parts or overvaluing abstract rigor for the majority. Should advanced math stay mandatory when most people only need arithmetic and basic statistics?