Understanding Derivatives Made Simple

“Hi Reddit, I’m Alex, 16 male, and I think my calc teacher broke my

brain.” “So I’m sitting in math class, right? Teacher’s talking

about limits and instantaneous rates of change… and I’m like, cool,

that means absolutely nothing to me.” “But then someone explains it like this.”

“Imagine a graph is just a hill. The derivative is basically asking: how steep is the

hill right here?” “If your function is y = x², don’t panic. You’re just asking:

‘As x changes a tiny bit, how fast does y change?’” “Here’s the cheat

code they don’t tell you fast enough: 👉 Bring the power down. 👉 Subtract 1 from