Imagine you want a piece of software written but you’re hiring it out, like a lot of corporations do. You write up a loose specification and hand it to two different dev shops and you’ll get two wildly different results. The tighter the spec, the closer the results will be.

It’s not much different from that.

Teaching assistant. At my school they were enrolled grad students who helped professors with grading, tutoring, etc.

I didn’t learn calculus until college, but it’s one of the things I’m most glad I learned and I think I should’ve been taught it earlier.

It builds an understanding of the relationships between things in the real world. It’s the answer to “where do all these equations come from?” in all the science classes I took prior.

I haven’t used it since, but I think about it all the time.