> Somehow I found linear algebra easier than calculus, but I don't know why.
I suspect the answer is that your calculus course was a lot heavier on crank-grinding: having to readily apply integration and differentiation on a wide panoply of functions, some of them you're not really familiar with (such as arccos). If you're weak on trigonometry or some algebraic manipulations, that's going to shut out the ability to do a lot of the crank-grinding without really impacting your ability to understand the concepts.
By contrast, the crank-grinding in linear algebra is a lot less involved. The most complex algebra is going to be solving polynomial equations to find the eigenvalues of a matrix, but those are generally going to mostly be quadratic equations since asking anyone to solve more complex equations by hand is going to ask for trouble. Otherwise, it's largely plug-and-chug numbers into stock formula. Gram-Schmidt orthonormalization? Pick a vector, normalize it, project the other vectors and cancel them out, and repeat until you've done all of them.
I suspect the answer is that your calculus course was a lot heavier on crank-grinding: having to readily apply integration and differentiation on a wide panoply of functions, some of them you're not really familiar with (such as arccos). If you're weak on trigonometry or some algebraic manipulations, that's going to shut out the ability to do a lot of the crank-grinding without really impacting your ability to understand the concepts.
By contrast, the crank-grinding in linear algebra is a lot less involved. The most complex algebra is going to be solving polynomial equations to find the eigenvalues of a matrix, but those are generally going to mostly be quadratic equations since asking anyone to solve more complex equations by hand is going to ask for trouble. Otherwise, it's largely plug-and-chug numbers into stock formula. Gram-Schmidt orthonormalization? Pick a vector, normalize it, project the other vectors and cancel them out, and repeat until you've done all of them.