Yeah, I think for many students radians are that thing you have to turn off if you want your calculator to show the correct result.
Things like this were often the downfall of math classes: Yeah, everything was explained, somehow, but if you didn’t really pay attention that one time it was easy to miss the subtleties. If something is then additionally not frequently used it’s easy to get by not really understanding it (and maybe only knowing that radians are an alternative way to represent degrees, where 2π are 360°).
It’s not that hard to understand, but if you don’t need to understand it to succeed, why bother if you aren’t inherently interested in the topic anyway? (Ok, the percentage of people who are inherently interested in math is probably higher on this website than elsewhere. Or at least of people who needed to work with radians to the degree that they had to really understand them.)
Things like this were often the downfall of math classes: Yeah, everything was explained, somehow, but if you didn’t really pay attention that one time it was easy to miss the subtleties. If something is then additionally not frequently used it’s easy to get by not really understanding it (and maybe only knowing that radians are an alternative way to represent degrees, where 2π are 360°).
It’s not that hard to understand, but if you don’t need to understand it to succeed, why bother if you aren’t inherently interested in the topic anyway? (Ok, the percentage of people who are inherently interested in math is probably higher on this website than elsewhere. Or at least of people who needed to work with radians to the degree that they had to really understand them.)