Total recall?

I found out that prior to my physics class I'm taking in college, there's a prerequisite quiz. It's nothing too horrible, in fact, they're all high school concepts, which are often shrugged off in college (an alarming number of people tend to use calculators for even the simplest of multiplication). One part dealt with linear travel along a not-quite-linear line on a graph. The solution (I thought) was to divide things up into triangles and use the old "base times height times .5" formula, and then work from there. Great.

The next part dealt with the meaning of cos, sin, and tan, also known as one of the many unholy trinities high schoolers come across. Instantly I recalled "SOH-CAH-TOA! That's it!" but immediately came across static after that, and I had to do some Google-searching to know what they mean. Of course, part of the problem is that I really don't want to recall high school in general. In fact, I've succeeded in convincing myself that high school was far better than it actually was. On the other hand, I had also convinced myself that the high school was a labyrinthine dungeon (although they recently renovated to try to dispel that) stuck in a deteriorating neighborhood, which may or may not be really true.

Returning to the graph problem, I found that there was a problem, as some were far more than others. Horrified, I realized that bh(.5) wasn't for measuring hypotenuses, but measuring area.

So assuming that x and y were the sides of a right triangle, we would get for measuring the hypotenuse.

This is all rather troubling as the more I remember about what I learned in high school, it also brings to light the negative aspects of high school (and not just academics, EVERYTHING) which undermines the belief that high school wasn't so bad.