I completely agree, most people fail to realize the importance of exercising their brains in this fashion...honsetly, this is why I stayed as far away from classes where I was required to memorize definitions, regurgitate them on the test the next day, then flush the toilet. I dont see any point to memorizing facts, afterall what are they testing? Your ability to grasp the material or your ability to apply pneumonics and get a decent grade? This is why students become frustrated with math; there is no conceivable way to memorize every problem in your textbook the night before a test, you need to understand the CONCEPTS and TECHNIQUES in order to have a fighting chance.

The byproduct of learning math is that teaches you how to teach yourself how to learn, how to think and how to solve problems, something you do impicitly many times every minute you are a programmer. While learning Calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, etc... may not be important on the surface, it will DEFINITELY go a long way to helping you in these areas of critical thinking, make new technologies easier to learn and new styles of programming easier to decipher because you have the training to be able process difficult problems on your feet in a top-down, analytical fashion. I find that the training I received in Mathematics (was a double major in math and comp. sci) was more important to my long-term growth as a developer and team leader.