Well I was not happy with the plug and chug approach to calculus so I wrote a book that uses a more intuitive geometric approach (at last it is intuitive to me) and put it all online for free at http://www.thegistofcalculus.com but nobody cares to read it so I guess people are actually fine with just memorizing everything.

It is only about 50 pages and explains the meat & potatoes of the math class.