[MalbertKerman]

> and I was annoyed that nobody had just told me that because I would have gotten it instantly.

Right?! In my path through the physics curriculum, this whole area was presented in one of two ways. It went straight from "You don't need to worry about the details of this yet, so we'll just present a few conclusions that you will take on faith for now" to "You've already deeply and thoroughly learned the details of this, so we trust that you can trivially extend it to new problems." More time in the math department would have been awfully useful, but somehow that was never suggested by the prerequisites or advisors.

[ajkjk]

oh, my point was the opposite of that. The math department was totally useless for learning how anything made sense. I only understood linear algebra when I took quantum mechanics for instance. The math department couldn't be bothered to explain anything in any sort of useful way; you were supposed to prove pointless theorems about things you didn't understand.

[MalbertKerman]

I did get a lot of that in the lower level math courses, where it kinda felt like the math faculty were grudgingly letting in the unwashed masses to learn some primitive skills to apply [spit] to their various fields, and didn't really give a shit if anybody understood anything as long as the morons could repeat some rituals for moving x around on the page. I didn't really understand integrals until the intermediate classical mechanics prof took an hour or two to explain what the hell we had been doing for three semesters of calculus.

But when I did go past the required courses and into math for math majors, things got a lot better. I just didn't find that out until I was about to graduate.