Natalie

To be fair when I do advanced math using an automated tool, it feels distinctly easier when it's "I learned how to do this and I understand vaguely how it works and what the tool is doing" vs "I have no idea what's happening or how to tell if I'm using this close to correctly"

think it was among the worst taught math courses in my college, only really competing with worse overall with the abstract stuff I just did not / do not have the head for. but it IS very cool and useful math I wish I understood better.

I feel this so much. A decade after getting my degree I keep seeing it come up and I've retained almost nothing of it, even with a lab attached to it in which we made algorithms in matlab. Yet still attached so abstractly I had no clue what any of it actually did or was used for.

I am so glad I got a competent math teacher for linear algebra in college, because it's the single most foundational class of my entire career.