Differential Equations is One of the Worst Taught Math Courses

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Differential equations is one of the worst-taught math courses.

The thing is, there’s a lot of breadth to it. It has a lot of branch-off points.

And what I’ve experienced in my own education and with many students that I’ve tutored was that typically, the instructor will race towards saying:

“All right, we’ve covered the basics. Now let’s just go into my favorite area of research.”

Except they haven’t really covered the basics. They just did separation of variables, then integrating factors, and finally characteristic polynomial up to second order.

Which is barely anything!

So it’s like, depending on who your instructor is, you can get a completely different view on what even is the subject. What does it even cover?!

Further reading:

• The funny thing about Differential Equations is that pretty much everyone who teaches it has a different conception of what it covers.
• When I took DiffEq in undergrad, it was taught as part of an Abstract Algebra class

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