The way a teacher introduces the topic is extremely important. Shitty teachers perpetuate the myth that math is so hard. It's hard if the teacher either doesn't

The way a teacher introduces the topic is extremely important. Shitty teachers perpetuate the myth that math is so hard. It's hard if the teacher either doesn't actually know what it is about, or has forgotten what it was like to be new to the topic. I had similar classes in robotics (the lower-level kind: control theory, path planning, joint configurations, robot dynamics, inverse kinematics, stability), where we often had zero idea what was going on. The professor showed some slides dense with walls of text and badly typeset large equations, where we couldn't even keep track of what letter stood for what, the abstraction levels were mixed like spaghetti - sometimes talking about exact voltages, about mathematical tricks and shortcuts - but things weren't glued together with an overarching motivation. So we learned stuff like Lyapunov-stability, the K-step ahead prediction, etc. but basically nobody had a clue what we were actually doing. And there was lots and lots of in-detail stuff. This was in Hungary by the way. When I spent a semester in Germany and had a robotics course (slightly different focus), I thought it was so easy. There was a lot less material and we progressed much slower, but people actually followed what was happening. When you came out of a lecture, you could summarize in a few sentences what you've been doing. In my home university robotics class, we had no idea: we just saw a bunch of slides of incomprehensible math with no time to digest it. When I see MIT lectures online, it also seems very "easy", in the sense that all the intuitions and motivations are laid out for you. I think this also has disadvantages. I can remember having many Heureka moments when disentangling the mess and finally putting puzzle pieces together, when learning from not so high-quality materials. I was proud about a lot of these "connections that I discovered", only to learn that some universities start with these high-level overviews and they don't count as exciting insight at elite universities, it's just part of the "boring, dry curriculum" as seen by students there.