Simpleton here: One, the first thing the professor does is put things in "human terms", the issue is plain that the mode of conveyance used in the textbook is

Simpleton here: One, the first thing the professor does is put things in "human terms", the issue is plain that the mode of conveyance used in the textbook is wanting. And this is coming from "Author in Action" videos provided by Pearson, ostensibly from Sullivan himself. I think a portion of this issue is derived from being "too simple to state." Two, calculation takes precendence over everything. I've seldom been offered the opportunity to actually apply any of this myself in real world practice. What's worse is that when professors have included "working" problems they're quickly glossed over, to me it seems like this is absurd - as a non-math major this is precisely why I'm in the class, for application. This branches into arguments about the math taught being entirely abstract and stripped from a model, which makes it infinitely more difficult for someone like me. What compounds it is none of the work asks things like "why do we use exponential functions in the calculation of half-life?" instead, you just translate to TI-84 and plug your answer in. I'd quite like to see more applied concepts, and less calculation. It'd also be nice to self-direct, but I'm sure that's in reality impracticable from an assesment standpoint. I noticed repeatedly that I quickly grasped certain concepts, but was forced to repeatedly compute similar problems, time that would've been better spent working on points where I was lacking.