I didn't refer to "real math" but, regardless, I was rejecting your explicit point. Not all forms of practice are inherently useful to you even if it's in the s

I didn't refer to "real math" but, regardless, I was rejecting your explicit point. Not all forms of practice are inherently useful to you even if it's in the same category/topic. E.g. just because you trained running thousands of miles for power marathons does not mean you are necessarily better positioned to box. It does probably mean you've put a bit of a damper on your interest in doing more exercise for boxing though. More directly, just because you calculated hundreds of Taylor Series manually does not inherently mean the practice you did made you better at something you'll be able to use with the topic you've now spent dozens of hours on already. What I mean by randomly calculate in this case is be given a random trig equation, be told to hand calculate an nth level Taylor series, compute the numerical answer to a few values, and move on to the next problem until you've done hundreds in the course. I do NOT mean running through dozens practice problems to get better at learning when/how to apply Taylor series (though that did come in a later course, it thankfully didn't need to be done by hand just as nobody was expecting you to calculate sqrt(5.7) by hand to learn calculus either). This no doubt makes me a great calculator of 5th derivatives of trig functions but, except for the first few perhaps, at the expense of dozens of hours of being great at actually applying tricks to do things with what the Taylor series spits out instead. Like you say, the math course has to give cookie cutter training sometimes not about the direct concept at hand but that means you can be shit out of luck if that cookie cutter training wasn't relevant for boxing even though the topic itself can be.