I really enjoyed this post having attended the same school and taken some of the same classes. I'm actually currently in my final months of a mechanical enginee

I really enjoyed this post having attended the same school and taken some of the same classes. I'm actually currently in my final months of a mechanical engineering B.S. at Madison, and I think the problem goes beyond a "hazing" of freshmen. For me, my ECE 352 was Introduction to Dynamic Systems. For anyone here without a physics background, it's basically an introduction to "more real" mathematical modeling of physical systems, beyond what you would learn in your first few semesters of college physics. Think "applied differential equations." This class naturally involved some fairly high level math compared to what we had been using before, and I think the professors honestly didn't know (or had forgotten) how to transition into it. Suddenly the class was using things that they might have done one or two homework assignments on in differential calculus a year a go, but there was never any "here are the overarching concepts used in this class and how they fit into the two years of calculus you have already taken." The class was just dumped off the Laplace transform deep end and left to memorize steps to solve problems. I think the problem was that the professor had honestly forgotten what it was like to not have an intuitive grasp of what a Laplace transform did or how to linearize a dynamic system. I've found myself falling into almost the exact same trap when teaching people object oriented programming for example. To an experienced programmer, an object is the most natural thing in the world, you can pass them around, perform operations on them and they just "work" for you. It's so simple for you that it's hard to remember that it may be a completely foreign concept to someone brand new. The thing is, it's comparatively easy to just teach someone the steps to solve a specific problem when the alternative is teaching them to think in such a way that they could solve it on their own. It's the same with debugging, it's the same with math, and with programming. I spent the rest of that semester watching the professor spend every single lecture doing one or two difficult examples, and nothing else. Teaching someone so that they can gain a deep understanding of a given subject is really hard, and I think it's the rare school and professor that can do it effectively. I ended up doing well in that class, but it was really by rote memorization of every single mathematical "scenario" that I thought likely to be on the exams. It wasn't until a year or so later that dynamic systems finally clicked into place, and it was because a professor in an unrelated class happened to spend 45 minutes on a good intuitive explanation of what they meant. I think teaching real systematic debugging is similar in that it's something that requires a real mental investment on the part of the teacher. That's not to say it's impossible, because it certainly isn't. It just requires someone to make the investment and explain the why as well as the how.