One odd thing is that out of the four compulsory math courses in my 5 years program, the one I enjoyed most was the one where the lecturer was lousy. I did a lot of that course by self-study. This was because the lecturer early on made it perfectly clear that he would
not spend much time on explaining the more complicated parts of the curriculum, he would spend most his time on explaining the stuff that people needed to know in order to merely
pass the final exam. And he wasn't that good at explaining the simple stuff, either.
This was the course where we learned about multi-variable calculus (you know, partial derivatives, multiple integrals and vector calculus, divergence theorem and all that). Really interesting stuff compared to what was to follow.
Brief digression: At my university more than half the students are part of a 5-year program leading to a master's degree in some discipline of engineering. All the different engineering programs share some common courses:
Philosophy and science
Introductory information technology
Physics
Statistics
Chemistry
Mathematics 1 (basic calculus, series, limits, mathematical proofs)
Mathematics 2 (multi-variable calculus, vector calculus and vector fields)
Mathematics 3 (linear algebra and ordinary differential equations)
Mathematics 4 (Laplace & Fourier transforms, partial differential equations, numeric methods)
All these courses sum up to a little more than one full year's study.
My favourites out of these were Math 2 and (of course) chemistry - although we chem. eng. students obviously had a slightly different chemistry course than the others. Less of the general blah blah and more technical (and useful) stuff
