I am just a gradstudent, but I have helped teach SR at the university level. In the US, this is usually lumped in with a classical mechanics class.
Roughly speaking, there is a tradeoff between two things:
1) building intuition without destroying previous (correct) intuition
2) mathematical details
With enough time, both can be done. The preferred method (based on discussions of teaching at several universities) is, as Fredrik suggested, to teach things twice. Introducing more detail (and mathematical tools) with each pass.
This is done for almost all subjects: E&M, classical mechanics, etc. Unfortunately, in the US, usually the "second" going around of QM waits till gradschool. SR is usually too short of a topic to fill an entire class and is included in other things (usually E&M and/or classical mechanics) and they try to go over it roughly, then in more detail all in one course. The few schools that teach (and require) GR for undergrads probably doesn't have that problem, but I don't know of any such university offhand.
Prof. Rothenstein, you often posts obtuse proofs of things here, that if they give any insight into your teaching or personal way of thinking about SR, I feel would leave a student very lacking on the
physical intuition and instead makes things seem like just a series of math tricks (which incidentally is roughly how Lorentz viewed relativity for a long time). You seem to favor "quickness of mathematical result" over "understanding" of result. I feel this is probably not very helpful to the students. Similarly, if we started students with lagrangian mechanics instead of Newton's mechanics, they would problably leave with a feeling that it is nothing more than a series of mathematical procedures.
Yes students need to work (many) problems and get used to the mathematical machinery, so that they can eventually look through the math to see the physics. But it is not the mathematical steps of deriving the Lorentz tranformations, or the velocity addition formula that matter. There are many ways of doing those. Some professors don't even prove such things (and leave it to the textbooks), so they can focus on more things.
Fredrik said:
but I would say that their [Einstein's postulates] significance is mainly historical. I would emphasize very strongly that they aren't mathematical axioms, but rather loosely stated guidelines
Yes! I wish that was made clearer in many textbooks.
Somewhat related to this, is that one of the largest problems students have I noticed, is that they have trouble breaking from their old notions of a coordinate system. Our shorthand of saying someone is
in a particular inertial frame, or the time of some event
for each person, doesn't help. Stating historical versions of the postulates and just inserting "inertial frame" just prolongs this problem. At some point a discussion of what a coordinate system is (and isn't) usually needs to happen. Introducing frank discussions of coordinate systems early helps with mathematical rigor (tradeoff item #2), but can seriously hurt intuition (tradeoff item #1) since they can feel they are restarting from scratch.
Sometimes professors just don't discuss it (since it can confuse more than help), and the times I helped teach this is how it was done ... hoping they would figure it out from all the spacetime diagrams, etc. But some students would still be left thinking things like "measuring one way velocity of light" was coordinate independent, etc.
Fredrik said:
I would talk about some of the postulates here, but wait until later before I present a complete list of postulates. (I actually don't
have a complete list at this time

).
For the handwavy ones, we used the usual two postulates referring to inertial coordinates. For precision, (after they saw the math with matrices, etc) there was a homework where they showed two boosts used together were not necessarily another boost matrix... we need rotations as well. So without going into "group theory" they get most of the idea. It is then explained that the mathematical statement of SR is the requirement that the fundamental laws of physics have poincare symmetry ... translations, rotation, boosts. Depending on where they inserted SR in the classical mechanics course affected how they phrased "fundemental laws of physics", but you get the idea: SR = requirement of poincare symmetry. (That space-time had a metric, ie. the so called "clock hypothesis" (
wiki or
math.ucr.edu) was taken for granted, but I guess it could be stated explicitly ... I'm not sure I would have appreciated the need for it if it was presented to me when I was learning as a student the first time.)
Because of these symmetries, there are a set of coordinate systems that are particularly useful if we are going to write out the laws of physics in coordinates dependent form. Inertial frames are the cartesian coordinate systems in which the laws of physics therefore look the "simplest". (Prof. Rothenstein, since you've brought up the 'arbitrariness' of clock synchronization before, if one uses this approach it also becomes clear why Einstein's synchronization is "better" and more "natural" than some scheme to have every 'inertial' frame agree on synchronization via sacrificing rotational symmetry.)
People of course can always bicker with correctness of phrasing, and presentation, but this seems to work well. It seems to be a good tradeoff, as it eventually gives them more foundation, yet still connects to previous ideas they have already used.
In the end, to each their own. But since I was taught similar to how Fredrik proposed (although spacetime diagrams weren't introduced immediately when I first saw it, it was introduced handwavy/main consequences qualitatively discussed first, then we used matrices, then Minkowski + four vectors), and since I have taught along those lines as well, I am partial to it. (However, I know one professor who loved spacetime diagrams and
started with those. It had the advantage that it made all 'paradoxes' immediately moot, but many students had difficulty gaining intuition and connecting to previous intuition. While more difficult in my opinion, it could be a viable alternative.)