Ackbach said:
Diff Eq is a tough one, in particular, because the "why's" are harder to come by. Why do you solve this type of DE this way? Because it works. Why does it work? Because some brilliant person (I mean that! Some of these methods are incredibly complicated and would have required an immense imagination to invent them.) dreamed up the method a long time ago. I'll give DE's this: it's not hard to check if a given solution solves the original DE.
I suppose you can go into existence and uniqueness theorems, and that's good and you should do that. But the fact is that there is no method of solving an arbitrary ODE, much less an arbitrary PDE. If there was, someone would have gotten the $1M prize from the Clay Institute for solving the Navier-Stokes equations. And we'd have heard about it.
The consolation of DE's is the application. No area of mathematics is more applied than DE's, because so many physical laws, once you've applied them in a particular circumstance, come out as a DE.
I've come to terms with DEs because I realized how much trouble they are. The problem is not understanding that it is incredibly hard to solve any given DE, but rather that there is
no underlying motivation as to
why someone should learn to solve them. This touches the point of applications: a serious introduction to DE must show how naturally they show up in such a variety of contexts: Physics, for starters, economy, mathematical modelling in general. There are plenty of examples! Why not use them to your advantage?
More than also motivating the study of solutions to DEs, I find the most intriguing part of this area is
interpreting the situation and setting up the equation, rather than arriving at a specific solution (partially because probably there isn't one). There are many paths to analyzing DEs which are just as important, sometimes a lot more. Shouldn't this be mentioned and somewhat explored in those courses? I firmly believe so.
CaptainBlack said:
You point to the comments, which are quite interesting in themselves, but the blog post itself is also rather interesting, demonstrating something of the nature of the small group tutorial system practiced at some of our better institutions.
Tim's acount is very much like how many of us would like (and try) to conduct the help we give here. But it is also obvious that many students do not like it and prefer to have a list of "stuff" to memorise. This is not new, in the mid 80's I had an engineer working for me who complained (I don't recall to whom) that they were being asked to do stuff that was not in their degree course, notes or textbooks (I think we transferred them to the trials group where original though was not required).
(To balance the books somewhat I also had a good maths grad working for me who was so interested in understanding everything we were doing they never actually finished any work).
CB
The balance of which you speak is hard to achieve, but immensely satisfying in my humble opinion. If you are completely careless about how things in your surroundings work, you lack the minimum curiosity necessary to advance past natural limitations that will be placed around. If you try to fully understand everything you will never take any steps, because a certain degree of acceptance is required to move forward. (This may have felt tautological, but nevertheless I decided to comment.)
As you've said it yourself, it is not new. I strongly believe the reason that such mindset exists is precisely because you can keep the "is-this-going-to-be-on-the-test-or-not", getting "good" grades with poor comprehension of the material. People will not question your knowledge, but rather the numbers/letters assigned to it. They would rather trust your A than test if you actually earned it.
CaptainBlack said:
I know it is a breech of etiquet to reply to ones own post, but sometimes one must because of the way memory works.
1. When I was doing A-levels back in the late 60's, the only course on which it was intimated that you were required to think for yourself was Eng-Lit. (though we were taught derivatives using difference quotients etc)
2. A-level maths was routine and uninteresting, only when I got to university and saw real maths did it become interesting (as in non-trivial). (note: I was intending to do theoretical physics and was enrolled for joint maths and physics. I dropped physics after the first year because it was just not interesting enough - or rather not as interesting as real mathematics)
CB
Obviously I have no authority, but your contributions are most fruitful. By all means, do breech! (Clapping) I am not familiar with this A-level math courses you have all spoken of, we don't have that here in Brazil (as far as I know). Your situation is not at all uncommon: I had considered theoretical physics for sometime before I chose mathematics. Upon entering university, I wasn't disappointed about my decision: the basic physics courses were horrible, to say the least. Consequently, I despised physics for a while until my taste came back, together with the understanding that the subject is intrinsically beautiful, disregarding the awful institute that carries the burden of teaching said courses.