25 years ago, my wife was taking a Linear Algebra class, after undergrad as a prerequisite to an Accounting certificate. She sat down one Saturday morning to do the first homework assignment, I left to go do some chores. Came back three hours later to find her in the same position, book still open to Chapter 1, Page 1. I asked, “How’s it going?” She burst into tears, saying "I don’t even know what ‘permute’ means!"
The struggle is real.
I’m not sure why but my first math class in college was linear algebra, my highest HS class was Trig. For one assignment we had to invert iirc a 6X6 matrix. I was going to be a computer programmer and the library had an apple II computer lab and I had taken a programming class in HS on apple II’s. So I asked if it would be OK if I wrote a program to do the inversion and the prof said OK since he figured if I could program a computer to do it, obviously I knew how to do it. So I did. He ended up marking me down because the answers the computer spit out ended up not being rounded and had I done it by hand, I would have seen that they were actually whole numbers. This was 44 years ago.
That turkey would not be impressed with my household
Part of the problem with linear algebra in particular is that it seems that every math prof who teaches linear algebra is writing an intro book on it and is using the draft as the course text. And the book sucks, needless to say.
