[catchmrbharath]

> I am doubly upset at that teacher now.

You shouldn't be. Wireless Technology is an advanced class for Electrical Engineering majors. Electrical Engineering majors would have gone through a class of Linear systems, where they would have learnt the intuition behind Fourier transforms as shown in OP's demo. I think the teacher might have done you a disservice by not mentioning the prerequisites, but thats the only thing you can be upset about.

[kbenson]

> I think the teacher might have done you a disservice by not mentioning the prerequisites, but thats the only thing you can be upset about.

It was offered as a double elective for CS and CEE, which meant it was supposed to be accessible to both majors (if admittedly harder for CS majors). I can accept the class being hard, I can't accept the first three hours of class time being spent copying notes of his math notes as he copied them out of his binder onto the board, with a total of class discussion being less than 10 minutes in total for those two class periods. There wasn't even and explanation of what our goal in this was, just "Here's an equation. It's useful. Now we are going to derive some other useful forms of it."

Never before or since have I ever been in a class where the teacher walks in, introduces himself, says what we'll be covering (FFT), turns to the board and starts copying his math notes onto the board, and doesn't stop until the class is over, keeping in mind, it wasn't how to solve an equation, it was how to transform a given equation into another given form with no explanation as to why. Things have come close in some of the more dry history classes I've had, but even then you generally get some additional context from the teacher expanding on the notes presented.

[ci5er]

That's very sad - I'm sorry that happened to you.

It makes me curious about one point. It sounds as if the class you took covered what my engineering program called "Communication Theory". We were expected to have two terms of differential equations and one each of linear algebra and statistics under our belts as prerequisites. (I think. This was a long time ago...)

Were you missing, at least, having at strong basis in differential equations? If you didn't, that would have made the class double-tough.

[kbenson]

I had plenty of differential equations, but I never took linear algebra. I'm fairly certain it was introduced in one of the semesters of calculus, but IIRC there was a separate linear equations class offered. I never took statistics, but it always seemed like it was one of the more practical and useful math classes.

To be clear, my problem wasn't that there was a lot of math. My problem was that there was no context, and what we were copying off the board could easily have been copied from a book or pamphlet. I'm not sure what the practical reason is to spend multiple classes deriving one version of the FFT from another with zero context.

[eru]

Have you tried speaking up about it? Teachers don't have magic powers of mind reading.

[kbenson]

Well, it was close to 15 years ago now, so read "I'm doubly mad" as "when something makes me remember it, I feel sense of loss, both for what I could have learned if the situation was different, and how I've felt about it and myself over the years regarding it."

I'm mad about it, but in the weird way multiple years can change that into into something that's not quite the same as the word usually implies.

[trymas]

In my case, I had few lecturers, who went completely bonkers, when they read anonymous questionaires, with the fact, that lectures were some blank copy paste of lecturer's notes -> blackboard -> students' notebooks. They could not admit that. I believe next year those lecturers were changed, though damage to our and older generations were done (badly delivered studies).