[yiyus]

Although I agree that word problems can be somewhat distracting in a DE course, I do not think they should be totally avoided. One of the main reasons it was difficult to grasp the concepts we studied in our first DE courses is that they were too abstract. When later we studied other subjects, such as electric circuits or fluid dynamics, everything started making much more sense.

In my opinion, the ideal way of learning would be to first have very basic (only conceptual) introductory courses of applied fields, where we find some basic equations that we do not know how to solve. And then, we study DE to learn the techniques to solve these problems, avoiding direct references but keeping in mind where we are going with all this.