[maaku]

I had an almost identical experience with my ODE class. This is exactly when I started hating math, and moved out of computer science (which was part of the math department at the university I was at).

It took me a long time to return to learning higher maths, this time on my own according to the needs of my job, which is far less an ideal environment than University.

If ODE contains "a few basic concepts that they will remember for the rest of their lives" I never learned it, and I wonder what those concepts would be.